Category Archives: Cloud

Enterprise Storage is not just a Label

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I have many anecdotes around the topic of Enterprise Storage, but the conversations in the past 2 weeks made it important for me to share this.

Enterprise Storage is …

Amusing, painful, angry

I get riled up whenever people do not want to be educated about Enterprise Storage. Here are a few that happened in the last 2 weeks.

[ Story #1 ]

A guy was building his own storage for cryptocurrency. He was informed by his supplier that the RAID card was enterprise, and he could get the best performance using “Enterprise” RAID-0.

  • Well, “Enterprise” RAID-0 volume crashed, and he lost all data. Painfully, he said he lost a hefty sum financially

[ Story #2 ]

A media company complained about the reliability of previous storage vendor. The GM was shopping around and was told that there are “Enterprise” SATA drives and the reliability is as good, if not better than SAS drives.

  • The company wanted a fully reliable Enterprise Storage system with 99.999% availability, and yet the SATA interface was not meant to build a more highly reliable enterprise storage. The GM insisted to use “Enterprise” SATA drives for his “enterprise” storage system instead of SAS.  

[ Story #3 ]

An IT admin of a manufacturing company claimed that they had an “Enterprise Storage” system for a few years, and could not figure out why his hard disk drives would die every 12-15 months.

  • He figured out that the drives supplied by his vendor were consumer SATA drives, even though he was told it was an “Enterprise Storage” system when he bought the system.

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First looks into Interplanetary File System

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The cryptocurrency craze has elevated another strong candidate in recent months. Filecoin, is leading the voice of a decentralized Internet, the next generation Web 3.0. In this blog, I am not going to write much about the Filecoin frenzy but the underlying distributed file system that powers this phenomenon – The Interplanetary File System.

[ Note: This is still a very new area for me, and the rest of the content of this blog is still nascent and developing ]

Interplanetary File System

Tremulous Client-Server web architecture

The entire Internet architecture is almost client and server. Your clients like browsers, apps, connect to Web services served from a collection of servers. As Web 3.0 approaches (some say it is already here), the client-server model is no longer perceived as the Internet architecture of choice. Billions, and billions of users, applications, devices relying solely on a centralized service would lead to many impactful consequences, and the reasons for decentralization, away from the client-server architecture models of the Internet are cogent.

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Setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS Part 1

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I have started to enhance the work that I did last weekend with Nextcloud on FreeNAS™. I promised to share the innards of my work but first I have to set the right expectations for the readers. This blog is just a documentation of the early work I have been doing to get Nextcloud on FreeNAS™ off the ground quickly. Also there are far better blogs than mine on the Nextcloud topic.

Note:

Nextcloud 17 (latest version is version 21)

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My 2-day weekend with Nextcloud on FreeNAS

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In recent weeks, I have been asked by friends and old cust0mers on how to extend their NAS shared drives to work-from-home, the new reality. Malaysia went into a full lockdown as of June 1st several days ago.

I have written about file synchronization stories before but I have never done a Nextcloud blog. I have little experience with TrueNAS® CORE Nextcloud plugin and this was a good weekend to build it up from scratch with Virtualbox with FreeNAS™ 11.2U5 (because my friend was using that version).

[ Note ] FreeNAS™ 11.2U5 has been EOLed.

Nextcloud login screen

So, here it how it went for my little experiment. FYI, this is not a How-to guide. That will come later after I have put all my notes together with screenshots and all. This is just a collection of my thoughts while setting up Nextcloud on FreeNAS™.

Dropbox® is expensive

Using cloud storage with file sync and share capability is not exactly a cheap thing especially when you are a small medium sized business or a school or a charity organization. Here is the pricing table for Dropbox® for Business :

Dropbox for business pricing

I am using Dropbox® as the example here but the same can be said for OneDrive or Google Drive and others. The pricing can quickly add up when the price is calculated per user per month.

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Memory cloud reality soon?

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The original SAN was not always Storage Area Network. SAN had a twin nomenclature called System Area Network (SAN) back in the late 90s. Fibre Channel fabric topology (THE Storage Area Network) was only starting to take off when many of the Fibre Channel topologies at the time were either FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop) or Point-to-Point. So, for a while SAN was System Area Network, or at least that was what Microsoft® wanted it to be. That SAN obviously did not take off.

System Area Network (architecture shown below) presented a high speed network where server clusters can communicate. The communication protocol of choice was VIA (Virtual Interface Adapter), and the proposed applications, notably the Microsoft® SQL Server, would use Winsock API to interface with the network services. Cache coherency in the combined memory resources of a clustered network is often the technology to ensure data synchronization, consistency and integrity.

Alas, System Area Network did not truly take off, and now it is pretty much deprecated from the Microsoft® universe.

System Area Network (SAN)

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Plotting the Crypto Coin Storage Farm

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The recent craze of the Chia cryptocurrency got me excited. Mostly because it uses storage as the determinant for the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm in a blockchain network. Yes, I am always about storage. 😉

I am not a Bitcoin miner nor am I a Chia coin farmer, and my knowledge and experience in both are very shallow. But I recently became interested in the 2 main activities of Chia – plotting and farming, because they both involved storage. I am writing this blog to find out more and document about my learning experience.

[ NB: This blog does not help you make money. It is just informational from a storage technology perspective. ]

Chia Cryptocurrency

Proof of Space and Time

Bitcoin is based on Proof-of-Work (PoW). In a nutshell, there is a complex mathematical puzzle to be solved. Bitcoin miners compete to solve this puzzle and the process uses high computational processing to solve it. Once solved, the miners are rewarded for their work.

Newer entrants like Filecoin and Chia coin (XCH) use an alternate method which is Proof-of-Space (PoS) to validate and verify the transactions. Instead of miners, Chia coin farmers have to prove to have a legitimate amount of disk and/or memory space to solve a mathematical puzzle, conceptually similar to the one in Bitcoin mining. In the beginning, this was great for folks who have unused disk space that can be “rented” out to store the crypto stuff (Note: I am not familiar with the terminology yet, and I did not want to use the word “crypto tokens” incorrectly). Storj was one of the early vendors that I remember in this space touting this method but I have not followed them for a while. Their business model might have changed.

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Blasphemous technical writing

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This is so, so, so wrong! I want to hold back but I can’t hold back no more!

This article from Petapixel appeared in my daily news feed last week. When I saw the title “Seagate performed best in Backblaze’s 2020 Hard Drive Failure Report“, I literally jumped. My immediate thoughts were “This can’t be right“.

Labelling Seagate as the best performer in a Backblaze report not only sounded oxymoronic. It was moronic. For those of us who have the industry experience, we know enough that this cannot be true with just a one fell swoop statement.

Petapixel misleading article title

Backblaze report

Backblaze has been releasing Hard Drive Stats and Report every quarter since 2013. For many of us practitioners, the report has been the de facto standard and indicator of hard disks reliability. Inadvertently, it defines the quality of the hard disk drives associated with the respective manufacturer’s brand and models.

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The other pandemic – Datanemic

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

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

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

Data Security Breach, Cyber Attack, Ransomware

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

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The hot cold times of HCI

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Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is a hot technology. It has been for the past decade since Nutanix™ took the first mover advantage from the Converged Infrastructure (CI) technology segment and made it pretty much its own … for a while.

Hyper Converged Infrastructure

But the HCI market (not the technology) is a strange one. It is hot. It is cold. The perennial leader, Nutanix™, has yet to eke out a profitable year. VMware® is strong in the market. Cisco™, which was hot with their HyperFlex solution in 2019, was also stopped short with a dismal decline in the IDC Worldwide HCI 2Q2020 tracker below:

IDC Worldwide Hyperconverged Infrastructure Tracker – 2Q2020

dHCI = Disaggregated or discombobulated? 

dHCI is known as disaggregated HCI. The disaggregation part is disaggregated hardware, especially on the storage part. Vendors like HPE® with Nimble Storage, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp® and a few more have touted the disaggregation of the performance and capacity, the separation of storage and compute as a value proposition but through close inspection, it is just another marketing ploy to attach a SAN storage to servers. It was marketing old wine in a new bottle. As rightly pointed out by my friend, Charles Chow of Commvault® quoted in his blog

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Multicloud is sprouting Storage Silos

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Grain Silos

We get an avalanche of multicloud selling from storage vendors. We get promises and benefits of multicloud but from whose point of view?

Multicloud is multiple premises

This is an overly simplistic example how I created 3 copies of the same spreadsheet yesterday. I have a quotation on Google Sheets. A fairly complicated one. Someone wanted it in Excel format, but the format and the formulas were all messed up when I tried to download it as XLSX. What I had to do was to download the Google Sheets as ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) format to my laptop, and then upload the LibreOffice file to my OneDrive account, and use Excel Online to open the ODS file and saved as XLSX. In one fell swoop, I have the same spreadsheet in Google Drive, my laptop and OneDrive. 3 copies in 3 different premises. 

As we look to the behaviour of data creation and data acquisition, data sharing and data movement, the central repository is the gold image, the most relevant copy of the data. However, for business reasons, data has to be moved to where the applications are. It could be in cloud A or cloud B or cloud C or it could be on-premises. The processed output from cloud A is stored in cloud A, and likewise, cloud B in cloud B and so on.

To get the most significant and relevant copy, data from all premises must be consolidated, thus it has to be moved to a centralized data storage repository. But intercloud data movement is bogged down by egress fees, latency, data migration challenges (like formats and encoding), security, data clearance policies and many other hoops and hurdles.

With all these questions and concerns in mind, the big question mark is “Is multicloud really practical?” From a storage guy like me who loves a great data management story, “It is not. Multicloud creates storage silos“.

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