The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is an American trade association, incorporated in December 1997. It is a registered 501(c)(6)non-profit organization. SNIA has more than 185 unique members, 2,000 active contributing members, and over 50,000 IT end users and storage professionals.
Description
SNIA's membership community participates in the following storage-related technical working groups:
The SNIA Technical Council is a group of high-tech industry representatives that guides the organization's technical activities. The council oversees SNIA's Technical Work Groups (TWGs) and serves as the organization's technical liaison to standards organizations.
SNIA's Technical Work Groups develop vendor-neutral architectures, standards, specifications, and supporting software in areas including AI data workloads, cloud object storage, computational storage, security, solid-state storage, storage management, and DNA data storage.
The SNIA dictionary won an award for publication excellence in 2009 and 2012 from the Business Communications Report.[citation needed]
SNIA organizes the annual SNIA Developer Conference (SDC), originally known as the Storage Developer Conference. The conference was launched in 2004 and is a technical event focused on data infrastructure technologies, including storage, artificial intelligence, memory, networking, compute, security, and data management. It also features interoperability testing through SNIA Plugfests and Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions. The conference has typically been held in Santa Clara, California. SNIA also organizes one-day regional SDC conferences.
SNIA also maintains partnerships with and submits material to other industry standards organizations such as ISO, IEC, DMTF, CXL, INCITS T10, T11, IETF, and IEEE.
Small Form Factor Committee
The Small Form Factor Committee (SFF) was an ad hocelectronics industry group formed to quickly develop interoperability specifications (as a complement to the traditional standards process). They created the Small Form-factor Pluggable network interface module format. The committee was absorbed by the Storage Networking Industry Association in 2016.
The SFF Committee was formed in 1990 to define the emerging disk drive form factor for laptop computers. In November 1992, the members broadened the objectives to complement the formal standards process in any area of the storage industry which needed prompt attention. SFF projects are in areas not addressed by standards committees because of timing, charter, or other considerations.
