Storage Networking Industry Association

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.

Storage Networking Industry Association

Abbreviation	SNIA
Formation	December 22, 1997; 27 years ago (1997-12-22)
Type	Nonprofit
Headquarters	5201 Great America Parkway, Suite 320
Location	Santa Clara, California, U.S.
Chair	J Michel Metz (AMD)
Vice Chair	Richelle Ahlvers (Intel)
Chief Operations Officer	Michael Meleedy
Website	snia.org

Description

SNIA's membership community participates in the following storage-related technical working groups:

• Cloud Storage Technologies
• Computational Storage
• Data Management
• Data Security
• Dictionary^[1]
• DNA Data Storage^[2]
• Networked Storage
• Next Generation Data Center
• Persistent Memory
• Physical Storage
• Power Efficiency Measurement
• Storage Management Initiative – Specification (SMI-S)
• SNIA Swordfish® - Scalable Storage Management Specification^[3][4]

SNIA and its technical council maintain a vendor-neutral dictionary and glossary of storage networking, data, and information management terminology.

The SNIA dictionary won an award for publication excellence in 2009 and 2012 from the Business Communications Report.^{[citation needed]}

SNIA along with Computerworld hosted the popular Storage Networking World (SNW) Conferences from 1999 to 2013, at various venues around the world, and commonly occurred in the Spring and Fall in the USA, and in the Fall in the EU.

SNIA is also the organizer the Storage Developers Conference (SDC).

SNIA absorbed the Small Form Factor Committee in 2016.^[5]

SNIA also maintains partnerships with and submits material to other industry standards organizations^[6] such as ISO,^[7] IEC,^[8] DMTF,^[9] CXL,^[10] INCITS^[11] T10, T11, IETF,^[12] and IEEE.^[13]

Small Form Factor Committee

The Small Form Factor Committee (SFF) was an ad hoc electronics 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.^[14][5]

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.

The committee consisted of members that represent companies that develop, manufacture, and sell products and components for the storage industry. Its members included but were not limited to representatives from companies such as Amphenol Interconnect, Avago Technologies, Broadcom, Dell, FCI Electronics, Foxconn, Fujitsu Components America, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, LSI Corporation, Molex, Panduit, Pioneer Corporation, Samsung, Seagate Technology, Sumitomo Electric Industries, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Tyco Electronics, and W. L. Gore & Associates.