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 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.
I was talking to an end user who was slowly getting exposed to the cloud amid this Covid-19 pandemic. The whole work from home thingy was not new to him, but the scale of the practice suddenly escalated when more than 80 of his staff have to work from wherever they were stuck at during the past 6 weeks. Initially all of his staff had to alternate their folders and files access because their Sonicwall® Global Client license and SSL VPN Clients were inadequate. Even after their upgrade of the licenses, the performance of getting the folders and files through the Z: drive was poor and the network was chocked up. I told them that regardless, the SMB protocol of the NAS shared folders was chatty and generated a lot of network traffic on the VPN, along with the inadequacies of running this over the wide area Internet network. Staff productivity obviously nosedived.
The end user is not an IT savvy user. They were unfamiliar with Cloud Storage other than the free personal ones like Google Drive, or Dropbox. They have more than 200TB and I have introduced to them Wasabi® Cloud. They were very familiar with their Z:, their NAS Drive. I introduced to them the Cloud Drive.
NAS: Hey, how’s it going?
Cloud: Not bad. My boss and your boss are talking about bringing me and Wasabi® Cloud to join your gang. Hope you are OK with that.
Falconstor® Software is gaining momentum. Given its arduous climb back to the fore, it is beginning to soar again.
Tape technology and Digital Data Preservation
I mentioned that long term digital data preservation is a segment within the data lifecycle which has merits and prominence. SNIA® has proved that this is a strong growing market segment through its 2007 and 2017 “100 Year Archive” surveys, respectively. 3 critical challenges of this long, long-term digital data preservation is to keep the archives
Accessible
Undamaged
Usable
For the longest time, tape technology has been the king of the hill for digital data preservation. The technology is cheap, mature, and many enterprises has built their long term strategy around it. And the pulse in the tape technology market is still very healthy.
The challenges of tape remain. Every 5 years or so, companies have to consider moving the data on the existing tape technology to the next generation. It is widely known that LTO can read tapes of the previous 2 generations, and write to it a generation before. The tape transcription process of migrating digital data for the sake of data preservation is bad because it affects the structural integrity and quality of the content of the data.
In my times covering the Oil & Gas subsurface data management, I have seen NOCs (national oil companies) with 500,000 tapes of all generations, from 1/2″ to DDS, DAT to SDLT, 3590 to LTO 1-7. And millions are spent to transcribe these tapes every few years and we have folks like Katalyst DM, Troika and more hovering this landscape for their fill.
One of the historical feats which had me mesmerized for a long time was the 14-year journey China’s imperial treasures took to escape the Japanese invasion in the early 1930s, sandwiched between rebellions and civil wars in China. More than 20,000 pieces of the imperial treasures took a perilous journey to the west and back again. Divided into 3 routes over a decade and four years, not a single piece of treasure was broken or lost. All in the name of preservation.
Digital data preservation is on another end of the data lifecycle spectrum. More often than not, it is not the part that many pay attention to. In the past 2 decades, digital data has grown so much that it is now paramount to keep the data forever. Mind you, this is not the data hoarding kind but to preserve the knowledge and wisdom which is in the digital content of the data.
SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) conducted 2 surveys – one in 2007 and another in 2017 – called the 100 Year Archive, and found that the requirement for preserving digital data has grown multiple folds over the 10 years. In the end, the final goal is to ensure that the perpetual digital contents are
Accessible
Undamaged
Usable
All at an affordable cost. Therefore, SNIA has the vision that the digital content must transcend beyond the storage medium, the storage system and the technology that holds it.
[ Note: This is still experimental and should not be taken as production materials. I took a couple days over the weekend to “muck” around the new Iconik plug-in in FreeNAS™ to prepare for as a possible future solution. ]
This part is the continuation of Part 1 posted earlier.
iconik has partnered with iXsystems™ almost a year ago. iconik is a cloud-based media content management platform. Its storage repository has many integration with public cloud storage such as Google Cloud, Wasabi® Cloud and more. The on-premises storage integration is made throughiconik storage gateway, and it presents itself to FreeNAS™ and TrueNAS® via plugins.
For a limited, you get free access to iconik via this link.
iconik – The Application setup
[ Note: A lot of the implementation details come from this iXsystems™ documentation by Joe Dutka. This is an updated version for the latest 11.3 U1 release ]
iconik is feature rich and navigating it to setup the storage gateway can be daunting. Fortunately the iXsystems™ documentation was extremely helpful. It is also helpful to consider this as a 2-step approach so that you won’t get overwhelmed of what is happening.
Set up the Application section
Get Application ID
Get Authorization Token
Set up the Storage section
Get Storage ID
The 3 credentials (Application ID, Authorization Token, Storage ID) are required to set up the iconik Storage Gateway at the FreeNAS™ iconik plug-in setup.
[ Note: This is still experimental and should not be taken as production materials. I took a couple days over the weekend to “muck” around the new Iconik plug-in in FreeNAS™ to prepare for as a possible future solution. ]
The COVID-19 situation goes on unabated. A couple of my customers asked about working from home and accessing their content files and coincidentally both are animation studios. Meanwhile, there was another opportunity asking about a content management solution that would work with the FreeNAS™ storage system we were proposing. Over the weekend, I searched for a solution that would combine both content management and cloud access that worked with both FreeNAS™ and TrueNAS®, and I was glad to find the iconik and TrueNAS®partnership.
In this blog (and part 2 later), I document the key steps to setup the iconik plug-in with FreeNAS™. I am using FreeNAS™ 11.3U1.
Dataset 777
A ZFS dataset assigned to be the storage repository for the “Storage Target” in iconik. Since iconik has a different IAM (identity access management) than the user/group permissions in FreeNAS, we have make the ZFS dataset to have Read/Write access to all. That is the 777 permission in Unix speak. Note that there is a new ACL manager in version 11.3, and the permissions/access rights screenshot is shown here.
Take note that this part is important. We have to assign @everyone to have Full Control because the credentials at iconik is tied to the permissions we set for @everyone. Missing this part will deny the iconik storage gateway scanner to peruse this folder, and the status will remain “Inactive”. We will discuss this part more in Part 2.
[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at the event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]
“Cheap and deep“, “Race to Zero” were some of the less storied calls I have come across when discussing about object storage, and it was really de-valuing the merits of object storage as vendors touted their superficial glory of being in the IDC Marketscape for Object-based Storage 2019.
Almost every single conversation I had in the past 3 years was either explaining what object storage is or “That is cheap storage right?”
[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at the event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]
A funny photo (below) came up on my Facebook feed a couple of weeks back. In an honest way, it depicted how a developer would think (or the lack of thinking) about the storage infrastructure designs and models for the applications and workloads. This also reminded me of how DBAs used to diss storage engineers. “I don’t care about storage, as long as it is RAID 10“. That was aeons ago 😉
The world of developers and the world of infrastructure people are vastly different. Since cloud computing birthed, both worlds have collided and programmable infrastructure-as-code (IAC) have become part and parcel of cloud native applications. Of course, there is no denying that there is friction.
Containerized applications are quickly defining the cloud native applications landscape. The container orchestration machinery has one dominant engine – Kubernetes.
In the world of software development and delivery, DevOps has taken a liking to containers. Containers make it easier to host and manage life-cycle of web applications inside the portable environment. It packages up application code other dependencies into building blocks to deliver consistency, efficiency, and productivity. To scale to a multi-applications, multi-cloud with th0usands and even tens of thousands of microservices in containers, the Kubernetes factor comes into play. Kubernetes handles tasks like auto-scaling, rolling deployment, computer resource, volume storage and much, much more, and it is designed to run on bare metal, in the data center, public cloud or even a hybrid cloud.
[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]
Cloud computing will have challenges processing data at the outer reach of its tentacles. Edge Computing, as it melds with the Internet of Things (IoT), needs a different approach to data processing and data storage. Data generated at source has to be processed at source, to respond to the event or events which have happened. Cloud Computing, even with 5G networks, has latency that is not sufficient to how an autonomous vehicle react to pedestrians on the road at speed or how a sprinkler system is activated in a fire, or even a fraud detection system to signal money laundering activities as they occur.
Furthermore, not all sensors, devices, and IoT end-points are connected to the cloud at all times. To understand this new way of data processing and data storage, have a look at this video by Jay Kreps, CEO of Confluent for Kafka® to view this new perspective.
Data is continuously and infinitely generated at source, and this data has to be compiled, controlled and consolidated with nanosecond precision. At Storage Field Day 19, an interesting open source project, Pravega, was introduced to the delegates by DellEMC. Pravega is an open source storage framework for streaming data and is part of Project Nautilus.
The data generated at source (end-points, sensors, devices) is serialized, timestamped (as event occurs), continuous and infinite. These are the properties of a time series data stream, and to make sense of the streaming data, new data formats such as Avro, Parquet, Orc pepper the landscape along with the more mature JSON and XML, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
You can learn more about these data formats in the 2 links below:
Many time series projects started as DIY projects in many organizations. And many of them are still DIY projects in production systems as well. They depend on tribal knowledge, and these databases are tied to an unmanaged storage which is not congruent to the properties of streaming data.
At the storage end, the technologies today still rely on the SAN and NAS protocols, and in recent years, S3, with object storage. Block, file and object storage introduce layers of abstraction which may not be a good fit for streaming data.
[Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]
Western Digital dived into Storage Field Day 19 in full force as they did in Storage Field Day 18. A series of high impact presentations, each curated for the diverse requirements of the audience. Several open source initiatives were shared, all open standards to address present inefficiencies and designed and developed for a greater future.
Zoned Storage
One of the initiatives is to increase the efficiencies around SMR and SSD zoning capabilities and removing the complexities and overlaps of both mediums. This is the Zoned Storage initiatives a technical working proposal to the existing NVMe standards. The resulting outcome will give applications in the user space more control on the placement of data blocks on zone aware devices and zoned SSDs, collectively as Zoned Block Device (ZBD). The implementation in the Linux user and kernel space is shown below:
