Backup – Lest we forget

World Backup Day – March 31st

Last week was World Backup Day. It is on March 31st every year so that you don’t lose your data and become an April’s Fool the next day.

Amidst the growing awareness of the importance of backup, no thanks to the ever growing destructive nature of ransomware, it is important to look into other aspects of data protection – both a data backup/recovery and a data security –  point of view as well.

3-2-1 Rule, A-B-C and Air Gaps

I highlighted the basic 3-2-1 rule before. This must always be paired with a set of practised processes and policies to cultivate all stakeholders (aka the people) in the organization to understand the importance of protecting the data and ensuring data recoverability.

The A-B-C is to look at the production dataset and decide if the data should be stored in the Tier 1 storage. In most cases, the data becomes less active and these datasets may be good candidates to be archived. Once archived, the production dataset is smaller and data backup operations become lighter, faster and have positive causation as well.

Air gaps have returned to prominence since the heightened threats on data in recent years. The threats have pushed organizations to consider doing data offsite and offline with air gaps. Cost considerations and speed of recovery can be of concerns, and logical air gaps are also gaining style as an acceptable extra layer of data. protection.

Backup is not total Data Protection cyberdefence

If we view data protection more holistically and comprehensively, backup (and recovery) is not the total data protection solution. We must ignore the fancy rhetorics of the technology marketers that backup is the solution to ensure data protection because there is much more than that.

The well respected NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Cybersecurity Framework places Recovery (along with backup) as the last pillar of its framework.

NIST Cybersecurity Framework

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The prudence needed for storage technology companies

Blitzscaling has been on my mind a lot. Ever since I discovered that word a while back, it has returned time and time again to fill my thoughts. In the wake of COVID-19, and in the mire of this devastating pandemic, is blitzscaling still the right strategy for this generation of storage technology, hyperconverged, data management and cloud storage startups?

What the heck is Blitzscaling? 

For the uninformed, here’s a video of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked and a member of the Paypal mafia, explaining Blitzscaling.

Blitzscaling is about hyper growing, scaling ultra fast and rocketing to escape velocity, at the expense of things like management efficiency, financial prudence, profits and others. While this blog focuses on storage companies, blitzscaling is probably most recognizable in the massive expansion of Uber (and contraction) a few years ago. In the US, the ride hailing war is between Uber and Lyft, but over here in South East Asia, just a few years back, it was between Uber and Grab. In China it was Uber and Didi.

From the storage angle, 2 segments exemplified the blitzscaling culture between 2015 and 2020.

  • All Flash Startups
  • Hyper Converged Infrastructure Startups

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Falconstor Software Defined Data Preservation for the Next Generation

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

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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Did Cloud Kill LTFS?

I like LTFS (Linear Tape File System). I was hoping it would take off but it has not. And looking at its future, its significance is becoming less and less relevant. I look if Cloud has been a factor in the possible demise of LTFS in the next few years.

What is LTFS?

In a nutshell, Linear Tape File System makes LTO tapes look like a disk with a file system. It takes a tape and divides it into 2 partitions:

  • Index Partition (XML Index Schema with file names, metadata and attributes details)
  • Data Partition (where the data resides)

Diagram from https://www.snia.org/sites/default/orig/SDC2011/presentations/tuesday/DavidPease_LinearTape_File_System.pdf

It has a File System module which is implemented in supported OS of Unix/Linux, MacOS and Windows. And the mounted file system “tape partition” shows up as a drive or device.

Assassination attempts

There were many attempts to kill off tapes and so far, none has been successful.

Among the “tape-killer” technologies, I think the most prominent one is the VTL (Virtual Tape Library). There were many VTLs I encountered during my days in mid-2000s. NetApp had Alacritus and EMC had Clariion Disk Libraries. There were also IBM ProtecTIER, FalconStor VTL (which is still selling today) among others and Sepaton (read in reverse is “No Tapes’). Sepaton was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems several years back. Continue reading

From the past to the future

2019 beckons. The year 2018 is coming to a close and I look upon what I blogged in the past years to reflect what is the future.

The evolution of the Data Services Platform

Late 2017, I blogged about the Data Services Platform. Storage is no longer the storage infrastructure we know but has evolved to a platform where a plethora of data services are served. The changing face of storage is continually evolving as the IT industry changes. I take this opportunity to reflect what I wrote since I started blogging years ago, and look at the articles that are shaping up the landscape today and also some duds.

Some good ones …

One of the most memorable ones is about memory cloud. I wrote the article when Dell acquired a small company by the name of RNA Networks. I vividly recalled what was going through my mind when I wrote the blog. With the SAN, NAS and DAS, and even FAN (File Area Network) happening during that period, the first thing was the System Area Network, the original objective Infiniband and RDMA. I believed the final pool of where storage will be is the memory, hence I called it the “The Last Bastion – Memory“. RNA’s technology became part of Dell Fluid Architecture.

True enough, the present technology of Storage Class Memory and SNIA’s NVDIMM are along the memory cloud I espoused years ago.

What about Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)? It wasn’t a compelling enough technology for me when it came into the game. Reduced port and cable counts, and reduced power consumption were what the FCoE folks were pitching, but the cost of putting in the FC switches, the HBAs were just too great as an investment. In the end, we could see the cracks of the FCoE story, and I wrote the pre-mature eulogy of FCoE in my 2012 blog. I got some unsavoury comments writing that blog back then, but fast forward to the present, FCoE isn’t a force anymore.

Weeks ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) just became a hybrid cloud service provider/vendor with the Outposts announcement. It didn’t surprise me but it may have shook the traditional systems integrators. I took the stance 2 years ago when AWS partnered with VMware and juxtaposed it to the philosophical quote in the 1993 Jurassic Park movie – “Life will not be contained, … Life finds a way“.

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The Prophet has arrived

Early last week, I had a catch up with my friend. He was excited to share with me the new company he just joined. It was ProphetStor. It was a catchy name and after our conversation, I have decided to spend a bit of my weekend afternoon finding out more about the company and its technology.

From another friend at FalconStor, I knew of this company several months ago. Ex-FalconStor executives have ventured to found ProphetStor as the next generation of storage resource orchestration engine. And it has found a very interesting tack to differentiate from the many would-bes of so-called “software-defined storage” leaders. ProphetStor made their early appearance at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong back in November last year, positioning several key technologies including OpenStack Cinder, SNIA CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) and SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) to provide federation of storage resources discovery, provisioning and automation. 

The federation of storage resources and services solution is aptly called ProphetStor Federator. The diagram I picked up from the El Reg article presents the Federator working with different OpenStack initiatives quite nicely below:  There are 3 things that attracted me to the uniqueness of ProphetStor.

1. The underlying storage resources, be it files, objects, or blocks, can be presented and exposed as Cinder-style volumes.

2. The ability to define the different performance capabilities and SLAs (IOPS, throughput and latency) from the underlying storage resources and matching them to the right application requirements.

3. The use of SNIA of SMI-S and CDMI Needless to say that the Federator software will abstract the physical and logical structures of any storage brands or storage architectures, giving it a very strong validation of the “software-defined storage (SDS)” concept.

While the SDS definition is still being moulded in the marketplace (and I know that SNIA already has a draft SDS paper out), the ProphetStor SDS concept does indeed look similar to the route taken by EMC ViPR. The use of the control plane (ProphetStor Federator) and the data plane (underlying physical and logical storage resource) is obvious.

I wrote about ViPR many moons ago in my blog and I see ProphetStor as another hat in the SDS ring. I grabbed the screenshot (below) from the ProphetStor website which I thought did beautifully explained what ProphetStor is from 10,000 feet view.

ProphetStor How it works

The Cinder-style volume is a class move. It preserves the sanctity of many enterprise applications which still need block storage volumes but now it comes with a twist. These block storage volumes now will have different capability and performance profiles, tagged with the relevant classifications and SLAs.

And this is where SNIA SMI-S discovery component is critical because SMI-S mines these storage characteristics and presents them to the ProphetStor Federator for storage resource classification. For storage vendors that do not have SMI-S support, ProphetStor can customize the relevant interfaces to the proprietary API to discover the storage characteristics.

On the north-end, SNIA CDMI works with the ProphetStor Federator’s Offer & Provisioning functions to bundle wrap various storage resources for the cloud and other traditional storage network architectures.

I have asked my friend for more technology deep-dive materials (he has yet to reply me) of ProphetStor to ascertain what I have just wrote. (Simon, you have to respond to me!)

This is indeed very exciting times knowing ProphetStor as one of the early leaders in the SDS space. And I like to see ProphetStor go far with this.

Now let us pray … because the prophet has arrived.

Can VSA help NetApp?

Almost a year ago, I had an interview with VMware Malaysia for a Senior SE position. They wanted a pre-sales guy who knows Oil & Gas and a strong technology background. I had a strong storage background, and I was involved in Oil & Gas upstream since my NetApp and EMC days.

I thought I was their guy having being led to believe (mostly by my own self-belief) to be so. I didn’t get the job but I did not find out the reason why I lost the opportunity. But I remembered well that I brashly mentioned to the Australian interviewer over the phone that VMware could become the next “storage technology” company. At that time, VMware just launched their VMware 5.0 and along with it, their vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA). This was a turning point of the virtual storage appliance space.

My friend, whose company is a VMware partner, said that the list price for the vSphere VSA was USD5,000.00 a pop. The price wasn’t too bad to the small-medium-enterprise businesses in Malaysia, minus the hardware and storage capacity cost. But what intrigued me back then was this virtual storage appliance concept was disruptive.

VMware could potentially take large JBOD farms, each for the minimum of 3 physical ESXi nodes and build a shared storage using the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA). Who needs shared iSCSI or Fibre Channel LUNs anymore if VMware had its way?

But VMware still pretty much depended on their storage partners, especially its master, EMC and so I believe VMware held back pushing VSA for the reason of allowing its storage partner ecosystem to thrive. And for that reason, the vSphere Storage API such as VAAI and VASA were developed since vSphere 4 to enhance the deeper integration of these storage vendor’s technology into the VMware world.

But of course, long before the VMware’s VSA venture, HP LeftHand already had one on the cards. The LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance (also VSA) was already getting rave comments from their partners and customers, impressed with how they were able to showcase HP LeftHand storage solution and technology brilliantly. Eventually, HP recognized the prowess of the LeftHand VSA and started marketing it as HP StoreVirtual VSA. I don’t hear much about the HP LeftHand (since has been renamed as P4000) VSA nowadays, seeing the HP guys in Malaysia preferring to pitch the physical storage than the virtual storage software.

NetApp, back in Q1 of 2012, also decided to go down the path of virtual storage appliance, announcing the ONTAP-v to the world here. It was initially resold through the Fujitsu partnership, but the Q1 announcement expands the ONTAP-v to a larger set of server vendors as shown below. The key component is to have a qualified RAID controller in each of the server vendors.

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Primary Dedupe where are you?

I am a bit surprised that primary storage deduplication has not taken off in a big way, unlike the times when the buzz of deduplication first came into being about 4 years ago.

When the first deduplication solutions first came out, it was particularly aimed at the backup data space. It is now more popularly known as secondary data deduplication, the technology has reduced the inefficiencies of backup and helped sparked the frenzy of adulation of companies like Data Domain, Exagrid, Sepaton and Quantum a few years ago. The software vendors were not left out either. Symantec, Commvault, and everyone else in town had data deduplication for backup and archiving.

It was no surprise that EMC battled NetApp and finally won the rights to acquire Data Domain for USD$2.4 billion in 2009. Today, in my opinion, the landscape of secondary data deduplication has pretty much settled and matured. Practically everyone has some sort of secondary data deduplication technology or solution in place.

But then the talk of primary data deduplication hardly cause a ripple when compared a few years ago, especially here in Malaysia. Yeah, the IT crowd is pretty fickle that way because most tend to follow the trend of the moment. Last year was Cloud Computing and now the big buzz word is Big Data.

We are here to look at technologies to solve problems, folks, and primary data deduplication technology solutions should be considered in any IT planning. And it is our job as storage networking professionals to continue to advise customers about what is relevant to their business and addressing their pain points.

I get a bit cheesed off that companies like EMC, or HDS continue to spend their marketing dollars on hyping the trends of the moment rather than using some of their funds to promote good technologies such as primary data deduplication that solve real life problems. The same goes for most IT magazines, publications and other communications mediums, rarely giving space to technologies that solves problems on the ground, and just harping on hypes, fuzz and buzz. It gets a bit too ordinary (and mundane) when they are trying too hard to be extraordinary because everyone is basically talking about the same freaking thing at the same time, over and over again. (Hmmm … I think I am speaking off topic now .. I better shut up!)

We are facing an avalanche of data. The other day, the CEO of Nexenta used the word “data tsunami” but whatever terms used do not matter. There is too much data. Secondary data deduplication solved one part of the problem and now it’s time to talk about the other part, which is data in primary storage, hence primary data deduplication.

What is out there?  Who’s doing what in term of primary data deduplication?

NetApp has their A-SIS (now NetApp Dedupe) for years and they are good in my books. They talk to customers about the benefits of deduplication on their FAS filers. (Side note: I am seeing more benefits of using data compression in primary storage but I am not going to there in this entry). EMC has primary data deduplication in their Celerra years ago but they hardly talk much about it. It’s on their VNX as well but again, nobody in EMC ever speak about their primary deduplication feature.

I have always loved Ocarina Networks ECO technology and Dell don’t give much hoot about Ocarina since the acquisition in  2010. The technology surfaced a few months ago in Dell DX6000G Storage Compression Node for its Object Storage Platform, but then again, all Dell talks about is their Fluid Data Architecture from the Compellent division. Hey Dell, you guys are so one-dimensional! Ocarina is a wonderful gem in their jewel case, and yet all their storage guys talk about are Compellent  and EqualLogic.

Moving on … I ought to knock Oracle on the head too. ZFS has great data deduplication technology that is meant for primary data and a couple of years back, Greenbytes took that and made a solution out of it. I don’t follow what Greenbytes is doing nowadays but I do hope that the big wave of primary data deduplication will rise for companies such as Greenbytes to take off in a big way. No thanks to Oracle for ignoring another gem in ZFS and wasting their resources on pre-sales (in Malaysia) and partners (in Malaysia) that hardly know much about the immense power of ZFS.

But an unexpected source coming from Microsoft could help trigger greater interest in primary data deduplication. I have just read that the next version of Windows Server OS will have primary data deduplication integrated into NTFS. The feature will be available in Windows 8 and the architectural view is shown below:

The primary data deduplication in NTFS will be a feature add-on for Windows Server users. It is implemented as a filter driver on a per volume basis, with each volume a complete, self describing unit. It is cluster aware, and fully crash consistent on all operations.

The technology is Microsoft’s own technology, built from scratch and will be working to position Hyper-V as an strong enterprise choice in its battle for the server virtualization space with VMware. Mind you, VMware already has a big, big lead and this is just something that Microsoft must do-or-die to keep Hyper-V playing catch-up. Otherwise, the gap between Microsoft and VMware in the server virtualization space will be even greater.

I don’t have the full details of this but I read that the NTFS primary deduplication chunk sizes will be between 32KB to 128KB and it will be post-processing.

With Microsoft introducing their technology soon, I hope primary data deduplication will get some deserving accolades because I think most companies are really not doing justice to the great technologies that they have in their jewel cases. And I hope Microsoft, with all its marketing savviness and adeptness, will do some justice to a technology that solves real life’s data problems.

I bid you good luck – Primary Data Deduplication! You deserved better.

Falconstor – soaring to 7th heaven

I was invited to Falconstor version 7.0 launch to the media this morning at Sunway Resort Hotel.

I must admit that I am a fan of Falconstor from a business perspective because they have nifty solutions. Many big boys OEMed Falconstor’s VTL solutions such as EMC with its CDL (CLARiiON Disk Library) and Sun Microsystems virtual tape library solutions. Things have been changing. There are still OEM partnerships with HDS (with Falconstor VTL and FDS solutions), HP (with Falconstor NSS solution) and a few others, but Falconstor has been taking up a more aggressive stance with their new business model. They are definitely more direct with their approach and hence, it is high time we in the industry recognize Falconstor’s prowess.

The launch today is Falconstor version 7.0 suite of data recovery and storage enhancement solutions. Note that while the topic of their solutions were on data protection, I used data recovery, simply because the true objective of their solutions are on data recovery, doing what matters most to business – RECOVERY.

Falconstor version 7.0 family of products is divided into 3 pillars

  • Storage Virtualization – with Falconstor Network Storage Server (NSS)
  • Backup & Recovery – with Falconstor Continuous Data Protector (CDP)
  • Deduplication – with Falconstor Virtual Tape Library (VTL) and File-Interface Deduplication System (FDS)

NSS virtualizes heterogeneous storage platforms and sits in between the application servers, or virtualized servers. It simplifies disparate storage platforms by consolidating volumes and provides features such as thin provisioning and snapshots. In the new version, NSS now supports up to 1,000 snapshots per volume from the previous number of 255 snapshots. That is a 4x increase as the demand for data protection is greater than ever. This allows the protection granularity to be in the minutes, well meeting the RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) standard of the most demanding customers.

The NSS also replicates the snapshots to a secondary NSS platform at a DR to extend the company’s data resiliency and improves the business continuance factor for the organization.

In a revamp new algorithm in version 7.0, the Microscan technology used in the replication technology is now more potent and higher in performance. For the uninformed, Microscan, as quoted in the datasheet is:

MicroScan™, a patented FalconStor technology, minimizes the
amount of data transmitted by eliminating redundancies at the
application and file system layers. Rather than arbitrarily
transmitting entire blocks or pages (as is typical of other
replication solutions), MicroScan technology maps, identifies, and
transmits only unique disk drive sectors (512 bytes), reducing
network traffic by as much as 95%, in turn reducing remote
bandwidth requirements.

Another very strong feature of the NSS is the RecoverTrac, which is an automated DR technology. In business, business continuity and disaster recovery usually go hand-in-hand. Unfortunately, triggering either BC or DR or both is an expensive and resource-consuming exercise. But organizations have to prepare and therefore, a proper DR process must be tested and tested again.

I am a certified Business Continuity Planner, so I am fully aware of the beauty RecoverTrac brings to the organization. The ability to test non-intrusive, simulated DR, and find out the weak points of recovery is crucial and RecoverTrac brings that confidence of DR testing to the table. Furthermore, well-tested automated DR processes also eliminates human errors in DR recovery. And RecoverTrac also has the ability to track the logical relationships between different applications and computing resource, making this technology an invaluable tool in the DR coordinator’s arsenal.

The diagram below shows the NSS solution:

 

And NSS touts to be one true any storage platform to any storage platform over any protocol replication solution. Most vendors will have either FC or iSCSI or NAS protocols but I believe so far, only Falconstor offers all protocols in one solution.

Item #2 in the upgrade list is Falconstor’s CDP solution. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is a very interesting area in data protection. CDP provides almost near-zero RTO/RPO solution on disk, and yet not many people are aware of the power of CDP.

About 5-6 years ago, CDP was hot and there were many start-ups in this area. Companies such Kashya (bought by EMC to become RecoverPoint), Mendocino, Revivio (gobbled up by Symantec) and StoneFly have either gone belly up or gobbled up by bigger boys in the industry. Only a few remained, and Falconstor CDP is one of the true survivors in this area.

CDP should be given more credit because there are always demand for very granular data protection. In fact, I sincerely believe that both CDP, snapshots and snapshot replication are the real flagships of data protection today and the future because data protection using the traditional backup method, in a periodic and less frequent manner, is no longer adequate. And the fact that backup is generating more and more data to keep is truly not helping.

Falconstor CDP has the HyperTrac™ Backup Accelerator (HyperTrac) works in conjunction with FalconStor Continuous Data Protector (CDP) and FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) to increase tape backup speed, eliminate backup windows, and offload processing from application servers. A quick glimpse of HyperTrac technology is shown below:

 

In the Deduplication pillar, there were upgrades to both Falconstor VTL and Falconstor FDS. As I said earlier, CDP, snapshots and replication of the snapshot are already becoming the data protection of this new generation of storage solutions. Coupled with deduplication, data protection is made more significant because it makes smart noodles to keep one copy of the same old files, over and over again.

Falconstor File-Interface Deduplication Systems (FDS) addresses the requirement to storage more effectively, efficiently, economically. Its Single Instance Repository (SIR) technology has now been enhanced as a global deduplication repository, giving it the ability to truly store a single copy of the object. Previously, FDS was not able to recognize duplicated objects in a different controller. FDS also has improved its algorithms, driving performance up to 30TB/hour and is able to deliver a higher deduplication ratio.

 

In addition to the NAS interface, the FDS solution now has a tighter integration with the Symantec Open Storage Technology (OST) protocol.

The Falconstor VTL is widely OEM by many partners and remains one of the most popular VTL solutions in the market. VTL is also enhanced significantly in this upgrade and not surprisingly, the VTL solution from Falconstor is strengthened by its near-seamless integration with the other solutions in their stable. The VTL solution now supports up to 1 petabyte usable capacity.

 

Falconstor has always been very focused in the backup and data recovery space and has done well favourably with Gartner. In January of 2011, Gartner has release their Magic Quadrant report for Enterprise Disk-based Backup and Recovery, and Falconstor was positioned as one of the Visionaries in this space. Below is the magic quadrant:

 

As their business model changes to a more direct approach, it won’t be long before you seen Falconstor move into the Leader quadrant. They will be soaring, like a Falcon.