There is a mini revolution going on, and Facebook is the main force driving it.
It is the Open Compute Project (OCP), and its mission is to redesign the modern-day data centers and drive open hardware and architectural designs and specifications, including storage. The overall goals are to drive greater data center efficiency, flexibility, energy savings and cost effectiveness in a new class of “hyperscale” datacenters. Facebook, Google and Amazon are some of the examples of hyperscale datacenters, where their businesses relies on massive computing power, exponential storage performance and racks and racks of computing infrastructure to drive their web-computing or cloud-computing services.
Some of the cool technology innovations in mind includes having systems that support any CPUs from any vendors including Intel and AMD. We may even see both processor brands running on the same motherboard. The Open Common Slots component for processors is based on PCIe. Intel has pledged their Decathlete motherboard specifications for OCP and likewise AMD has produced its Roadrunner mobo series specification for the project as well. The ARM processor could also be supported in the near future in this “mix-and-match” OCP ideals.
Other proposed changes include OpenRack specifications, “sleds”, and of course, the Open Vault project for storage (aka “Knox”). Continue reading →
I was in a car with my host in the stifling traffic jams on the streets of Jakarta. We had just finished dinner and his driver was taking me back to the hotel. It was about 9pm and we were making conversation trying to figure out how we can work together. My host, a wonderful Singaporean who has been residing in Jakarta for more than a decade and a half, owns a distributorship focusing mainly on IT security solutions. He had invited me over to Jakarta to give a talk on Cloud Storage at the Indonesia CIO Network event on January 9th 2013.
I was there to represent SNIA South Asia to give a talk about CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface), and my host also took the opportunity to introduce Nutanix, a SAN-less 2-tier, high-performance, virtualized data center platform. (Note: That’s quite a mouthful, but gotta include all the buzz-words in there). It was my host’s first foray into storage networking solutions, away from his usual security solutions spread. As the conversation went on in the car, he said “You storage guys are so strange!“.
To many of the IT folks who have been involved in OS, applications, security, and networking, to say a few, storage is like a dark art, some mumbo jumbo, voodoo-like science known to a select few. That’s great, because this perception will keep us relevant, and still have the value and a job. To me, that just fine and dandy, and I like it that way. 🙂
In preparation to the event, I have to learn up SNIA CDMI. Cloud and Storage … Cloud and Storage … Cloud and Storage. Hmmm …. Continue reading →
Yes, Yes, I have been inactive for almost 2 months. There were many things I had to do to put my business back into shape again, and hence my lack of activities in my blog.
Yes, Yes, I have a lot of catching up to do, but first I would like to report that one of the more prominent web hosting companies (many of who frequently brand themselves as “Cloud” companies) in Malaysia have been hacked.
I got the news at about 8.00am on September 28th morning and I was in Bangalore, India. Friend of mine buzzed me on Facebook Messenger, and shared with me the following:
Thursday, September 27, 2012 1:46 AM
Date: 27th Sep 2012
Time: 6.01PM GMT +0800
We have an intrusion incident that happened early this morning around 12midnight of 27th September 2012. About 50 customers’ Virtual Machines hosted on our CLOUD were deleted from the cloud server. When we spotted the abnormal behavior, we managed to stop the intruder from causing more damages to our system.
From our initial investigation, we suspect one of our employees who will leave the company at this month end logged into one of our control panels and deleted some Virtual Machines. The backup was terminated at the same time when the Virtual Machines were deleted.
At this point of time, our team is working relentlessly on restoring the affected virtual machines and customer data.
In the mean time, my COO is lodging a police report and my manager is lodging a report to MyCERT while I am writing this email.
We are truly sorry about the whole incident as it has caused a great deal of inconvenience to our customers and their end customers as well.
Please also be rest assured that our CLOUD is truly secured; this incident was not a successful hacking attempt but rather sabotage via an ordinary login.
Detailed investigation reports will be compiled and sent to our customers.
Sincerely,
Chan Kee Siak
Founder and CEO
===================================
Summary / History of issues:
===================================
27th Sep 2012,
1.00am:
- We detected several virtual machines on the cloud were throwing warning signals.
- Technical Managers were immediately informed.
01.30am:
- We found out that an intruder was attempting to delete some of the virtual machines on our CLOUD cluster.
- The intruder was using a valid login to access our CLOUD control panel.
- COO was informed, signed in to co-ordinate.
- The access of the intruder has been disabled to prevent further damage.
- We posted an announcement at: https://support.exabytes.com.my/News/2248/c...aintenance.aspx
02.00am:
- CEO was informed.
- We found out that the intruder was using the login ID and password which belonged to one of the staff members whom we had recently sent out termination notice. The last working day of this staff was end of this month.
- Around 50++ Virtual Machines / VPS were affected.
- We started to inform affected customers.
02.30am:
- Rebuild and restoration of virtual machines began.
10.00am:
- Some Virtual Machines were Restored. The rest were still pending, on going.
- For Virtual machines without extra R1Soft Backup, we have recreated blank virtual machines with Operating System.
12:30pm:
- Attempted to recover the deleted backup on the CLOUD Backup server via data recovery tool. No guarantee and no ETA yet, we were doing our very best.
5.39pm:
- 80% of virtual machines were recreated. However, some were without the latest backup of data.
- Our engineers were attempting to recover the Cloud Backup Hard Drive with the use of recovery tool. However, as the size was huge, it might take few more hours.
Damage:
- The CLOUD Accounts, Virtual Machines and CLOUD Backup of affected clients were deleted. Only client with additional R1Soft backup still has the recent backup.
=================================
Date: 27th September 2012
Time: 1:55 AM GMT+8
Maintenance Details:
We have been alert by our monitoring system that certain Cloud VM has been found to be inaccessible. Our senior admin engineers are now working to resolve the issues.
Maintenance effect:
VMs affected isolated under MY-CLOUD-02 Zone.
We regret for any inconveniences caused.
Best regards,
Support team
------------------
Technical Support Department.
I have always wanted to look deeper into OpenStack, but I never got around to it. However, last week, something about NASA and OpenStack caught my attention … something about NASA pulling out of OpenStack development.
The spin was that “OpenStack has come on its own” is true, because OpenStack today has 180 (at last count on June 20th 2012) companies participating and contributing to the development, deployment and marketing of the highly popular Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing project. So, the NASA withdrawal was not as badly felt as to what NASA had said next.
When NASA CIO Linda Cureton announced that NASA has shifted to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their enterprise cloud-based infrastructure and they have saved almost a million dollars in costs, that was a clear and blatant impalement to the very heart and soul of OpenStack. NASA, one of the 2 founders of OpenStack in 2009, has switched sides to announce their preference to OpenStack’s rival, AWS. It pains me to just listen to the such a defection. Continue reading →
VMware is not a panacea for all your server virtualization requirements but because they do fantastic marketing (not to mention doing 1 small seminar every 1.5-2 months here in Malaysia last year), everyone thinks they are the only choice for server virtualization.
Efforts from Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and RedHat Virtualization do not seem to make a dent into VMware’s armour and it is beginning to feel that VMware is the only choice for server virtualization. However, every new server virtualization proposal would end up with the customer buying a brand new, much more powerful server. More CPUs, more cores, and more RAM (I am not going into VMware vRAM licensing issues here but customers know they are caged-in).
You see, VMware’s style of server virtualization is a in-system virtualization. The amount of physical resources within the system are being pooled, virtualized and shared with the virtual machines (VMs) in the physical chassis. With exception to the concept of distributed vSwitches (dvSwitch), CPUs, processing CPU cores and RAM are pretty much confined within what’s available in the physical box in most server virtualization environment. You can envision the concept of VMware’s in-system virtualization in the diagram below:
So, the consolidation (and virtualization) phase of older physical servers would involve packing tons of CPU cores and tons of RAMs in a newer, high end server.
I just visited a prospect a few days ago. For about 30 users for an ERP system and perhaps 100 users of Zimbra mailboxes, he lamented that he had to invest into 2 Dell R710 servers with 64GB of RAM each and sporting 2 x 8-core Intel Xeon. That sounded to like an overkill but that is what is happening here in this part of the world. The customer is given the perception and the doubt of inadequacy when they virtualize their servers. “What if I don’t have enough cores?; what if I don’t have enough RAM?” That in itself is the typical Malaysian (and Singaporean) kiasu mentality. Check out the Wikipedia definition of kiasu here.
Such a high-end server costs a lot of moolahs. And furthermore, the scalability and performance of the virtualized servers in the VMs are trapped within how much these servers can scale physically. If the server is maxed out at 16-cores and 128GB of RAM, then the customer to upgrade again with a server forklift. That’s not good.
And one more thing. VMware server virtualization is not ready for High Performance Computing (HPC) …yet.
Let’s look at this in another way. Let’s assume that you can look the server virtualization approach in an outward manner rather than the inward within kind of thinking, like the VMware in-system method.
What if you can invest in lower-end x86 servers with 1 x quad-core CPUs, with 8GB of RAM? What if you can put aggregate many of these lower-end servers together and build a large cluster of lower-end x86 servers into a huge symmetric multiprocessing server farm that supports 1,024 CPUs of 16,384 cores, 64TB of RAM? Have a look at this video that explains what I just mentioned:
Yeah, yeah .. it’s a marketing video from ScaleMP. But I am looking beyond the company and looking at the possibility of this out-system type of server virtualization. The ability to pool together all the CPU processing power of many physical servers and the aggregation of physical RAMs of all the combined servers into a single shared memory architectureunleashes the true power of server virtualization. This is THE next generation symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architecture, and it breaks free from the limitations and scalability the in-ward virtualization of physical servers.
In the past, SMP system rely on heavy programmability of the applications to scale with SMP systems. Applications didn’t necessary scale on-the-fly with SMP systems, and some level of configuration and programming have to be applied to address the proprietary SMP methods and interconnects. ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundationhypervisor solution removes the proprietary nature of SMP and bringing x86 server virtualization to meet the demands of HPC.
Here’s a look at the high level architecture of ScaleMP vSMP:
This type architecture brings similarity to RNA Networks solutions that I blogged some time ago. RNA Network, which was acquired by Dell late last year, based their solution on the RDMA technology and protocol, and was more about enhancing scalability and performance with memory pooling via Memory Cloud. ScaleMP’s patent-pending technology is more than that. It pools both memory and processing cores as well, giving it greater scalability and performance, the much needed resources for the demands of HPC environments.
The folks at ScaleMP contacted me a couple of weeks back and shared some of their marketing datasheets and whitepapers. While the information passed to me were OK, I wish the information could have a deeper dive into the technology and implementation as well. I hope they could share it, and I don’t mind signing an NDA.
Well, this is done pro bono, because I want everyone to know the choices and possibilities out there. It is my worldly cause to have people educated because only by being informed, we make better choices. The server virtualization world isn’t always about VMware, you know.
It is kind of interesting when every vendor out there claims that they are as open as they can be but the very reality is, the competitive nature of the game is really forcing storage vendors to speak open, but their actions are certainly not.
Confused? I am beginning to see a trend … a trend that is forcing customers to be locked-in with a certain storage vendor. I am beginning to feel that customers are given lesser choices, especially when the brand of the server they select for their applications will have implications on the brand of storage they will be locked in into.
And surprise, surprise, SSDs are the pawns of this new cloak-and-dagger game. How? Well, I have been observing this for quite a while now, and when HP announced their SMART portfolio for their storage, it’s time for me to say something.
In the announcement, it was reported that HP is coming out with its 8th generation ProLiant servers. As quoted:
“The eighth generation ProLiant is turbo-charging its storage with a Smart Array containing solid state drives and Smart Caching.”
“It also includes two Smart storage items: the Smart Array controllers and Smart Caching, which both feature solid state storage to solve the disk I/O bottleneck problem, as well as Smart Data Services software to use this hardware”
From the outside, analysts are claiming this is a reaction to the recent EMC VFCache product. (I blogged about it here) and HP was there to put the EMC VFcache solution as a first generation product, lacking the smarts (pun intended) of what the HP products have to offer. You can read about its performance prowess in the HP Connect blog.
The idea is very obvious. Put in a PCIe-based flash caching card in the server, and use a condescending caching/tiering technology that ties the server to a certain brand of storage. Only with this card, that (incidentally) works only with this brand of servers, will you, Mr. Customer, be able to take advantage of the performance power of this brand of storage. Does that sound open to you?
HP is doing it with its ProLiant servers; Dell is doing it with its ExpressFlash; EMC’s VFCache, while not advocating any brand of servers, is doing it because VFCache works only with EMC storage. We have seen Oracle doing it with Oracle ExaData. Oracle Enterprise database works best with Oracle’s own storage and the intelligence is in its SmartScan layer, a proprietary technology that works exclusively with the storage layer in the Exadata. Hitachi Japan, with its Hitachi servers (yes, Hitachi servers that we rarely see in Malaysia), already has such a technology since the last 2 years. I wouldn’t be surprised that IBM and Fujitsu already have something in store (or probably I missed the announcement).
NetApp has been slow in the game, but we hope to see them coming out with their own server-based caching products soon. More pure play storage are already singing the tune of SSDs (though not necessarily server-based).
The trend is obviously too, because the messaging is almost always about storage performance.
Yes, I totally agree that storage (any storage) has a performance bottleneck, especially when it comes to IOPS, response time and throughput. And every storage vendor is claiming SSDs, in one form or another, is the knight in shining armour, ready to rid the world of lousy storage performance. Well, SSDs are not the panacea of storage performance headaches because while they solve some performance issues, they introduce new ones somewhere else.
But it is becoming an excuse to introduce storage vendor lock-in, and how has the customers responded this new “concept”? Things are fairly new right now, but I would always advise customers to find out and ask questions.
Cloud storage for no vendor lock-in? Going to the cloud also has cloud service provider lock-in as well, but that’s another story.
Admit it! You are a terabyte junkie! I am sure many of us have one terabyte or more of your personal “stuff” at home. Heck, I even heard from a friend that he has almost 20TB of high definition movies (thank you Torrent!) at home! That’s crazy!
And what the typical Malaysian consumer would do after he or she runs out of hard disk space? In KL (our beloved capital city, Kuala Lumpur), they would throng the Low Yat IT mall or extensions of it, like Digital Mall in PJ Section 14. In other towns and cities in Malaysia, PC fairs are popular, as consumers try to get the best price possible (We Malaysian are good at squeezing the max of a deal)
It is difficult for the not-so-IT-literate consumer to differentiate which brand is the best. Buffalo, Iomega, DLink, Western Digital, etc, etc. But the tides are changing, because these vendors want to tie you down for the rest of your digital life. You see, buying a small NAS for the home now comes with a big carrot, an incentive to keep you wanting for more, and yet you can’t unbind yourself from the tether once you are hooked.
Cloud storage hasn’t taken off in a big way last year. But many cloud storage vendors know there are plenty of opportunities out there but how do they get the consumers to upload their files, photos and whatever stuff they might have, to cloud storage? Ingeniously, they work together with other smaller NAS storage players and use these vendor’s product offerings as baits. They bundle a significantly large FREE capacity or data protection offering in the Cloud Storage as the carrot, and once the consumer decides to put their files in the cloud storage, boom, they are ensnared to become a long term ATM machine to the Cloud Storage Provider.
Sneaky? No? I call this good, smart marketing. You have a market of opportunities out there, but cloud storage isn’t catching on. You have small NAS vendors that is reaching out to the market of consumer, but it’s a brutal, competitive arena and margins are razor thin. It’s a win-win situation for both sides.
This was moving towards a market that scratches the itch. The consumers wanted reliable backup too, but consumer-grade disk drives fail ever so often. Laptops get stolen, and files could be infected by viruses. The list goes on, but the point is that the Cloud Storage Providers may have found a silver lining in getting the consumers to leap into the cloud. And the whole idea of small NAS vendor-big Cloud Backup dynamic duo, just got a big endorsement last night. Guess who has decided to dip its grubby hands into the pie?
EMC, the 800-pound gorilla of the information and storage world, through its Iomega subsidiary, wants your money! They had just married Iomega with EMC Atmos. It was quoted:
“EMC subsidiary and data protection specialist Iomega announced the integration between Iomega network storage solutions and EMC Atmos, extending Atmos cloud-based data protection and sharing to Iomega’s network storage product offerings. The new integration gives small and midsize businesses (SMBs), remote offices and distributed enterprises access to any Atmos powered cloud around the world.”
Surprised? Not really, but I guess EMC needs to breath new life into Atmos and this marriage just extended Atmos’ life support system.
The next all-Flash product in my review list is SolidFire. Immediately, the niche that SolidFire is trying to carve out is obvious. It’s not for regular commercial customers. It is meant for Cloud Service Providers, because the features and the technology that they have innovated are quite cloud-intended.
Are they solid (pun intended)? Well, if they have managed to secure a Series B funding of USD$25 million (total of USD$37 million overall) from VCs such as NEA and Valhalla, and also angel investors such as Frank Slootman (ex-Data Domain CEO) and Greg Papadopoulus(ex-Sun Microsystems CTO), then obviously there is something more than meets the eye.
The one thing I got while looking up SolidFire is there is probably a lot of technology and innovation behind their Nodes and their Element OS. They hold their cards very, very close to their chest, and I couldn’t not get much good technology related information from their website or in Google. But here’s a look of how the SolidFire is like:
The SolidFire only has one product model, and that is the 1U SF3010. The SF3010 has 10 x 2.5″ 300GB SSDs giving it a raw total of 3TB per 1U. The minimum configuration is 3 nodes, and it scales to 100 nodes. The reason for starting with 3 nodes is of course, for redundancy. Each SF3010 node has 8GB NVRAM and 72GB RAM and sports 2 x 10GbE ports for iSCSI connectivity, especially when the core engineering talents were from LeftHand Networks. LeftHand Networks product is now HP P4000. There is no Fibre Channel or NAS front end to the applications.
Each node runs 2 x Intel Xeon 2.4GHz 6-core CPUs. The 1U height is important to the cloud provider, as the price of floor space is an important consideration.
Aside from the SF3010 storage nodes, the other important ingredient is their SolidFire Element OS.
Cloud storage needs to be available. The SolidFire Helix Self-Healing data protection is a feature that is capable of handling multiple concurrent failures across all levels of their storage. Data blocks are replicated randomly but intelligently across all storage nodes to ensure that the failure or disruption of access to a particular data block is circumvented with another copy of the data block somewhere else within the cluster. The idea is not new, but effective because solutions such as EMC Centera and IBM XIV employ this idea in their data availability. But still, the ability for self-healing ensures a very highly available storage where data is always available.
To address the efficiency of storage, having 3TB raw in the SF3010 is definitely not sufficient. Therefore, the Element OS always have thin provision, real-time compression and in-line deduplication turned on. These features cannot be turned off and operate at a fine-grained 4K blocks. Also important is the intelligence to reclaim of zeroed blocks, no-reservation, and no data movement in these innovations. This means that there will be no I/O impact, as claimed by SolidFire.
But the one feature that differentiates SolidFire when targeting storage for Cloud Service Providers is their guaranteed volume level Quality of Service (QOS). This is important and SolidFire has positioned their QOS settings into an advantage. As best practice, Cloud Service Providers should always leverage the QOS functionality to improve their storage utilization
The QOS has:
Minimum IOPS – Lower IOPS means lower performance priority (makes good sense)
Maximum IOPS
Burst IOPS – for those performance spikes moments
Maximum and Burst MB/sec
The combination of QOS and storage capacity efficiency gives SolidFire the edge when cloud providers can scale both performance and capacity in a more balanced manner, something that is not so simple with traditional storage vendors that relies on lots of spindles to achieve IOPS performance sacrificing capacity in the process. But then again, with SSDs, the IOPS are plenty (for now). SolidFire does not boast performance numbers of millions of IOPS or having throughput into the tens of Gigabytes like Violin, Virident or Kaminario, but what they want to be recognized as the cloud storage as it should be in a cloud service provider environment.
SolidFire calls this Performance Virtualization. Just as we would get to carve our storage volumes from a capacity pool, SolidFire allows different performance profiles to be carved out from the performance pool. This gives SolidFire the ability to mix storage capacity and storage performance in a seemingly independent manner, customizing the type of storage bundling required of cloud storage.
In fact, SolidFire only claims 50,000 IOPS per storage node (including the IOPS means for replicating data blocks). Together with their native multi-tenancy capability, the 50,000 or so IOPS will align well with many virtualized applications, rather than focusing on a 10x performance improvement on a single applications. Their approach is more about a more balanced and spread-out I/O architecture for cloud service providers and the applications that they service.
Their management is also targeted to the cloud. It has a REST API that integrates easily into OpenStack, Citrix CloudStack and VMware vCloud Director. This seamless and easy integration, is more relevant because the CSPs already have their own management tools. That is why SolidFire API is a REST-ready, integration ready to do just that.
The power of the SolidFire API is probably overlooked by storage professionals trained in the traditional manner. But what SolidFire API has done is to provide the full (I mean FULL) capability of the management and provisioning of the SolidFire storage. Fronting the API with REST means that it is real easy to integrate with existing CSP management interface.
Together with the Storage Nodes and the Element OS, the whole package is aimed towards a more significant storage platform for Cloud Service Providers(CSPs). Storage has always been a tricky component in Cloud Computing (despite what all the storage vendors might claim), but SolidFire touts that their solution focuses on what matters most for CSPs.
CSPs would want to maximize their investment without losing their edge in the cloud offerings to their customers. SolidFire lists their benefits in these 3 areas:
Performance
Efficiency
Management
The edge in cloud storage is definitely solid for SolidFire. Their ability to leverage on their position and steering away from other all-Flash vendors’ battlezone could all make sense, as they aim to gain market share in the Cloud Service Provider space. I only wish they can share more about their technology online.
Fortunately, I found a video by SolidFire’s CEO, Dave Wright which gives a great insight about SolidFire’s technology. Have a look (it’s almost 2 hour long):
[2 hours later]: Phew, I just finished the video above and the technology is solid. Just to summarize,
No RAID (which is a Godsend for service providers)
Aiming for USD5.00 or less per Gigabyte (a good number!)
General availability in Q1 2012
Lots of confidence about the superiority of their technology, as portrayed by their CEO, Dave Wright.
I like the way Amazon is building their Cloud Computing services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is certainly on track to become the most powerful Cloud Computing company in the world. In fact, AWS might already is. But they are certainly not resting on their laurels when they launched 2 new services in as many weeks – Amazon DynamoDB (last week) and Amazon Storage Gateway (this week).
I am particularly interested in the Amazon Storage Gateway, because it is addressing one of the biggest fears of Cloud Computing head-on. A lot of large corporations are still adamant to keep their data on-premise where it is private and secure. Many large corporations are still very skeptical about it even though Cloud Computing is changing the IT landscape in a massive way. The barrier to entry for large corporations is not something easy, but Amazon is adapting to get more IT divisions and departments to try out Cloud Computing in a less disruptive way.
The new service, is really about data storage and data backup for large corporations. This is important because large corporations have plenty of requirements for data storage and data to be backed up. And as we know, a large portion of the data stored does not need to be transactional or to be accessed frequently. This set of data is usually less frequently used, for archiving or regulatory compliance reasons, particular in the banking and healthcare industry.
In the data backup operations, the reason data is backed up is to provide a data recovery mechanism when a disaster strikes. Large corporations back up tons of data every day, weeks or month and this data only has value when there is a situation that requires data relevance, data immediacy or data recovery. Otherwise, it is just plenty of data taking up storage space, be it on disk or on tape.
Both data storage and data backup cost a lot of money, both CAPEX and OPEX. In CAPEX, you are constantly pressured to buy more storage to store the ever growing data. This leads to greater management and administration costs, both contributing heavily into OPEX costs. And I have not included the OPEX costs of floor space, power and cooling, people (training, salary, time and so on) typically adding up to 3-5x the operations costs relative to the capital investments. Such a model of IT operations related to storage cannot continue forever, and storage in the Cloud offers an alternative.
These 2 scenarios – data storage and data backup – are exactly the type of market AWS is targeting. In order to simplify and pacify large corporations, AWS introduced the Amazon Storage Gateway, that eases the large corporations to take some of their IT storage operations to the Cloud in the form of Amazon S3.
The video below shows the Amazon Storage Gateway:
The Amazon Storage Gateway is a piece of software “appliance” that is installed on-premise in the large corporation’s data center. It seamlessly integrates into the LAN and provides a SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connection to the Amazon S3. The data being transferred to the S3 is also encrypted with AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) 256-bit. Both SSL and AES-256 can give customers a sense of security and AWS claims that the implementation meets the data storage and data recovery standards used in the banking and healthcare industries.
The data storage and backup service regularly protects the customer’s data in snapshots, and giving the customer a rapid recovery platform should the customer experienced on-premise data corruption or data disruption. At the same time, the snapshot copies in the Amazon S3 can also be uploaded into Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) and testing or development environments can be evaluated and testing with Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). The simplicity of sharing and combining different Amazon services will no doubt, give customers a peace of mind, easing their adoption of Cloud Computing with AWS.
This new service starts with a 60-day free trial and moving on to a USD$125.00 (about Malaysian Ringgit $400.00) per gateway per month subscription fee. The data storage (inclusive of the backup service), costs only 14 cents per gigabyte per month. For 1TB of data, that is approximately MYR$450 per month. Therefore, minus the initial setup costs, that comes to a total of MYR$850 per month, slightly over MYR$10,000 per year.
At this point, I like to relate an experience I had a year ago when implementing a so-called private cloud for an oil-and-gas customers in KL. They were using the HP EVS (Electronic Vaulting Service) to an undisclosed HP data center hosting site in the Klang Valley. The HP EVS, which was an OEM of Asigra, was not an easy solution to implement but what was more perplexing was the fact that the customer had a poor understanding of what would be the objectives and their 5-year plan in keeping with the data protected.
When the first 3-4TB data storage and backup were almost used up, the customer asked for a quotation for an additional 1TB of the EVS solution. The subscription for 1TB was MYR$70,000 per year. That is 7x time more than the AWS MYR$10,000 per year cost! I have to salute the HP sales rep. It must have been a damn good convincing sell!
In the long run, the customer could be better off running their storage and backup on-premise with their HP EVA4400 and adding an additional of 1TB (and hiring another IT administrator) would have cost a whole lot less.
Amazon Web Services has already operating in Singapore for the past 2 years, and I am sure they are eyeing Malaysia as their regional market. Unless and until Malaysian companies offering Cloud Services know to use economies-of-scale to capitalize the Cloud Computing market, AWS is always going to be a big threat to CSP companies in Malaysia and a boon of any companies seeking cloud computing services anywhere in the world.
I urge customers in Malaysia to start questioning their so-called Cloud Service Providers if they can do what AWS is doing. I have low confidence of what the most local “cloud computing” companies can deliver right now. I hope they stop window dressing their service offerings and start giving real cloud computing services to customers. And for customers, you must continue to research and find out more which cloud services meet your business objectives. Don’t be flashed by the fancy jargons or technical idealism thrown at you. Always, always find out more because your business cost is at stake. Don’t be like the customer who paid MYR$70,000 for 1TB per year.
AWS is always innovating and the Amazon Storage Gateway is just another easy-to-adopt step in their quest for world domination.
When someone as important and as prominent as Jason Hoffman reads and follows your blog, you tend to stand up and take notice. I found out last week that Jason Hoffman, Founder and CTO of Joyent, was doing just that, I was deeply honoured and elated.
My Asian values started kicking in and I felt that I should reciprocate his gracious visits with a piece on Joyent. I have known about Joyent, thanks to Bryan Cantrill as the VP of Engineering because I am bloody impressed with his work with DTrace. And I have followed Joyent’s announcements every now and then, even recommending a job that was posted on Joyent’s website for a Service Delivery Manager in Asia Pacific for my buddy a couple of months ago. He’s one of the best Solaris engineers I have ever worked with but the problem with techies is, they tend to wait for everything to fall into place before they do the next thing. Too methodical!
I took some time over the weekend to understand a bit more about Joyent and their solution offerings. They are doing some mighty cool stuff and if you are Unix/Linux buff/bigot like me, you would be damn impressed. For those people who has experienced Unix and especially Solaris, there is an unexplained element that describes the fire and the passion of such a techie. I was feeling all the good vibes all over again.
Unfortunately, Joyent is not well known in this part of the world but I am well aware of their partnership with a local company called XyBase in an announcement in June last year. Xybase, through its vehicle called Anise Asia, entered into the partnership to resell Joyent’s SmartCenter solution. For those who has worked with XyBase in Malaysia, let’s not go there. 😉
Enough chitter-chatter! What’s Joyent about?
Well, for Malaysian IT followers, we are practically drowned in VMware. VMware does a seminar every 1.5 months or so, and they get invited to other vendors’ events ever so frequently as well. My buddy, Mr. Ong Kok Leong, who was an early employee in VMware Malaysia, has been elevated to superstardom, thanks to his presence in everything VMware. It’s a good thing and kudos to VMware to take advantage of their first-to-market, super gung-ho approach in the last 3 years or so. They have built a sizable lead in the local market and the competitors like Citrix Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V are being left in a dust. I believe only RedHat’s KVM is making a bit of a dent but they are primarily confined to their own RedHat space. Furthermore, most of VMware competitors do not have a strong portfolio and a complete software stack to challenge VMware and what they have been churning out.
Here’s my take … consider Joyent because I see Joyent having a very, very strong portfolio to give VMware a run for its money. Public listed VMware has deep pockets to continue their marketing blitz and because of where they are right now, they have gotten very pricey and complicated. And this blogger intends to level the playing field a bit by sharing more about Joyent and their solutions.
I see Joyent having 4 very strong technologies that differentiates them from others. These technologies (in no particular order) are:
node.js
ZFS
DTrace
KVM
These technologies have been proven in the field because Joyent has been deploying, stress testing them and improving on them in their own cloud offering called Joyent Cloud for the last few year. This is true “eating your own dogfood” and putting your money where your mouth is. This is a very important considering when building a Cloud Computing offering, especially in the public cloud space. You need something that is proven and Joyent Cloud is testimonial to Joyent’s technology.
So let’s start with a diagram of the Joyent Cloud Software Stack.
Key to the performance of Joyent Cloud is node.js.
node.js as quoted in its website is “Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.” The key to this is being event-driven and asynchronous and cloud solutions developed using node.js are able to go faster, scale bigger and respond better. The event-based model follows a programming approach in which the flow of the program is determined by events that occurred.
A simple analogy is when you (in Malaysia) is at McDonald’s. In the past, the McDonald’s staff will service and fulfill your order before they service the next customer and so on. That was the flow of the past. Some time last year, McDonalds’ decide that their front staff would take your order, sends you to a queue and then took the order of the next customer. The back-end support staff would then fulfill your order putting that burger and drink on your tray. That is why they are able to serve (take your money) faster and get more things done. This is what I understand about event-driven, when it is applied in a programming content.
node.js has been touted as the new “Ruby-on-Rails” and it is all about low-latency, and concurrency in applications, especially cloud applications. Here’s a video introducing node.js, by Joyent’s very own Ryan Dahl, the creator of node.js.
Besides performance, you would also need a strong and robust file system to ensure security, data integrity and protection of data as it scales. ZFS is a 128-bit, enterprise file system that was developed in Sun more than 10 years ago, and I am a big admirer of the ZFS technology. I have written about ZFS in the past, comparing it with NetApp’s Data ONTAP and also written about ZFS self-healing properties in dealing with Silent Data Corruption. In fact, my buddy (him being the more technical one) and I have been developing storage solutions with ZFS.
Cloud Computing is complex and you have to know what’s happening in the Cloud. For the Cloud Service Provider, they must know the real-time behaviour of the cloud properties. It could be for performance, resource consumption and contention, bottlenecks, applications characteristics, and even for finding the problems as quickly as possible. For the customers, they must have the ability to monitor, understand and report what they are consuming and using in the Cloud.
The regular used buzzword is Analytics and DTrace is the framework developed for Cloud Analytics. When it comes to analytics, nothing comes close to what DTrace can do. Most vendors (including VMware) will provide APIs for 3rd party ISVs to develop cloud analytics but nothing beats having the creator of the cloud technology given you the tools that they use internally. That is what Joyent is giving to the customer, DTrace, a tool that they use themselves internally. Here’s a screenshot of DTrace in action for Joyent’s SmartDataCenter.
I have always said that you got to see it to know it. Cloud visibility is crucial for the optimal operational efficiency of the cloud.
Joyent already has Solaris Zones technology in its offering. But the missing piece was bare metal hypervisor and last year, Joyent added the final piece. KVM (Kernel-based Virtualization) was ported to Joyent, and KVM is more secure, and faster than the traditional approach of VMware, which relies on binary translation. KVM would mean that the virtualization kernel has direct interaction and communication with the native x86 virtualization on processors that supports hardware virtualization extension. There is a whole religious debate about native, paravirtualization and binary translation on the web. You can read one here, and as I said, KVM is native virtualization.
There are lots more to know about Joyent but you got to spend some time to learn about it. It is not well known (yet) in this part of the world, my intention in this blog entry is to disseminate information so that you readers don’t have to be droned into one thing only.
There are choices and in the virtualization space, it is just not always about VMware. VMware deserves to be where they are but when one comes into power (like VMware), he/she tends to become less friendly to work it. A customer should not be subjected to this new order of oppression because businesses are there when there are customers. And as customers, they are always choices and Joyent is one good choice.
