Category Archives: Backup

Pure Electric!

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I didn’t get a chance to attend Pure Accelerate event last month. From the blogs and tweets of my friends, Pure Accelerate was an awesome event. When I got the email invitation for the localized Pure Live! event in Kuala Lumpur, I told myself that I have to attend the event.

The event was yesterday, and I was not disappointed. Coming off a strong fiscal Q1 2018, it has appeared that Pure Storage has gotten many things together, chugging full steam at all fronts.

When Pure Storage first come out, I was one of the early bloggers who took a fancy of them. My 2011 blog mentioned the storage luminaries in their team. Since then, they have come a long way. And it was apt that on the same morning yesterday, the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays 2017 was released.

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The changing face of storage

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“No, we are not a storage company anymore. We are a data management company now.“

I was reading a Forbes article interviewing NetApp’s CIO, Bill Miller. It was titled:

NetApp’s CIO Helps Drive Company’s Shift From Data Storage To Data Management

I was fairly surprised about the time it took for that mindset shift messaging from storage to data management. I am sure that NetApp has been doing that for years internally.

To me, the writing has been in the wall for years. But weak perception of storage, at least in this part of Asia, still lingers as that clunky, behind the glassed walls and crufty closets, noisy box of full of hard disk drives lodged with snakes and snakes of orange, turquoise or white cables. 😉

The article may come as a revelation to some, but the world of storage has changed indefinitely. The blurring of the lines began when software defined storage, or even earlier in the form of storage virtualization, took form. I even came up with my definition a couple of years ago about the changing face of storage framework. Instead of calling it data management, I called the new storage framework,  the Data Services Platform.

So, this is my version of the storage technology platform of today. This is the Data Services Platform I have been touting to many for the last couple of years. It is not just storage technology anymore; it is much more than that.

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Can NetApp do it a bit better?

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 12. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented in this event]

In Day 2 of Storage Field Day 12, I and the other delegates were hustled to NetApp’s Sunnyvale campus headquarters. That was a homecoming for me, and it was a bit ironic too.

Just 8 months ago, I was NetApp Malaysia Country Manager. That country sales lead role was my second stint with NetApp. I lasted almost 1 year.

17 years ago, my first stint with NetApp was the employee #2 in Malaysia as an SE. That SE stint went by quickly for 5 1/2 years, and I loved that time. Those Fall Classics NetApp used to have at the Batcave and the Fortress of Solitude left a mark with me, and the experiences still are as vivid as ever.

Despite what has happened in both stints and even outside the circle, I am still one of NetApp’s active cheerleaders in the Asia Pacific region. I even got accused by being biased as a community leader in the SNIA Malaysia Facebook page (unofficial but recognized by SNIA), because I was supposed to be neutral. I have put in 10 years to promote the storage technology community with SNIA Malaysia. [To the guy named Stanley, my response was be “Too bad, pick a religion“.]

The highlight of the SFD12 NetApp visit was of course, having lunch with Dave Hitz, one of the co-founders and the one still remaining. But throughout the presentations, I was unimpressed.

For me, the only one which stood out was CloudSync. I have read about CloudSync since NetApp Insight 2016 and yes, it’s a nice little piece of data shipping service between on-premise and AWS cloud.

Here’s how CloudSync looks like:

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Disaster Recovery has changed

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Simple and affordable Disaster Recovery? Sounds oxymoronic, right?

I have thronged the small medium businesses (SMBs) space in the past few months. I have seen many SMBs resort to the cheapest form they can get their hands on. It could be a Synology here or a QNAP there, and that’s their backup plan. That’s their DR plan. When disaster strikes, they just shrug their shoulders and accept their fate. It could be a human error, accidental data deletion, virus infection, data corruption and recently, RANSOMware! But these SMBs do not have the IT resources to deal with the challenges these “disasters” bring.

Recently I attended a Business Continuity Institute forum organized by the Malaysian Chapter. Several vendors and practitioners spoke about the organization’s preparedness and readiness for DR. And I would like to stress the words “preparedness” and “readiness”. In the infrastructure world, we often put redundancy into the DR planning, and this means additional cost. SMBs cannot afford this redundancy. Furthermore, larger organizations have BC and DR coordinators who are dedicated for the purpose of BC and DR. SMBs probably has a person who double up an the IT administrator.

However, for IT folks, virtualization and cloud technologies are beginning to germinate a new generation of DR solutions. DR solutions which are able to address the simplicity of replication and backup, and at the same time affordable. Many are beginning to offer DR-as-a-Service and indeed, DR-as-a-Service has become a Gartner Magic Quadrant category. Here’s a look at the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for DR-as-a-Service.

gartner-mq-dr-as-a-service-2016

And during these few months, I have encountered 3 vendors in this space. They are sitting in the Visionaries quadrant. One came to town and started smashing laptops to jazz up their show (I am not going to name that vendor). Another kept sending me weird emails, sounding kind of sleazy like “Got time for a quick call?”

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Discovery of the 8th element – Element R

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I am so blind. After more than 20 years in the industry, I have chosen to be blind to one of the most important elements of data protection and availability. Yet, I have been talking about it over and over, and over again but never really incorporated it into mantra.

Some readers will know that I frequently use these 7 points (or elements) in my approach to storage infrastructure and information management. These are:

  • Availability
  • Performance
  • Protection
  • Accessibility
  • Management
  • Security
  • Compliance

A few days ago, I had an epiphany. I woke up in the morning, feeling so enlightened and yet conflicted with the dumbfounded dumb feeling. It was so weird, and that moment continued to play in my mind like a broken record. I had to let it out and hence I am writing this down now.

Element R – Recovery, Resiliency, Restorability, Resumption. That’s the element which I “discovered“. I was positively stunned that I never incorporated such an important element in my mantra, until now. Continue reading →

Oops, excuse me but your silo is showing

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It is the morning that the SNIA Global Steering Committee reporting session is starting soon. I am in the office extremely early waiting for my turn to share the happenings in SNIA Malaysia.

And of late, I have been getting a lot of calls to catch up on hot technologies, notably All Flash Storage arrays and hyper-converged infrastructure. Even though I am now working for Interica, a company that focuses on Oil & Gas exploration and production software, my free coffee sessions with folks from the IT side have not diminished. And I recalled a week back in mid-March where I had coffee overdose!

Flash storage and hyperconvergence are HOT! Despite the hypes and frenzies of both flash storage and hyperconvergence, I still believe that integrating either or, or both, still have an effect that many IT managers overlook. The effect is a data silo.

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Hail Hydra!

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The last of the Storage Field Day 6 on November 7th took me and the other delegates to NEC. There was an obvious, yet eerie silence among everyone about this visit. NEC? Are you kidding me?

NEC isn’t exactly THE exciting storage company in the Silicon Valley, yet I was pleasantly surprised with their HydraStorprowess. It is indeed quite a beast, with published numbers of backup throughput of 4PB/hour, and scales to 100PB of capacity. Most impressive indeed, and HydraStor deserves this blogger’s honourable architectural dissection.

HydraStor is NEC’s grid-based, scale-out storage platform with an object storage backend. The technology, powered by the DynamicStor ™ software, a distributed file system laid over the HydraStor grid architecture. At the same time, it has the DataRedux™ technology that provides the global in-line deduplication as the HydraStor ingests data for data protection, replication, archiving and WORM purposes. It is a massive data consolidation platform, storing gazillion loads of data (100PB you say?) for short-term and long-term retention and recovery.

The architecture is indeed solid, and its data availability goes beyond traditional RAID-level resiliency. HydraStor employs their proprietary erasure coding, called Distributed Resilient Data™. The resiliency knob can be configured to withstand 6 concurrent disks or nodes failure, but by default configured with a resiliency level of 3.

We can quickly deduce that DynamicStor™, DataRedux™ and Distributed Resilient Data™ are the technology pillars of HydraStor. How do they work, and how do they work together?

Let’s look a bit deeper into the HydraStor architecture.

HydraStor is made up of 2 types of nodes:

  • Accelerator Nodes
  • Storage Nodes

The Accelerator Nodes (AN) are the access nodes. They interface with the HydraStor front end, which could be CIFS, NFS or OST (Open Storage Technology). The AN nodes chunks the in-coming data and performs in-line deduplication at a very high speed. It can reach speed of 300TB/hour, which is blazingly fast!

The AN nodes also runs DynamicStor™, handling the performance heavy-lifting portion of HydraStor. The chunked data from the AN nodes are then passed on to the Storage Nodes (SN), where they are further “deduped in-line” to determined if the chunks are unique or not. It is a two-step inline deduplication process. Below is a diagram showing the ANs built above the SNs in the HydraStor grid architecture.

NEC AN & SN grid architecture

 

The HydraStor grid architecture is also a very scalable architecture, allow the dynamic scale-in and scale-out of both ANs and SNs. AN nodes and SN nodes can be added or removed into the system, auto-configuring and auto-optimizing while everything stays online. This capability further strengthens the reliability and the resiliency of the HydraStor.

NEC Hydrastor dynamic topology

Moving on to DataRedux™. DataRedux™ is HydraStor’s global in-line data deduplication technology. It performs dedupe at the sub-file level, with variable length window. This is performed at the AN nodes and the SN nodes level,chunking and creating unique hash values. All unique chunks are further compressed with a modified LZ compression algorithm, shrinking the data to its optimized footprint on the disk storage. To maintain the global in-line deduplication, the hash table is available across the HydraStor cluster.

NEC Deduplication & Compression

The unique data chunk resulting from deduplication and compression are then written to disks using the configured Distributed Resilient Data™ (DRD) algorithm, at its set resiliency level.

At the junction of DRD, with erasure coding parity, the data is broken up into multiples of fragments and assigned a parity to a grouping of fragments. If the resiliency level is set to 3 (the default), the data is broken into 12 pieces, 9 data fragments + 3 parity fragments. The 3 parity fragments corresponds to the resiliency level of 3. See diagram below of the 12 fragments spread across a group of selected disks in the storage pool of the Storage Nodes.

NEC DRD erasure coding on Storage Nodes

 

If the HydraStor experiences a failure in the disks or nodes, and has resulted in the loss of a fragment or fragments, the DRD self-healing function will auto-rebuild and auto-reconfigure the recovered fragments in another set of disks, maintaining the level of 3 parities.

The resiliency level, as mentioned earlier, can be set up to 6, boosting the HydraStor survival factor of 6 disks or nodes failure in the grid. See below of how the autonomous DRD recovery works:

NEC Autonomous Data recovery

Despite lacking the razzle dazzle of most Silicon Valley storage startups and upstarts, credit be given where credit is due. NEC HydraStor is indeed a strong show stopper.

However, in a market that is as fickle as storage, deduplication solutions such as HydraStor, EMC Data Domain, and HP StoreOnce, are being superceded by Copy Data Management technology, touted by Actifio. It was rumoured that EMC restructured their entire BURA (Backup Recovery Archive) division to DPAD (Data Protection and Availability Division) to go after the burgeoning copy data management market.

It would be good if NEC can take notice and turn their HydraStor “supertanker” towards the Copy Data Management market. That would be something special to savour.

P/S: NEC. Sorry about the title. I just couldn’t resist it 😉

Technology prowess of Riverbed SteelFusion

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The Riverbed SteelFusion (aka Granite) impressed me the moment it was introduced to me 2 years ago. I remembered that genius light bulb moment well, in December 2012 to be exact, and it had left its mark on me. Like I said last week in my previous blog, the SteelFusion technology is unique in the industry so far and has differentiated itself from its WAN optimization competitors.

To further understand the ability of Riverbed SteelFusion, a deeper inspection of the technology is essential. I am fortunate to be given the opportunity to learn more about SteelFusion’s technology and here I am, sharing what I have learned.

What does the technology of SteelFusion do?

Riverbed SteelFusion takes SAN volumes from supported storage vendors in the central datacenter and projects the storage volumes (aka LUNs)to applications and hosts at the remote branches. The technology requires a paired relationship between SteelFusion Core (in the centralized datacenter) and SteelFusion Edge (at the branch). Both SteelFusion Core and Edge are fronted respectively by the Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization device, to deliver the performance required.

The diagram below gives an overview of how the entire SteelFusion network architecture is like:

Riverbed SteelFusion Overall Solution 2 Continue reading →

SMB on steroids but CIFS lord isn’t pleased

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I admit it!

I am one of the guilty parties who continues to use CIFS (Common Internet File System) to represent the Windows file sharing protocol. And a lot of vendors continue to use the “CIFS” word loosely without knowing that it was a something from a bygone era. One of my friends even pronounced it as “See Fist“, which sounded even funnier when he said it. (This is for you Adrian M!)

And we couldn’t be more wrong because we shouldn’t be using the CIFS word anymore. It is so 90’s man! And the tell-tale signs have already been there but most of us chose to ignore it with gusto. But a recent SNIA Webinar titled “SMB 3.0 – New opportunities for Windows Environment” aims to dispel our incompetence and change our CIFS-venture to the correct word – SMB (Server Message Block).

A selfie photo of Dennis Chapman, Senior Technical Director for Microsoft Solutions at NetApp from the SNIA webinar slides above, wants to inform all of us that … SMB History Continue reading →

Novell Filr about to be revealed

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My training engagement landed me in Manila this week. At the back of my mind is Novell Filr, first revealed to me a week ago by my buddy at Novell Malaysia. After almost 18 months since I first wrote about it, Novell Filr is about to be revealed in my blog within this month. And it has come at an opportune time, because the enterprise BYOD/file synchronization market is about to take off.

Gartner defines this market as Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) and it is already a very crowded market given the popularity of Dropbox, Box.net, Sugarsync and many, many others. It is definitely a market that is coveted by many but mastered by a few. There are just too many pretenders and too few real players.

The proliferation of smart phones and tablets and other mobile devices has opened up a burgeoning need to have data everywhere. The wonderfulness of having data right at the fingertips every time they are wanted give rise to the need of wanting business and corporate data to be available as well. The power of having data instantly at the swipe of our fingers on the touchscreen is akin us feeling like God, giving life to our communication and us making opportunities come alive at the very moment. Continue reading →