Category Archives: Analytics

Storage IO straight to GPU

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The parallel processing power of the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) cannot be denied. One year ago, nVidia® overtook Intel® in market capitalization. And today, they have doubled their market cap lead over Intel®,  [as of July 2, 2021] USD$510.53 billion vs USD$229.19 billion.

Thus it is not surprising that storage architectures are changing from the CPU-centric paradigm to take advantage of the burgeoning prowess of the GPU. And 2 announcements in the storage news in recent weeks have caught my attention – Windows 11 DirectStorage API and nVidia® Magnum IO GPUDirect® Storage.

nVidia GPU

Exciting the gamers

The Windows DirectStorage API feature is only available in Windows 11. It was announced as part of the Xbox® Velocity Architecture last year to take advantage of the high I/O capability of modern day NVMe SSDs. DirectStorage-enabled applications and games have several technologies such as D3D Direct3D decompression/compression algorithm designed for the GPU, and SFS Sampler Feedback Streaming that uses the previous rendered frame results to decide which higher resolution texture frames to be loaded into memory of the GPU and rendered for the real-time gaming experience.

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Rethinking File Security Fundamentals

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I took a week off blogging last week but the lazy days were inundated by bad news. A few more devastating ransomware attacks. This time, Colonial Pipeline in the US was hacked and its networks were shutdown by ransomware. These ransomware threats are never ending, and they are getting more damaging than ever. It is like trying to plug a leaking boat with your hands, and more leaks appear as you plug them.

More ransomware news hitting healthcare around the world last week:

We are forever chasing for a solution, forever losing because almost all technology defenses to protect the data against ransomware are reactive. Why is ransomware still such a big threat then?  Time to rethink file security fundamentals.

Data everywhere

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The other pandemic – Datanemic

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It is a disaster. No matter what we do, the leaks and the cracks are appearing faster than we are fixing it. It is a global pandemic.

I am not talking about COVID-19, the pandemic that has affected our lives and livelihood for over a year. I am talking about the other pandemic – the compromise of security of data.

In the past 6 months, the data leaks, the security hacks, the ransomware scourge have been more devastating than ever. Here are a few big ones that happened on a global scale:

Data Security Breach, Cyber Attack, Ransomware

Closer to home, here in South East Asia, we have

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Relinquishing Freedom in our Digital Future

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There was a TV cartoon show I loved when I was a kid called “Wait till your Father gets home“. I was probably 5 or 6 then, but I can still remember the mother was practically nagging all the time of having the father to come back to deal with the problems and issues caused by the kids, and sometimes the dog.

This patriarchal mentality of having the male manning (yeah, it is not a gender neutral word) the household is also, unfortunately, mimicked in our societies, in general, being obedient and subservient to the government of the day. This is especially true in East Asian societies, .

While dissent of this mindset is sprouting in the younger generation of these societies, you can see the dichotomy of the older generation and the younger one in the recent protests in Thailand and the on-going one in Myanmar. The older generation is likely fearful of the consequences and there are strong inclinations to accept and subject their freedom to be ruled by the rulers of the day. It is almost like part of their psyche and DNA.

So when I read the article published by Data Storage Asean titled “Malaysians Optimistic on Giving the Government Increased Access to Personal Data for Better Services“, I was in two minds. Why are we giving away our Personal Data when we do not get a guarantee that the our privacy is protected?

Data Privacy should be in our own hands

Why are we giving away our freedom in new digital Malaysia when in history, we have not been truly protected of that freedom? 

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Do we still need FAST (and its cohorts)?

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In a recent conversation with an iXsystems™ reseller in Hong Kong, the topic of Storage Tiering was brought up. We went about our banter and I brought up the inter-array tiering and the intra-array tiering piece.

After that conversation, I started thinking a lot about intra-array tiering, where data blocks within the storage array were moved between fast and slow storage media. The general policy was simple. Find all the least frequently access blocks and move them from a fast tier like the SSD tier, to a slower tier like the spinning drives with different RPM speeds. And then promote the data blocks to the faster media when accessed frequently. Of course, there were other variables in the mix besides storage media and speeds.

My mind raced back 10 years or more to my first encounter with Compellent and 3PAR. Both were still independent companies then, and I had my first taste of intra-array tiering

The original Compellent and 3PAR logos

I couldn’t recall which encounter I had first, but I remembered the time of both events were close. I was at Impact Business Solutions in their office listening to their Compellent pitch. The Kuching boys (thank you Chyr and Winston!) were very passionate in evangelizing the Compellent Data Progression technology.

At about the same time, I was invited by PTC Singapore GM at the time, Ken Chua to grace their new Malaysian office and listen to their latest storage vendor partnership, 3PAR. I have known Ken through my NetApp® days, and he linked me up Nathan Boeger, 3PAR’s pre-sales consultant. 3PAR had their Adaptive Optimization (AO) disk tiering and Dynamic Optimization (DO) technology.

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The Edge is coming! The Edge is coming!

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Actually, Edge Computing is already here. It has been here on everyone’s lips for quite some time, but for me and for many others, Edge Computing is still a hodgepodge of many things. The proliferation of devices, IoT, sensor, end points being pulled into the ubiquitous term of Edge Computing has made the scope ever changing, and difficult to pin down. And it is this proliferation of edge devices that will generate voluminous amount of data. Obvious questions emerge:

  • How to do you store all the data?
  • How do you process all the data?
  • How do you derive competitive value from the data from these edge devices?
  • How do you securely transfer and share the data?

From the storage technology perspective, it might be easier to observe what are the traits of the data generated on the edge device. In this blog, we also observe what could some new storage technologies out there that could be part of the Edge Computing present and future.

Edge Computing overview - Cloud to Edge to Endpoint

Edge Computing overview – Cloud to Edge to Endpoint

Storage at the Edge

The mantra of putting compute as close to the data and processing it where it is stored is the main crux right now, at least where storage of the data is concerned. The latency to the computing resources on the cloud and back to the edge devices will not be conducive, and in many older settings, these edge devices in factory may not be even network enabled. In my last encounter several years ago, there were more than 40 interfaces, specifications and protocols, most of them proprietary, for the edge devices. And there is no industry wide standard for these edge devices too.

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Storage in a shiny multi-cloud space

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The multi-cloud for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) era is not here (yet). That is what the technology marketers want you to think. The hype, the vapourware, the frenzy. It is what they do. The same goes to technology analysts where they describe vision and futures, and the high level constructs and strategies to get there. The hype of multi-cloud is often thought of running applications and infrastructure services seamlessly in several public clouds such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft® Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and linking it to on-premises data centers and private clouds. Hybrid is the new black.

Multicloud connectivity to public cloud providers and on-premises private cloud

Multi-Cloud, on-premises, public and hybrid clouds

And the aspiration of multi-cloud is the right one, when it is truly ready. Gartner® wrote a high level article titled “Why Organizations Choose a Multicloud Strategy“. To take advantage of each individual cloud’s strengths and resiliency in respective geographies make good business sense, but there are many other considerations that cannot be an afterthought. In this blog, we look at a few of them from a data storage perspective.

In the beginning there was … 

For this storage dinosaur, data storage and compute have always coupled as one. In the mainframe DASD days. these 2 were together. Even with the rise of networking architectures and protocols, from IBM SNA, DECnet, Ethernet & TCP/IP, and Token Ring FC-SAN (sorry, this is just a joke), the SANs, the filers to the servers were close together, albeit with a network buffered layer.

A decade ago, when the public clouds started appearing, data storage and compute were mostly inseparable. There was demarcation of public clouds and private clouds. The notion of hybrid clouds meant public clouds and private clouds can intermix with on-premise computing and data storage but in almost all cases, this was confined to a single public cloud provider. Until these public cloud providers realized they were not able to entice the larger enterprises to move their IT out of their on-premises data centers to the cloud convincingly. So, these public cloud providers decided to reverse their strategy and peddled their cloud services back to on-prem. Today, Amazon AWS has Outposts; Microsoft® Azure has Arc; and Google Cloud Platform launched Anthos.

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Intel is still a formidable force

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It is easy to kick someone who is down. Bad news have stronger ripple effects than the good ones. Intel® is going through a rough patch, and perhaps the worst one so far. They delayed their 7nm manufacturing process, one which could have given Intel® the breathing room in the CPU war with rival AMD. And this delay has been pushed back to 2021, possibly 2022.

Intel Apple Collaboration and Partnership started in 2005

Their association with Apple® is coming to an end after 15 years, and more security flaws surfaced after the Spectre and Meltdown debacle. Extremetech probably said it best (or worst) last month:

If we look deeper (and I am sure you have), all these negative news were related to their processors. Intel® is much, much more than that.

Their Optane™ storage prowess

I have years of association with the folks at Intel® here in Malaysia dating back 20 years. And I hardly see Intel® beating it own drums when it comes to storage technologies but they are beginning to. The Optane™ revolution in storage, has been a game changer. Optane™ enables the implementation of persistent memory or storage class memory, a performance tier that sits between DRAM and the SSD. The speed and more notable the latency of Optane™ are several times faster than the Enterprise SSDs.

Intel pyramid of tiers of storage medium

If you want to know more about Optane™’s latency and speed, here is a very geeky article from Intel®:

The list of storage vendors who have embedded Intel® Optane™ into their gears is long. Vast Data, StorOne™, NetApp® MAX Data, Pure Storage® DirectMemory Modules, HPE 3PAR and Nimble Storage, Dell Technologies PowerMax, PowerScale, PowerScale and many more, cement Intel® storage prowess with Optane™.

3D Xpoint, the Phase Change Memory technology behind Optane™ was from the joint venture between Intel® and Micron®. That partnership was dissolved in 2019, but it has not diminished the momentum of next generation Optane™. Alder Stream and Barlow Pass are going to be Gen-2 SSD and Persistent Memory DC DIMM respectively. A screenshot of the Optane™ roadmap appeared in Blocks & Files last week.

Intel next generation Optane roadmap

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Valuing the security value of NAS storage

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Garmin paid, reportedly millions. Do you sleep well at night knowing that the scourge of ransomware is rampant and ever threatening your business. Is your storage safe enough or have you invested in a storage which was the economical (also to be known as cheap) to your pocket?

Garmin was hacked by ransomware

I have highlighted this before. NAS (Network Attached Storage) has become the goldmine for ransomware. And in the mire of this COVID-19 pandemic, the lackadaisical attitude of securing the NAS storage remains. Too often than not, end users and customers, especially in the small medium enterprises segment, continue to search for the most economical NAS storage to use in their business.

Is price the only factor?

Why do customers and end users like to look at the price? Is an economical capital outlay of a cheap NAS storage with 3-year hardware and shallow technical support that significant to appease the pocket gods? Some end users might decided to rent cloud file storage, Hotel California style until they counted the 3-year “rental” price.

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Persistent Storage could stifle Google Anthos multi-cloud ambitions

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To win in the multi-cloud game, you have to be in your competitors’ cloud. Google Cloud has been doing that since they announced Google Anthos just over a year ago. They have been crafting their “assault”, starting with on-premises, and Anthos on AWS. Anthos on Microsoft® Azure is coming, currently in preview mode.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announcing Google Anthos at Next ’19

BigQuery Omni conversation starter

2 weeks ago, whilst the Google Cloud BigQuery Omni announcement was still under wraps, local Malaysian IT portal Enterprise IT News sent me the embargoed article to seek my views and opinions. I have to admit that I was ignorant about the deeper workings of BigQuery, and haven’t fully gone through the works of Google Anthos as well. So I researched them.

Having done some small works on Qubida (defunct) and Talend several years ago, I have grasped useful data analytics and data enablement concepts, and so BigQuery fitted into my understanding of BigQuery Omni quite well. That triggered my interests to write this blog and meshing the persistent storage conundrum (at least for me it is something to be untangled) to Kubernetes, to GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine), and thus Anthos as well.

For discussion sake, here is an overview of BigQuery Omni.

An overview of Google Cloud BigQuery Omni on multiple cloud providers

My comments and views are in this EITN article “Google Cloud’s BigQuery Omni for Multi-cloud Analytics”.

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