Category Archives: Data Corruption

Trusting your storage – It’s not about performance

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I have taken some downtime from my blog since late October. Part of my “hiatus” was my illness which had affected my right kidney but I am happy to announce that I am well again. During this period, I spent a lot of the time reading the loads of storage technologies announcements and their marketing calls and almost every single one of them touts Performance as if it is the single “sellable” feature of the respective storage vendor. None ever positions data integrity and the technology behind it in what I believe as the most important and most fundamental feature of any storage technology – Reading the right data exactly it was written into the storage array.

[ Note: Data integrity is even more critical in cloud storage and data corruption, especially the silent ones are even more acute in the clouds ]

Sure, this fundamental feature sounds like it is a given thing in any storage array but believe me, there are enterprise storage arrays which have failed to deliver this simple feature properly. I have end users coming to me through out my storage career that they have database corruption, or file corruption and unable to access their data in an acceptable manner. Data corruption is real folks!

Data corruption.

After several weeks of reading these stuff, I got jaded with so many storage vendors playing leapfrog announcements with their millions of IOPS boasts.

The 3 legged stool

Rewind to circa 2012, just about the time when EMC® acquired XtremIO™. XtremIO™ was a nascent All-Flash startup, and many, including yours truly, really saw the EMC® acquisition was about a high performant storage array. I was having an email conversation with Shahar Frank, one of the co-founders of XtremIO™, and expressing my views about their performance. What Shahar replied surprised me.

The fundamentals of the strength of a storage array was a like a 3-legged stool. 2 legs of the stool would be Performance, and Protection, but with 2 legs, the person sitting on the stool would fall. The 3rd leg would stabilize the balance of the stool, and this 3rd leg was Reliability. This stumped me because XtremIO™’s most sellable feature was Performance. But the wisdom of Shahar pointed to Reliability, the least exciting feature and the most dull of the 3. He was brilliant, of course and went on to found ElastiFile (acquired by Google™), but that’s another story for another day.

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Valuing the security value of NAS storage

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Garmin paid, reportedly millions. Do you sleep well at night knowing that the scourge of ransomware is rampant and ever threatening your business. Is your storage safe enough or have you invested in a storage which was the economical (also to be known as cheap) to your pocket?

Garmin was hacked by ransomware

I have highlighted this before. NAS (Network Attached Storage) has become the goldmine for ransomware. And in the mire of this COVID-19 pandemic, the lackadaisical attitude of securing the NAS storage remains. Too often than not, end users and customers, especially in the small medium enterprises segment, continue to search for the most economical NAS storage to use in their business.

Is price the only factor?

Why do customers and end users like to look at the price? Is an economical capital outlay of a cheap NAS storage with 3-year hardware and shallow technical support that significant to appease the pocket gods? Some end users might decided to rent cloud file storage, Hotel California style until they counted the 3-year “rental” price.

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Falconstor Software Defined Data Preservation for the Next Generation

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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.

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The Falcon to soar again

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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.

Today, that 20,000 over pieces live in perpetuity in 2 palaces – Beijing Palace Museum in China and National Palace Museum Taipei in Taiwan

Digital data 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.

[ Note: If you are interested to know more about Data -> Information -> Knowledge -> Wisdom, check out my 2015 article on LinkedIn ]

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.

The Falcon reemerges

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to speak with Falconstor® Software‘s David Morris (VP of Global Product Strategy & Marketing) and Mark Delsman (CTO). It was my first engagement with Falconstor® in almost 9 years! I wrote a piece of Falconstor® in my blog in 2011.

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btrfs butter gone bad?

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I wrote about btrfs 8 years ago.

Since then, it has made its way into several small to mid-end storage solutions (more NAS inclined solutions) including Rockstor, Synology, Terramaster, and Asustor. In the Linux world, SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server and OpenSUSE® use btrfs as the default OS file system. I have decided to revisit btrfs filesystem to give some thoughts about its future.

Have you looked under the hood?

The sad part is not many people look under the hood anymore, especially for the market the btrfs storage vendors are targeting. The small medium businesses just want a storage which is cheap. But cheap comes at a risk where the storage reliability and data integrity are often overlooked.

The technical conversation is secondary and thus the lack of queries for strong enterprise features may be leading btrfs to be complacent in its development.

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NAS is the next Ransomware goldmine

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I get an email like this almost every day:

It is from one of my FreeNAS customers daily security run logs, emailed to our support@katanalogic.com alias. It is attempting a brute force attack trying to crack the authentication barrier via the exposed SSH port.

Just days after the installation was completed months ago, a bot has been doing IP port scans on our system, and found the SSH port open. (We used it for remote support). It has been trying every since, and we have been observing the source IP addresses.

The new Ransomware attack vector

This is not surprising to me. Ransomware has become more sophisticated and more damaging than ever because the monetary returns from the ransomware are far more effective and lucrative than other cybersecurity threats so far. And the easiest preys are the weakest link in the People, Process and Technology chain. Phishing breaches through social engineering, emails are the most common attack vectors, but there are vhishing (via voicemail) and smshing (via SMS) out there too. Of course, we do not discount other attack vectors such as mal-advertising sites, or exploits and so on. Anything to deliver the ransomware payload.

The new attack vector via NAS (Network Attached Storage) and it is easy to understand why.

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ZFS Replication and Recovery with FreeNAS

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We get requests to recover data from a secondary platform all the time. RPO (recovery point objective) of 30 minutes can be challenging to small to medium sized companies, especially if there is an SLA (service level agreement) to meet.

This week, my team and I took some time to create a FreeNAS replication demo for a potential client. I thought I document the whole thing about ZFS replication, the key steps to set it up and show how recovery is done.

ZFS Snapshots

ZFS replication relies on periodic ZFS snapshots. ZFS snapshot is an inherent feature from the ZFS file system, and often used as a point-in-time copy of the existing ZFS file system tree in memory. Once a snapshot has been triggered, either manually or on schedule (periodic), the file system tree and its metadata in the memory are committed to disk to ensure an updated and consistent state of the file system at all times.

To start, a running snapshot policy on a schedule must be in place. This snapshot policy can be on a specific dataset or zvol, or even the entire zpool. Yeah, I am using quite a few ZFS terminology here – zpool, zvol, dataset. You can read more about each of the structures and more here.

Once the ZFS replication task has been setup, every snapshot occurred in the snapshot policy is automatically duplicated and copied to the target ZFS dataset. Usually, the target ZFS dataset is on a secondary FreeNAS storage server, serving as a disaster recovery platform. Sending and receiving data in the snapshots rely on SSH service.

This is the network diagram explaining the FreeNAS ZFS replication setup.

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Veaam to boost Cloud Data Management

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Cloud Data Management is a tricky word. Often vague, ambigious, how exactly would you define “Cloud Data Management“?

Fresh off the boat from Commvault GO 2019 in Denver, Colorado last week, I was invited to sample Veeam a few days ago at their Solution Day and soak into their rocketing sales in Asia Pacific, and strong market growth too. They reported their Q3 numbers this week, impressing many including yours truly.

I went to the seminar early in the morning, quite in awe of their vibrant partners and resellers activities and ecosystem compared to the tepid Commvault efforts in Malaysia over the past decade. Veeam’s presence in Malaysia is shorter than Commvault’s but they are able to garner a stronger following with partners and customers alike.

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Brainy Commvault

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[Disclosure: I was invited by Commvault as a Media person and Social Ambassador to their Commvault GO 2019 Conference and also a Tech Field Day eXtra delegate from Oct 13-17, 2019 in the Denver CO, USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Commvault, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

The waltz across the Commvault-Hedvig mine field will not be easy. Commvault will have a lot of open discussions about their acquisition of Hedvig and how Hedvig “primary storage platform” will fit into a “secondary storage framework” of Commvault. The outcome of this consummation is yet to appear as a structured form. The storyline will eventually form as Commvault’s diligence to define their strategy moving forward.

Day 1

Day 1 was my open day at Commvault GO. I was absorbing the first impressions of Commvault again even though this was my third Commvault GO, after Washington DC and Nashville in 2017 and 2018 respectively. There was certainly a “startup” feeling again in Commvault since the appointment of Sanjay Mirchandani as CEO 9 months ago.

A lot of excitement and buzz were generated around the metallic, the Commvault venture into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The SaaS solution is targeted at the mid-market for organizations with 500-2500 staff count. Its simplicity and pricing were the 2 things which gave me a good feeling all over. There is even a 45-day trial for metallic.

Getting Brainy

My Day 2 itinerary was more specific because my agenda for this trip was to seek answers to the realization of Commvault-Hedvig.

Commvault took the distinction of using the vision of a DataBrain (#databrain) to define their strategy. From the picture below, the left and right hemisphere of the DataBrain forms the Storage Management piece on the left and Data Management on the right.

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