SNIA Experts on Data
Listen to interviews with SNIA experts on data who cover a wide range of topics on both established and emerging technologies. SNIA is an industry organization that develops global standards and delivers vendor-neutral education on technologies related to data.
SNIA Experts on Data
SNIA Membership: One Fee Unlocks All SNIA Groups
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Curious about the future of data and how it's evolving? Join us for a chat with Dr. J Metz, Chair of the Board of Directors for SNIA, an industry organization that develops global standards and delivers education on all technologies related to data. In this episode, J explains how SNIA is evolving the structure of the organization and moving towards a more integrated ecosystem for SNIA members and the broader tech community.
Learn how SNIA has transformed membership fees to break down silos across various technical projects and unlock SNIA communities to simplify participation and encourage greater collaboration. The new fee structure fosters broader engagement and makes it easier and more affordable for companies to contribute to multiple initiatives within SNIA. Members can get involved with everything that's going on within SNIA or start a new initiative. Members get to work with technology, standards, and education.
J also shares personal anecdotes, highlighting the benefits he has gained from peer-to-peer connections and collaboration with technical leaders across the industry through his many years at SNIA.
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SNIA is an industry organization that develops global standards and delivers vendor-neutral education on technologies related to data. In these interviews, SNIA experts on data cover a wide range of topics on both established and emerging technologies.
About SNIA:
Welcome to the SNEA Experts on Data podcast. Each episode highlights key technologies related to data.
Speaker 2All right, welcome everybody to the SNEA Experts on Data podcast. I am Eric Wright. I'm the Chief Content Officer and Podcaster-in-Residence with GTM Delta and here for the SNEA Experts on Data podcast. Extremely happy because today I welcome I'm lucky a longtime friend and collaborator and somebody who, if you're already involved with SNEA, you should know, and if you don't, you want to know him Jay Metz. Jay, we're going to talk about a lot today. We've got some really cool updates for 2025. And maybe we can even talk a bit about 2024, some stuff that's happened already. We've got SDC coming up. There's all sorts of good things. But let's start with an intro for folks that are fresh to you, about you, your background with SNEA, and then we'll jump into the new 2025 membership plans background with SNEA, and then we'll jump into the new 2025 membership plans.
Speaker 3Sure, so I am the chair of SNEA. I'm the chair of the board of the directors. I've held this role since 2020. And my responsibility is to help guide the organization, along with the other board of directors and the technical council, into the next few decades. Yeah, so You're signing for a big mission.
Speaker 3Well yeah, the funny thing is that you know when you know. When we're kids, we always say, well, if I were in charge? Well, you know, at some point in time you get punished by actually being in charge and therefore you have to put your money where your mouth is. You may not appreciate when that wish comes true, but no you don't really know what you don't know until you have to know it.
Speaker 2Well, I guess what's really interesting too is because you've had a lot of history with SNEA as an organization and obviously in the industry. You know, leading up to that, what's coming up in 2025? I've been lucky enough to take a peek at kind of what's what's ahead. It's coming up in 2025. I've been lucky enough to take a peek at kind of what's ahead. In fact, it's out there to be seen and we'll add links to the show notes for folks that want to check it out. We've seen a lot of changes, not just because of that thing that sort of broke the world up for three years, but really the idea that the nature of communities has changed, the nature of collaboration in the industry has changed, and this is sort of an ideal time to talk about what's new and really kind of what led to the decisions around revisiting. How do we make SNEA just really easy to, to get value with and from?
Speaker 3and I think you know, every time we kind of put a milestone, you know, on the, on the map, you know um, it, it, you kind of look up from the grindstone you realize you've come an awful long way and that the things have changed and the nature of the beast has been very different. Um, it's kind of like going back to a place you used to live at and realize the trees are larger but the traffic patterns have changed. I've been at SNEA now for 10 years and on the board of directors for 10 years for SNEA and and when I was there it was very different than what happened 10 years before. That, right. So the, the nature of the landscape, of the way that storage has been, you know, evolving over time, means that you can't do what you used to do and expect to get the same kind of results, right? So when I joined SNEA 10 years ago, we were focusing on individual projects for the most part. Um, we had, you know, we had individual um technologies and these different groups had these technologies. They were focused on the standards and they had the, you know the, the education that went along with it, some marketing efforts that went along with it. You had another technology and you had that, you know, with its initiatives and its forums, and and you can get into the navel gazing if you're not careful.
Speaker 3Right, and before that it was, it was even more codified. Right, it was very more strict and compartmentalized. And the trouble is that the way that storage works is it's not siloed. You just don't have a specific piece of the puzzle and then you take it out and you put another one back in and then all of a sudden, it's the same thing, just with bigger, faster, better technologies. The whole ecosystem changes. If you have a forest and you take out a bush, it's not just a forest without a bush. That bush has a whole effect on the ecosystem, and storage is one of those things. I think one of the other problems that happened was that the demographics changed right People. We went through a between 2004 and 2014,. We went through a cloud revolution, right, and then, in 2014 to 2024, we went through a virtualization and containerized revolution, and at every stage along the way, there was always this assumption that data was going to be there. Sometimes the data was and sometimes the data wasn't.
Speaker 3And when it wasn't people really started to complain about it. But the problem is that you can't just assume that the data is going to be there in the form that you want it and when you want it to be, and that's a bigger problem than people were realizing. So, you know, we had some. We had some time to sit there and think about what we were going to do now in 2024. And that was big.
Speaker 3Well, part of the problem is that people are not familiar with all the stuff that's gone on before, and so they want to create a project, or they want to do this, and then they don't think about Snea to do it.
Speaker 3They come up with their own way of doing it.
Speaker 3But it turns out that there's more to it than that, and so anytime you organize something, there's a lot of overhead and there's a lot of process and there's a lot of rules and regulations and legal and this is true both inside the United States and around the world and you have to be aware of all these different nuances. The other part of it, too, is that just because you can put a couple of people together and come up with an idea doesn't mean that it's going to last long term. Right, because the sexy stuff is the new stuff to last long term. Right, because the sexy stuff is the new stuff, right. The hard part and this is where storage and data really come into play is how do you know it's still going to be there next year or the year after that, or five years down the road, or 10 years down the road, because regulations say you have to have a certain amount of data for X period of time. Right, right now it's about seven years is the average but could be 50, could be 100.
Speaker 3Right, and those are difficult problems to solve. So we said you know, there are reasons why people aren't coming to us, and I think one of the reasons that we need to at least address is that we need to make it easier to work with Right. So that's what we've been focusing on for the last year or so. We've been saying you know, what is it about what we do and what is it about the way that people want to work with us that we can make easier? So, um, we, we are smart enough to know that we're not smart enough to know everything, and we know that there are other organizations that have, you know, ancillary pieces to the puzzle that we don't want to or can't work on because we don't have the expertise, and that's fair.
Speaker 3But at the same time, we do have expertise and we do want to work on things that others, you know, could find complimentary. So the best question is how do we make that happen? How do we make it easier for people to do that? And so we started asking ourselves some really difficult and hard questions about it and we came up with what I think is a really good solution to make it easier for people to want to be part of CNA to see that the work that we're doing has relevance to what they're doing, without make them feel like they have to go through all kinds of hopes you know, fell out of favor, or at least fell out of immediate view, because there was this sense that the industry was now moving faster than a lot of you know community groups that were sort of.
Speaker 2Especially, the focus of snea was different than what a lot of people thought it was people. Then they saw it was, you know, when snea was an acronym you more because we talked about it in full length, but realizing that storage is also memory. Storage is data, not just data in where it is, but data removal, data lifecycle, like everything about it. And it's funny when you talk about we came to the cloud and then some would say like, ah, you know, we don't really have control over the type of work that's there. Like, well, we as consumers don't, but the hyperscalers do, and they are doing things that are about, you know, becoming more willing to share back. And on top of that, it's not just the fact that you're going to have this data live somewhere in many copies, in many places, but as we think about building in you know right to be forgotten building in other legislative things into a standards driven method so that it makes cross-collaboration and everything around like shared innovation more possible. Also because look, 20 years ago as a consumer, when I bought storage, I would have a storage vendor. I had a compute vendor, a storage vendor and a networking vendor and if I got a new storage vendor it'd mean I had six months to get rid of the old storage vendor, to stop paying the old stuff and then put in the new stuff.
Speaker 2But then we moved to, you know, leasing over purchasing which we were told was never going to work, because they're like why would I keep paying for something that I already own? Well, it turns out it's actually fantastic. And so we changed the purchasing pattern. And then we changed the purchasing pattern and then we changed the consumption pattern of how data is consumed and distributed and shared and refactored and reutilized in other areas. So much has changed. Thought it was even last year. We've discovered through the work in the community that there's people are bringing ideas saying like, hey, what if we did this? And I find there's a much more push than a than having to go and reach out to the vendors saying, hey, do you guys want to be a part of it? People are recognizing the opportunity.
Speaker 3Yeah, and? And I think, I think they're starting to redefine the questions, right. So you know one of the fads come and go, right, interests come and go. Sometimes the terminology comes and goes and you find yourself saying the same thing in different words, right? Well, hey, cloud is a form of ASP, right? So you know, at some point in time, what you're really talking about is certain functionality changing over a matter of time or a matter of location. That's pretty much what we're really trying to deal with.
Speaker 3Now we're hitting another dimension, a way that is not traditional. So you wind up with these hierarchy or even some fractal approaches to how the data needs to be processed and what kind of permanence it happens to be, because it's not a linear growth like, for example, in ai. You know, if you're doing model training, you're not just talking about a linear growth from 100 billion parameters to a trillion parameters. It doesn't go like this, it goes like this and then like that, right, and? And so the nature of the beast is very difficult.
Speaker 3Now, we were, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and Steve's been around for over 25. You know, the problems that we were solving were difficult for the time, no question about it and we've been able to learn from those lessons. And we've been able to apply some of those lessons to some of the new issues, because now we have to disaggregate in order to get the same kind of functionality at the scale that we need to do. And when we start talking to people who are not familiar with data and how data actually operates and exists, they're reinventing some of the wheels that have been fixed 20 years ago. Yeah, because they don't know any better. Right, they said oh, that makes sense, I need, I have this processor, I have to go over this wire to connect to that piece of device, but it's not quite that simple. Right, because you have to make sure that the bit that's there is going to stay there when you want it back. Right, because it's not the bit you store, it's the bit you get back. That's important.
Speaker 3And when you have trillions of those bits and trillions and trillions and trillions of those bits and they're all moving around and nothing's staying where it used to be just a few moments ago, the nature of the game changes, and so this means that we've got implications for software, implications for operating systems, hardware processing, networking, whether this gets done inside of an accelerator, whether it gets done inside of a GPU or gets done inside of a CPU, whether it gets done inside of a network. You know we're using terms now almost regularly that most people hadn't even heard of outside of HPC. Nobody knew what a collective was right and you know as an operation to be handled in, those collectives have to do with the data movement, right, and so once you understand what these words mean, what these terminologies mean, then you start to be able to understand how the pieces of the puzzle relate to one another, and so that's the key thing that we're trying to be able to make easier and more approachable for people.
Enhancing Collaboration and Membership Opportunities
Speaker 2Well, the other thing that I really liked was the sort of the data centric focus methods that got highlighted, uh, methods that that got highlighted. And I liked that it was divided into practice areas more than like originally it would have been, you know, sort of storage, memory, networking. But now you realize there's a lot more crossover, the addition of more folks participating around security. So we have, like you know, accelerate we've got protect, we've got we've got protect, we've got optimize, we've got store, transport and format.
Speaker 2And while some of them may seem unsexy, it's because, like you said, it's oh, this is, it's already written rules. We don't need to revisit it, like, oh, we've actually changed the game and so it requires us to revisit those rules, and sometimes it's just to say that, hey, we already kind of nailed it. But then also what's interesting beyond the practice areas is that the reach of other engineering, you know, consortiums and other standards bodies, that we're getting more interplay and people that could be participating in multiple ones but not as silos, like we want to drop those silos as well. So that's also fantastic to see why making the new membership model easier to be a part of really getting people. So it's like it's a no brainer to to jump in and then to access not just our resources at SNEA but the adjacent resources that are out there in partner consortiums.
Speaker 3Yeah, well, I mean and that's actually why we did what we did right is that we saw a lot of the stuff that's going on in these other organizations and we said, hey, look, that ties very closely to what we're doing over here. Right, you want to talk about memory, data movement? Right, dma? Right, you know you want to talk about, you know, access to storage using ethernet. You want to talk about the actual interconnects? Well, these are all things that we do and we've done in the past. So I said to myself, okay, what do we have to do in order to, you know, have that communication with these other groups, and what would happen if they wanted to join SNEA and get involved in the work that we're currently doing? And I would say, oh, wait a minute, this is a little bit more complex because of the way that SNEA evolved over time.
Speaker 1The way they used to work.
Speaker 3What happened? The way that SNEA actually developed over time was very organic and it worked because of the fact that, as the popularity of certain functions and certain technologies increased, people really wanted to get involved and they wanted to participate, and so they would get into the technical work. And it could have been, it could have been a fiber channel work, right, you know, there was a lot of fiber channel work between T11, fcia, snea, you know, 25 years ago, um, and then we had, um, some dvd work way back in the early 2000s and we had some tape work and so on and so forth, because that was very popular at the time. But, like everything else, it kind of goes, it comes, it waves right, ebbs and flows. It's like an accord, accordion. It expands and contracts.
Speaker 3So what wound up happening was that over time it made it very difficult, because the model was that you would join SNEA and then you would have to kind of do this ad hoc payment to get involved in these other projects. Well, that's great. If you only go upwards, right, you only have more popular things that are happening and that nothing ever tends to decline. Well, that doesn't happen, right? So we found ourselves. Well, I got this one project over here. It's also related to this other project over here. Security is a really good example of this, and I may have a company that wants to get involved in that security project but doesn't have the money to do both.
Speaker 3So what we said was you know what, forget it, pay one price, pay one price, come into SNIA and you get everything right. You get to work with everything that's going on, you get to work with the technology, you get to work with standards, you get to work with the education, and this makes it a lot easier for the ebb and the flow, the different velocities of technological development, and it makes it a much more long term solution for other organizations to work with us. Right. And so that's the ultimate idea that we're trying to to encourage people to say look, we've taken a lot of the advice that people have been giving us and made it simpler for people to work with us because they want to work with us. It just sometimes wasn't so easy, but now we fixed that and we made it in a lot of cases very affordable for companies to be able to participate in what's going on it's done in, I'll say in heavily because of the amount of work of the volunteers and folks that contribute time.
Speaker 2But the amazing thing is that, just like with a lot of technical working groups and technical communities I've been in, I've never found that me donating a 100 hours of effort and time and attendance to a SNEA event gave me 1.0 ROI. It was 100. Every single time it is one plus. I always get more out than I get in. And I remembered when I was working at my previous organization. It was funny because all of a sudden I find out that we were members of SNEA and I was like that's awesome.
Speaker 2And part of it was because we were working at a software layer to help to, you know, drive some changes and participate around some of the swordfish and things like that, and it's like it was really slow moving and we always had this justification of like, is it worthwhile to participate? And in the end, when we sort of pulled membership as a company just because we were no longer super active in it, the, the guys that and the girls that were part of it, they were still. They're like can we still go? Because, like they personally had gotten value from their peer-to-peer connections and because there's just is being in an incredibly smart room, as the old thing works right. If you're the smartest person in the room, you need to choose a different room. See, is the right room for everybody. It's like just a beautiful array of of people with such experience and and ideas that they want to bring together yeah, and that's the reason why it's great to be the chair of the organization, because everybody's smarter than me.
Speaker 2So what, what do you see as kind of the big opportunity now for for companies that are keen, you know, and, and they want to contribute back or they just at least like as a fresh company, if I'm going to go to a new software startup and they're like, hey, we're doing stuff around key value stores, like what's the? What's the sort of pitch that we, we lay out to those folks to say like, hey, at least come by and check what we're doing?
Speaker 3and maybe we'll find a synergy type of thing I think I think that is probably the biggest question that um companies are asking themselves is like, why would I want to do this? And I think that the question itself is the way that we used to approach the problem at C. So we used to say, oh well, we've got this project, we've got this project and we got this project, and it was pretty much up to the asker to put those pieces together to see whether or not it made sense for them. However, it was this level of abstraction and kind of a weird S-curve of getting around the real issue at hand. We do these technologies in service of a greater issue, right, the greater issue of data storage and the protection and all the stuff that goes around it, right? This is a holistic problem. It is a start to finish problem and then back again, right, there's a whole process that goes along with this. But when we start asking the question, we say, well, we've got this project, we have the smart data accelerator interface, which has to do with data movement, we have the security models and we've got the computational storage. It's all in service to a greater element, but we don't talk about what that greater element is.
Speaker 3Now, what we're able to do is say let's start with the greater element, let's start with the proper way of handling data for the needs that we have at the time and then piece together those individual projects for you, because now you don't have to choose. You know like, well, I don't need, I don't need sdxi. Okay, great, you know, but do you need to connect to some other data? Point, you know. Are we talking about? You know, memory? Are you programming for memory? Are you programming for storage? Are you programming for data being moved across the network? Okay, well, we got all that stuff too. Well, I don't want to have this situation where I have to mind read somebody and saying, oh, this is the magic point that you need to know about so that I can marry this, because I don't want to sell you on this.
Speaker 3I want to say look we're handling the storage ecosystem, and there's a lot of things that interact with that. If you deal with data at all, then you have to. You have to think about what SNE is doing, because there are a number of different things that are going on right now, from the security side to the power side, to the energy side, to the privacy side, to the regulation side, to the memory side, to the long-term storage, to the brand new stuff like the DNA, all this sort of stuff, like the bleeding, bleeding edge stuff, right. All these are in service to a greater question, right? What is the nature of the data that you have to work with, and does SNIA do what you needed to do for your company in order to get to that next level?
Speaker 3That, to me, is the right question to ask, whether that's like. Well, I can do a laundry list of all the projects we're doing and I can go through a list of all the. You know the testing and certification, you know white papers and all that kind of stuff. That's all in service to a greater need, right? And that is can we do data better?
Speaker 3And the answer is yes, right, and I believe in a lot of cases not everybody, I mean, there are some cases that we probably can't, you know, help people at this point in time, but that's why we're opening up to. This is like, if we can help do data better with a particular company or another organization, that's what we're opening ourselves up to be able to do.
Speaker 2Who would you say is the ideal customer profile I'm putting my marketing hat on here for a candidate to be a part of SNEA. Obviously there's hardware and software may be differentiated, but just curious on, like company style, size, or maybe the problem that a company is is trying to solve, that may align them, uh, most with with what SNEA can do to help them accelerate and and also just help Just help all of us work together.
Leveraging Collective Knowledge for Innovation
Speaker 3I think we kind of touch upon a number of different personality types for these different companies. I've always thought of a really good candidate for SNEO would be somebody who's trying to connect the dots but doesn't quite fit into any one particular initiative. Fit into any one particular initiative, right, if you want to, if you're talking about specific storage protocols NVM Express is a phenomenal one. But what if you want to fill in some of the gaps that that one particular thing does, or CXL does, or DMTF, which does memory, and JEDEC and so on? What if you want to connect those dots? What if you want to bridge the gaps that this particular organization and that particular organization need to glue? And that could be a small company, it could be a software company, it could be a management company, it could be a hardware company. They may want to bridge those gaps and connect the dots, and I think that that's one of the reasons why, you know, suneen is not only one of the great places to go and have that conversation, but also the reason why it's been missed up until this point in time. Right, because if I want to connect the dots and I take the responsibility here for the way that we had SNEA organized is we didn't make it easy for people to connect the dots. Come in and connect the dots. We've changed that. So the optimal point is for those people who said, look, I want to get involved in all these different things but I can't afford it because of the way that SNEA is organized. Now is the way to go about doing this, because those connecting the dots is the service of the greater need that we're trying to resolve Now.
Speaker 3I think the other part of the equation there, too, is there is a wealth of information over the last 25 years that smea has offered into the ecosystem, right. Much of it has actually been forgotten in the in the industry, right, because we've moved on from certain things we don't use, um, you know, we don't use ultra scuzzy or any of that kind of stuff you know anymore. So, so, but the lessons learned as to why we did what we did and how we do what we do is lost into the ether unless you ask the right people and ask the right questions with something new and you don't want to make the same mistakes that you know have been made in the past. You can leapfrog by standing on the shoulders of giants who have solved those problems in the past. That's all right there and ready for you, right?
Speaker 3So there's information that exists inside of the libraries, inside of the educational resources and the white papers and just the people that are involved To your point. You know the people that love doing what they do, they love helping other people, they love getting up there in front of people on the stage. They love offering, you know, the suggestions and the advice, and most of the time they do it because of the fact that they love it, not because of the fact that you know they're looking for a handout or looking for cash, right? So this is the part of the, you know the community that everybody talks about. But we've actually got that and we've got many thousands of people inside of SNEA who believe that very thing.
Speaker 2And it is truly, you know, everybody that I talked to, without a doubt, cannot mention what they love about SNEA without mentioning the people first.
Speaker 2And it's like obviously the thing you get from the people and it's like obviously the the thing you get from the people, but it's like that anecdotal information, the stories, that, and we can basically continue to build this tome of knowledge that carries on because it incrementally gets added to and, as maybe the previous folks maybe retire out and we'll see shifts in some of the leadership over time, but the people that are the new senior leaders, you know it's like the start of Full Metal Jacket.
Speaker 2You know you started off, you're getting your head shaved and there you go, welcome, you're the chair, and next thing you know you're leading that class of the next recruits and then you get to watch the people you taught, then lead the next class and then at that point it's like the stories have carried forward and the lessons as well.
Speaker 2And if I'm going to build new technology, I want to be in two places One, I want to go to the Computer History Museum to make sure that it hasn't been done or maybe it's something similar, and secondly, I'm going to go to pete's in san francisco, you're going to see two very different ways in which people will approach the problem, but it is that combination of incredible humans, incredible knowledge base to draw from and a group of people that are actively meeting and collaborating in order to do something. So there's that constant feedback, the project management's there, the governance is there, like all that machinery is done. You just got to show up, throw up, as they say, and make magic happen. Like it's fantastic to just come in, drop a story. And then there's always a hand that goes up like hey, I'm curious, I've got a similar problem. And then the hallway track begins and that's like even the more fantastic part of collaborative groups.
Speaker 3Are you familiar with the Grimm's Fairy Tale, stone soup? No, so it's a philosophy that I've had for a very long period of time and I try to use it whenever I can. It ultimately is one plus one equals three. You take one idea, you take another idea and you come up with the third one.
Speaker 3The idea of stone soup is that very quickly the parable goes you've got three soldiers who go into a village and everybody locks up really tightly.
Speaker 3So they sit in the middle of the village square and they take a pot, put a fire on it and put a stone inside of the water, and then slowly the villagers start coming out and they say they're making a stone soup. And eventually the villagers start throwing in things that they've got carrots and turnips and meat and that kind of stuff, and pretty much everybody has a wonderful meal, right, and that kind of stuff. And pretty much everybody has a wonderful meal right. Sneha, is an awful lot like stone soup, right, because if you, you, you will get something out of it that in a lot of cases is unique. You know, your taste buds are going to be very different than your neighbors, but your contributions in are going to add to the overall, um, you know, gestalt of of the meal and I mean I had, mean I had one moment where it was a very touching moment actually, you know, a few years back this was before the pandemic, I think it was the year before the pandemic.
Speaker 3As a matter of fact, um, we had put together some back to basics educational videos. Um, I think we did something along the lines of 20 or 24, 25 different educational videos. They're still available. One of the series was called everything you wanted to know about storage. But we're too proud to ask and we would go through the basics, like what is RAID, what is a hard drive, what is, you know, scsi, what is POSIX, all these different questions that we asked that people who wanted to know, like maybe they should have figured out what these things out, they didn't know.
Speaker 3So we said, look, let's go back to the basics, let's educate people on what storage is, because they can't learn this anywhere else. They need to know what they're going to come and do this. So I had a gentleman come up to me during one of the it was another organization symposium, as a matter of fact and he said those videos helped him get a job because he basically crammed for the exam you listen to. He must've listened to something around 20 hours worth of video to learn how storage worked and it gave him an entry level position because he actually knew the terminology necessary to be able to do the starting points right. He knew enough to have the starting points.
Speaker 3And that's the kind of stuff that he was able to get out of SNEA and we were able to find. You know, people can contribute and put that sort of thing in and it's all over the place. That's just one anecdote, but it's all in that place, right, where you've got this passion for, where you've got this passion for. You know, the small margin for error.
Speaker 3The reason why I do storage, you know, believe it or not is because if you do storage wrong, people will die right. There's very little margin for error when it comes to storage. You lose data. You lose data in a hospital. Bad things happen right, and so that's my motivation. Other people have other motivations for why they do what they do right, but it all basically comes down to the fact that I can't build an entire ecosystem of storage by myself, and nobody else can either, but we can do it together, right, and as we start to get into this world of scale where we're now, ai and HPC and all these other kinds of environments are really starting to take over, SNEA can't do it, it's on its own.
Speaker 3We are the individual, just like I'm an individual, just like you're an individual, but SNEA is an individual organization. No organization can do it all on its own. There's so many moving parts and so many nuances and so many issues that we simply can't solve the problem by ourselves First step is to recognize that.
Speaker 3Second step is to start reaching out and saying look, what can we do together? The good news is that there are a lot of organizations out there that actually think the same way and agree and they're willing to work with us and they're willing to work with each other, and that's a good thing. So the the worst thing that can happen is that you're in your own way, right, and we don't want to work. We don't want to be in our own way, right. We want to make this as easy as possible for people to come in, get what they want out of it and contribute their ideas as well. It's a it's a mutually beneficial kind of environment. If we can get through this, the system which I think we have, I think we've managed to simplify things a lot and just as a again as a collaborative community.
Speaker 2you talk about jobs, right? How many times have we talked about people that maybe you know? As they come into these groups they're fresh, they're in academia and they're getting involved and they can find that opportunity like if you want to get into the deep r&d side of storage it's it's a tough door to open and getting into these groups it's the just the, the peer camaraderie and sharing is is so good and it's not at all like you know, a conference there. It's fun, informative and all in this right combination and equilibrium. It's not meant to be the big, you know vendor fest. That's what makes it so beautiful. It's not about who's going to have the biggest party and who's going to have the best swag. It is have you met storage people before? Who's going to have?
Speaker 3the best swag it is. Have you met storage people before? Hardy Hardy is not exactly a normal thing.
Speaker 2It's a they're, they're a unique bunch and and and for that reason it's the birds of a feather opportunity is what is? Because, quite often, if, if, if you want to go to one of the you know, the vendor driven events, you know that may have storage involvement. It's like you're literally walking into a wrestling arena of craziness and you're like you're there for a purpose and if you're lucky, you can find people in the room sitting beside you at the back, because you want to be, you know, close to the door in case you got to get out. All of the things that we do. You may get lucky and you, you bump elbows with somebody. That's, that's like you imagine to be able to just go into a room and know that everybody in this room is like you. It's, it's literally just magical to watch how easily and quickly people connect quietly, you know, because we're introverts by nature, you know, uh, introverts the world unite from our homes.
Speaker 3Well, I think you're spot on too, because the thing is that we have two rules that are inviolable right, they have to be vendor neutral, the presentation has to be vendor neutral, and they have to be technology neutral, right? So what does that mean? Well, vendor neutral is pretty easy to understand, right? You're not looking for we're not looking for a product pitch. We're not looking for why my company is better than any other company.
Speaker 3We do the same thing about technology, too. Technology is a use, the right tool for the right job situation. Right, what we don't allow and what we and this is difficult it's very difficult because of the fact that that people want to promote their technology over some other technology that could possibly do the same thing, but we don't allow that. Right, we say, look, this is a particular technology. It solves these problems, these are the benefits and these are why you want to use it. Right? We don't allow somebody to say, well, you don't want to have that other stupid technology that's competing with ours because of the fact that it's stupid, right? Well, that's an excuse for not thinking. So. The neutrality part is one of the key reasons why SNEA, I think, is one of my favorite places that I've ever worked in before, because we focus entirely on solving data problems, right, and sometimes it will be one way and sometimes it will be another way, because the problems themselves are nuanced. And if you go to the Snea Developer Conference, right, and if you look at the agenda of the Snea Developer Conference, you will see that we're talking serious brain hurt when it comes to solving those particular problems. And that is the key right.
Speaker 3When people want to know how to solve a problem, they don't want to. They don't want to suffer through a product pitch and then have to tease out whether or not it's going to be the right thing for them. That's just not what they want to do. And there are lots of other um conferences and shows and sort of to get that information right. They can get the marketing stuff you know to that end almost anywhere.
Speaker 3What we do is we say, is how it works. This is maybe what you didn't realize about how it works. And a lot of this stuff is so truly cutting edge that many people don't even know what some of the stuff is. And that's part of the example. We have to define those terms properly and I think that the people who have complained about the lack of really good solid technology to sink their teeth into, haven't really taken a look at the CineDeveloper conference agenda and given it a shot. I think that's a miss on their part, because we're offering it and we've got a history and an archive of a lot of really good material.
Speaker 2That's just it. Yeah, so for folks that want to take a to take a look, uh, we could definitely. I could do this all day and in fact I'm looking forward to a big event that is coming up. You know, uh, sdc, if I get lucky I may be able to get in the area, but at the very least I know you and the team will be there. We got lots of folks from lots of amazing companies that are going to be part of it and that, among many things, the introduction of some of the regional events, the video library there is so many reasons to just jump in, get registered, decide from there. But so thank you, jay, for what you and everybody in the organizing team have done, and all the community members to make this the low barrier to entry. That it is to listen and give back to the community in so many ways. And here's to some stone soup that we're going to create, going forward. It's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 3It's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 2That's it. So for folks that want to reach you and find out more about snea, what's the best way that they can do so?
Speaker 3uh, probably they can reach out to me on you, on twitter, at drjmetzcom a dr jmetz I have, I also have a, uh, a jmetzcom smush, the two of those together, uh, so that's where I blog. I haven't done it in a little while. I have to catch up, uh, or linkedin is probably another really good way to go until I get and, of course, head on over to sneaorg.
Exploring Data Center Practice Areas
Speaker 2If you're not signed up already, I'll race you to the submit button. Get on in. It is. It is such a I I've. I'm a marketer and they even accept me in here now. I'm a nerd underneath it, but I'm probably more marketing than nerd, but it's. It is such an accepting community and it's been a real pleasure to be a part of and it's been a pleasure to spend time today chatting. So there you go, folks, get on in and check out. We've got many more amazing episodes like this. We talked about the different practice areas so you can learn about the data center focus areas. Plus, we've got lots of great speakers so much good information. We've got this on audio If you haven't seen it on video. You can check out our beautiful, glorious faces and Jay's beautiful drinking dog over on the YouTube channel, and that's what makes it fun that those familiarity of faces gets even more fun when you get in person, and so we hope to see everybody at an SNIA event coming up soon, absolutely.
Speaker 1Thank you for listening. For additional information on the material presented in this podcast, be sure and check out our educational library at sniaorg slash library.