I built a 6-node Gluster cluster with TrueNAS SCALE

I haven’t had hands-on with Gluster for over a decade. My last blog about Gluster was in 2011, right after I did a proof-of-concept for the now defunct, Jaring, Malaysia’s first ISP (Internet Service Provider). But I followed Gluster’s development on and off, until I found out that Gluster was a feature in then upcoming TrueNAS® SCALE. That was almost 2 years ago, just before I accepted to offer to join iXsystems™, my present employer.

The eagerness to test drive Gluster (again) on TrueNAS® SCALE has always been there but I waited for SCALE to become GA. GA finally came on February 22, 2022. My plans for the test rig was laid out, and in the past few weeks, I have been diligently re-learning and putting up the scope to built a 6-node Gluster clustered storage with TrueNAS® SCALE VMs on Virtualbox®.

Gluster on OpenZFS with TrueNAS SCALE

Before we continue, I must warn that this is not pretty. I have limited computing resources in my homelab, but Gluster worked beautifully once I ironed out the inefficiencies. Secondly, this is not a performance test as well, for obvious reasons. So, this is the annals along with the trials and tribulations of my 6-node Gluster cluster test rig on TrueNAS® SCALE.

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Sassy Cato

I am not cybersecurity guy at all. Cybersecurity, to me, is a hodgepodge of many things. It is complex and it is confusing. But to every organization that has to deal with cloud SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, mobile devices, work from home, and the proliferation of network connections from everywhere to the edge and back, strong cybersecurity without the burden of sluggish performance and without the complexity of stitching the cybersecurity point solutions would be a god send.

About 3 1/2 years ago, when I was an independent consultant, I was asked by a friend to help him (I was also looking for a gig) sell a product. It was Aryaka Networks, an SD-WAN solution. It was new to me, although I had some MPLS (multi protocol label switching) knowledge from some point in my career. But the experience with Aryaka at the people level was not too encouraging, with several people I was dealing with, switching positions or leaving Aryaka, including their CEO at the time, John Peters. After about 4 months or so, my friend lost confidence and decided to switch to Cato Networks.

Cato Networks opened up my eyes to what I believe cybersecurity should be. Simple, performant, and with many of the previous point requirements like firewall, VPN, zero trust networks, identity management, intrusion prevention, application gateways, threat detection and response, remote access, WAN acceleration and several more, all beautifully crafted into a single cloud-based service. There was an enlightenment moment for a greenhorn like me as I learned more about the Cato solution. That singularity of distributed global networking and cybersecurity blew me away.

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What the heck is Storage Modernization?

We often hear the word “modernization” thrown around these days. The push is to get the end user to refresh their infrastructure, and the storage infrastructure market is rife with modernization word. Is your storage ripe for “modernization“?

Many possibilities to modernize storage

To modernize, it has to be relative to legacy storage hardware, and the operating environment that came with it. But if the so-called “legacy” still does the job, should you modernize?

Big Data is right

When the word “Big Data” came into prominence a while back, it stirred the IT industry into a frenzy. At one point, Apache Hadoop became the poster elephant (pun intended) for this exciting new segment. So many Vs came out, but I settled with 4 Vs as the framework of my IT conversations. The 4Vs we often hear are:

  • Volume
  • Velocity
  • Variety
  • Veracity

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Is Software Defined right for Storage?

George Herbert Leigh Mallory, mountaineer extraordinaire, was once asked “Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?“, in which he replied “Because it’s there“. That retort demonstrated the indomitable human spirit and probably exemplified best the relationship between the human being’s desire to conquer the physical limits of nature. The software of humanity versus the hardware of the planet Earth.

Juxtaposing, similarities can be said between software and hardware in computer systems, in storage technology per se. In it, there are a few schools of thoughts when it comes to delivering storage services with the notable ones being the storage appliance model and the software-defined storage model.

There are arguments, of course. Some are genuinely partisan but many a times, these arguments come in the form of the flavour of the moment. I have experienced in my past companies touting the storage appliance model very strongly in the beginning, and only to be switching to a “software company” chorus years after that. That was what I meant about the “flavour of the moment”.

Software Defined Storage

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The prudence needed for storage technology companies

Blitzscaling has been on my mind a lot. Ever since I discovered that word a while back, it has returned time and time again to fill my thoughts. In the wake of COVID-19, and in the mire of this devastating pandemic, is blitzscaling still the right strategy for this generation of storage technology, hyperconverged, data management and cloud storage startups?

What the heck is Blitzscaling? 

For the uninformed, here’s a video of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked and a member of the Paypal mafia, explaining Blitzscaling.

Blitzscaling is about hyper growing, scaling ultra fast and rocketing to escape velocity, at the expense of things like management efficiency, financial prudence, profits and others. While this blog focuses on storage companies, blitzscaling is probably most recognizable in the massive expansion of Uber (and contraction) a few years ago. In the US, the ride hailing war is between Uber and Lyft, but over here in South East Asia, just a few years back, it was between Uber and Grab. In China it was Uber and Didi.

From the storage angle, 2 segments exemplified the blitzscaling culture between 2015 and 2020.

  • All Flash Startups
  • Hyper Converged Infrastructure Startups

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FUDs for Real

We human beings hate losing. It puts a psychological anxiety of not having to own and we are missing out on something. That “some thing” could be adulation, attention, rewards and many other things that seem to enrich our superficial lives. FOMO (fear of missing out) is real, ladies and gentlemen.

When we see a sign like the one below, what do you think is going through our mind?

Limited Time Offer

Limited Time Offer sign

OMG! I got to get it because the deal is for a limited time only! It will never happen again in my lifetime and I gotta buy it!

The game of FUD

F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). We in the technology business have seen tons of tactics to entice someone to buy our products or switch allegiance to the our side. And we do it ourselves too, consciously and unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally. There is no denying to that.

Based on what is known, and what is unknown to us, we share information which are available to us, in ways we want to influence and effect. But let it be known that we do not have a world view of everything, and thus, we chose to believe what we see and hear and experience. As human beings, we cannot 100% subscribe to be fearless, 100% certain that we are right, and 100% without a doubt do things or acts upon things that will be 100% correct. The outcome of FUD to create a convoluted messed up thought process that will deliver the desired effect and action. It is the universal Law of Cause and Effect.

The effect the marketers want you to think will speed up or delay your decision making, throw a spanner in to the thought process, and illogically gives you meaningless and meaningful (to your desires) heebee jeebees. The feeling of loss or missing out creates “displaced anxiety“, a Freudian concept where the projected fear and emotions will land into something that felt safer, even if the safer “target” may be irrelevant. And it is this irrelevant decision that marketers want to you take, because what they are selling is the “safer” decision.

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Down the rabbit hole with Kubernetes Storage

Kubernetes is on fire. Last week VMware® released the State of Kubernetes 2020 report which surveyed companies with 1,000 employees and above. Results were not surprising as the adoptions of this nascent technology are booming. But persistent storage remained the nagging concern for the Kubernetes serving the infrastructure resources to applications instances running in the containers of a pod in a cluster.

The standardization of storage resources have settled with CSI (Container Storage Interface). Storage vendors have almost, kind of, sort of agreed that the API objects such as PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims, StorageClasses, along with the parameters would be the way to request the storage resources from the Pre-provisioned Volumes via the CSI driver plug-in. There are already more than 50 vendor specific CSI drivers in Github.

Kubernetes and CSI initiative

Kubernetes and the CSI (Container Storage Interface) logos

The CSI plug-in method is the only way for Kubernetes to scale and keep its dynamic, loadable storage resource integration with external 3rd party vendors, all clamouring to grab a piece of this burgeoning demands both in the cloud and in the enterprise.

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Reap at low tide

[ Note: This article was published on Linkedin more than 6 months ago. Here is the original link to the article ]

[ Update (Apr 13 2020): Amid the COVID-19 pandemic and restricted movement globally,  we can turn our pessimism into an opportunistic one ]

Nature has a way of teaching us. What works and what doesn’t are often hidden in plain sight, but we human are mostly too occupied to notice the things that work.

Why are they not spending?

This news appeared in my LinkedIn feed. It read “Malaysian Banks Don’t Spend Enough on Tech“. It irked me immensely because in a soft economy climate (the low tide), our Malaysian financial institutions should be spending more on technology (reaping the opportunity) to get ahead.

Why are the storks and the egrets in my page photo above waiting and wading in the knee-deep waters? Because at low tide, when the waves ebb, food is exposed to them abundantly. They scurry for shrimps, small crabs, cockles, mussels and more. This is nature’s way.

From the report, the technology spending average among the Malaysian banks is pathetic.

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The negative domino effect on SMEs

When the banks are not spending on technology, the other industries, especially the SMEs (small medium enterprises) follow suit. The “penny pinching” and “tightening purse string” effect permeates across industries, slowly and surely putting the negative effect in tech spending into a volatile spin-cycle.

From a macro-economic point of view, spending slows down. Buying less means lesser demands and effectively, lowering supply, and it rolls on. The law of demand and supply just got dumped into an abyss.

A great opportunity for those who see it

When I was an engineer at Sun Microsystems more than 2 decades ago, I read a comment delivered by one of the executives. It said “When times are bad, those who know will get the best parts“. I took his comment to heart because what he said held true, even until today.

This is the best time, when the country is experiencing an economic downturn. When the competitors are holding back and may be reeling from the negative effects of the economy, the banks are in the best position to grab the best deals. This is the time to gain market share, when the competition is holding back for fear that the economy will become softer.

Furthermore, with the low interest rates across the board, there is no better time than the present to step up the tech spending. Banks should know this very well but I am perplexed.

That is why the Malaysian banks must kick start their tech spending campaign now. And the SMEs will follow, overturning the downturn with demands of spending for the best “parts”. The supply “factories” are fired up again, and will lead to a positive growth to the economy.

Bank Negara RMiT is that one opportunity

One thing which has been looming is Bank Negara, Malaysia’s Central Bank, RMiT (Risk Management in Technology) framework. A new version was released in July 2019, and to me as an outsider, is a great opportunity to grab the best parts. And some of these standards will come into effect in January 2020

Bank Negara is strongly encouraging banks to improve the security and the confidence of the country’s financial industry, and the RMiT framework is really a prod to increase tech spending. Unfortunately, in some of my business interactions with a few of the banks, the feet dragging practice is prevalent.

Nature’s lesson

The best time to have your best pick is at low tide. This is nature’s lesson for us. What are we waiting for?