Category Archives: Cloud

The Currency to grow Decentralized Storage

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Unless you have been living under a rock in the past months, the fervent and loud, but vague debates of web3.0 have been causing quite a scene on the Internet. Those tiny murmurs a few months ago have turned into an avalanche of blares and booms, with both believers and detractors crying out their facts and hyperboles.

Within the web3.0, decentralized storage technologies have been rising to a crescendo. So many new names have come forth into the decentralized storage space, most backed by blockchain and incentivized by cryptocurrencies and is putting the 19th century California Gold Rush to shame.

At present, the decentralized storage market segment is fluid, very vibrant and very volatile. Being the perennial storage guy that I am, I would very much like the decentralized storage to be sustainably successful but first, it has to make sense. Logic must prevail before confidence follows.

Classic “Crossing the Chasm”

To understand this decentralization storage chaos, we must understand where it is now, and where it is going. History never forgets to teach us of the past to be intelligible in the fast approaching future.

I look to this situation as a classic crossing the chasm case. This Crossing the Chasm concept was depicted in Geoffrey Moore’s 1991 book of the same name. In his book, he spoke well about the Technology Adoption Cycle that classifies and demonstrates the different demographics and psychological progression (and regression) of how a technology is taken to mainstream.

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm Technology (Disruption) Adoption Cycle

As a new technology enters the market, the adoption is often fueled by the innovators, the testers, the crazy ones. It progresses and the early adopters set in. Here we get the believers, the fanatics, the cults that push the envelope a bit further, going against the institutions and the conventions. This, which is obvious, describes the early adopter stage of the decentralized storage today.

Like all technologies, it has to go mainstream to be profitable and to get there, its value to the masses must be well defined to be accepted. This is the market segment that decentralized storage must move to, to the early majority stage. But there is a gap, rightly pointed out and well defined by Geoffrey Moore. The “Chasm“. [ Note: To read about why the chasm, read this article ].

So how will decentralized storage cross the chasm to the majority of the market?

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A conceptual distributed enterprise HCI with open source software

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Cloud computing has changed everything, at least at the infrastructure level. Kubernetes is changing everything as well, at the application level. Enterprises are attracted by tenets of cloud computing and thus, cloud adoption has escalated. But it does not have to be a zero-sum game. Hybrid computing can give enterprises a balanced choice, and they can take advantage of the best of both worlds.

Open Source has changed everything too because organizations now has a choice to balance their costs and expenditures with top enterprise-grade software. The challenge is what can organizations do to put these pieces together using open source software? Integration of open source infrastructure software and applications can be complex and costly.

The next version of HCI

Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) also changed the game. Integration of compute, network and storage became easier, more seamless and less costly when HCI entered the market. Wrapped with a single control plane, the HCI management component can orchestrate VM (virtual machine) resources without much friction. That was HCI 1.0.

But HCI 1.0 was challenged, because several key components of its architecture were based on DAS (direct attached) storage. Scaling storage from a capacity point of view was limited by storage components attached to the HCI architecture. Some storage vendors decided to be creative and created dHCI (disaggregated HCI). If you break down the components one by one, in my opinion, dHCI is just a SAN (storage area network) to HCI. Maybe this should be HCI 1.5.

A new version of an HCI architecture is swimming in as Angelfish

Kubernetes came into the HCI picture in recent years. Without the weights and dependencies of VMs and DAS at the HCI server layer, lightweight containers orchestrated, mostly by, Kubernetes, made distribution of compute easier. From on-premises to cloud and in between, compute resources can easily spun up or down anywhere.

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How well do you know your data and the storage platform that processes the data

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Last week was consumed by many conversations on this topic. I was quite jaded, really. Unfortunately many still take a very simplistic view of all the storage technology, or should I say over-marketing of the storage technology. So much so that the end users make incredible assumptions of the benefits of a storage array or software defined storage platform or even cloud storage. And too often caveats of turning on a feature and tuning a configuration to the max are discarded or neglected. Regards for good storage and data management best practices? What’s that?

I share some of my thoughts handling conversations like these and try to set the right expectations rather than overhype a feature or a function in the data storage services.

Complex data networks and the storage services that serve it

I/O Characteristics

Applications and workloads (A&W) read and write from the data storage services platforms. These could be local DAS (direct access storage), network storage arrays in SAN and NAS, and now objects, or from cloud storage services. Regardless of structured or unstructured data, different A&Ws have different behavioural I/O patterns in accessing data from storage. Therefore storage has to be configured at best to match these patterns, so that it can perform optimally for these A&Ws. Without going into deep details, here are a few to think about:

  • Random and Sequential patterns
  • Block sizes of these A&Ws ranging from typically 4K to 1024K.
  • Causal effects of synchronous and asynchronous I/Os to and from the storage

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At the mercy of the cloud deity

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) went down in the middle of last week. News of the outage were mentioned:

AWS Management Console unavailable error

Piling the misery

The AWS outage headlines attract the naysayers, the fickle armchair pundits, and the opportunists. Here are a few news articles that bring these folks to chastise the cloud giant.

Of course, I am one of these critics. I don’t deny that I am not. But I read this situation from a multicloud hyperbole of which I am not a fan. Too much multicloud whitewashing by vendors trying to pitch multicloud as a disaster recovery solution without understanding that this is easier said than done.

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OpenZFS with Object Storage

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At AWS re:Invent last week, Amazon Web Services announced Amazon FSx for OpenZFS. This is the 4th managed service under the Amazon FSx umbrella, joining NetApp® ONTAP™, Lustre and Windows File Server. The highly scalable OpenZFS filesystem can provide high throughput and IOPS bandwidth to Amazon EC2, ECS, EKS and VMware® Cloud on AWS.

I am assuming the AWS OpenZFS uses EBS as the block storage backend, given the announcement that it can deliver 4GB/sec of throughput and 160,000 IOPS from the “drives” without caching. How the OpenZFS is provisioned to the AWS clients is well documented in this blog here. It is an absolutely joy (for me) to see the open source OpenZFS filesystem getting the validation and recognization from AWS. This is one hell of a filesystem.

But this blog isn’t about AWS FSx for OpenZFS with block storage. It is about what is coming, and eventually AWS FSx for OpenZFS could expand into AWS’s proficient S3 storage as well.  Can OpenZFS integrate with an S3 object storage backend? This blog looks into the burning question.

In the recently concluded OpenZFS Developer Summit 2021, one of the topics was “ZFS on Object Storage“, and the short answer is a resounding YES!

OpenZFS Developer Summit 2021

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The burgeoning world of NVMe

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When I wrote this article “Let’s smoke this storage peace pipe” 5 years ago, I quoted:

“NVMe® and NVM®eF‰, as it evolves, can become the Great Peacemaker and bringing both divides and uniting them into a single storage fabric.“

I envisioned NVMe® and NVMe®oF™ setting the equilibrium at the storage architecture level, finishing the great storage fabric into one. This balance in the storage ecosystem at the storage interface specifications and language-protocol level has rapidly unifying storage today, and we are already seeing the end-to-end NVMe paths directly from the PCIe bus of one host to another, via networks over Ethernet (with RoCE, iWARP, and TCP flavours) and Fibre Channel™. Technically we can have an end point device, example a tablet, talking the same NVMe language to its embedded storage as well as a cloud NVMe storage in an exascale storage far, far away. In the past, there were just too many bridges, links, viaducts, aqueducts, bypasses, tunnels, flyovers to cross just to deliver a storage command, or a data in a formats, encased and encoded (and decoded) in so many different ways.

Colours in equilibrium, like the rainbow

Simple basics of NVMe®

SATA (Serial Attached ATA) and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) are not optimized for solid state devices. besides legacy stuff like AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) in SATA, and archaic SCSI-3 primitives in SAS, NVM® has so much to offer. It can achieve very high bandwidth and support 65,535 I/O queues, each with a queue depth of 65,535. The queue depth alone is a massive jump compared to SAS which has a queue depth limit of 256.

A big part of this is how NVMe® handles I/O processing. It has a submission queue (SQ) and a completion queue (CQ), and together they are know as a Queue Pair (QP). The NVMe® controller handles tens of thousands at I/Os (reads and writes) simultaneously, alerted to switch between each SQ and CQ very quickly using the MSI or MSI-X interrupt. Think of MSI and MSI-X as a service bell, a hardware register that informs the NVM® controller when there are requests in the SQ, and informs the hosts that there are completed requests in the CQ. There will be plenty of “dings” by the MSI-X service register but the NVMe® controller can perform it very well, with some smart interrupt coalescing.

NVMe I/O processing

NVMe® 1.1, as I recalled, used to be have 3 admin commands and 10 base commands, which made it very lightweight compared to SCSI-3. However, newer commands were added to NVMe® 2.0 specifications included command sets fo key-value operations and zoned named space.

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Storage Elephant Compute Birds

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Data movement is expensive. Not just costs, but also latency and resources as well. Thus there were many narratives to move compute closer to where the data is stored because moving compute is definitely more economical than moving data. I borrowed the analogy of the 2 animals from some old NetApp® slides which depicted storage as the elephant, and compute as birds. It was the perfect analogy, because the storage is heavy and compute is light.

“Close up of a white Great Egret perching on top of an African Elephant aa Amboseli national park, Kenya”

Before the animals representation came about I used to use the term “Data locality, Data Mobility“, because of past work on storage technology in the Oil & Gas subsurface data management pipeline.

Take stock of your data movement

I had recent conversations with an end user who has been paying a lot of dollars keeping their “backup” and “archive” in AWS Glacier. The S3 storage is cheap enough to hold several petabytes of data for years, because the IT folks said that the data in AWS Glacier are for “backup” and “archive”. I put both words in quotes because they were termed as “backup” and “archive” because of their enterprise practice. However, the face of their business is changing. They are in manufacturing, oil and gas downstream, and the definitions of “backup” and “archive” data has changed.

For one, there is a strong demand for reusing the past data for various reasons and these datasets have to be recalled from their cloud storage. Secondly, their data movement activities still mimicked what they did in the past during their enterprise storage days. It was a classic lift-and-shift when they moved to the cloud, and not taking stock of  their data movements and the operations they ran on these datasets. Still ongoing, their monthly AWS cost a bomb.

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Sassy Cato

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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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Control your Files. Control your Sovereignty.

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Data residency, data sovereignty, data localization – the trio of data compliance and governance – have been on my mind a lot lately. I am seeing a disturbing trend. “Splinternet” has taken a hurried and hastened pace. We are now seeing many countries drawing up digital boundaries in the name of data privacy and data protection with sovereign laws and regulations. Besides, these digital demarcation along the lines with data definitions, digital “colonization” is a strong undercurrent as developing countries are accepting larger and more powerful foreign powers into their playpen.

Public cloud services transcend national borders. The breakneck speed in the adoption of public cloud services is causing anxieties and concerns with conservative governments everywhere. On the flip side of the coin, commerce has certainly flourished and bloomed as global wide collaborations bring new opportunities, new markets – all for capitalism and growth.

[ Note: While we are on this debacle, the voices of decentralization are getting louder as well, but that is a topic for another day ]

Where are your data files now?

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Right time for Andrew. The Filesystem that is.

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I couldn’t hold my excitement when I discovered Auristor® early last week. I stumbled upon this Computerweekly article “Want to side step Public Cloud? Auristor® offers global file storage.” Given the many news not exactly praising the public cloud storage vendors nowadays, the article’s title caught my attention. Immediately Andrew File System (AFS) was there. I was perplexed at first because I have never seen or heard a commercial version of AFS before. This news gave me goosebumps.

For the curious, I am sure many will ask who is this Andrew anyway? What is my relationship with this Andrew?

One time with Andrew

A bit of my history. I recalled quite vividly helping Intel in Penang, Malaysia to implement their globally distributed file caching mechanism with the NetApp® filer’s NFS. It was probably 2001 and I believed Intel wanted to share their engineering computing (EC) files between their US facilities and Intel Penang Design Center (PDC). As I worked along with the Intel folks, I found out that this distributed file caching technology was called Andrew File System (AFS).

Although I couldn’t really recalled how the project went, I remembered it being a bed of bugs at that time. But being the storage geek that I am, I obviously took some time to get to know Andrew the File System. 20 years have gone by, and I never really thought of AFS coming out as a commercial solution or even knew of it as one, until Auristor®,

Auristor Logo

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