Storage does not mean Capacity only

I was listening to several storage luminaries in the GestaltIT’s podcastNo one understands Storage anymore” a few of weeks ago. Around the minute of 11.09 in the podcast, Dr. J. Metz, SNIA® Chair, brought up this is powerful quote “Storage does not mean Capacity“. It struck me, not in a funny way. It is what it is, and it something I wanted to say to many who do not understand the storage solutions they are purchasing. It exemplifies what is wrong in the many organizations today in their understanding of investing in a storage infrastructure project.

This is my pet peeve. The first words uttered in most, if not all storage requirements in my line of work are, “I want this many Terabytes of storage“. There are no other details and context of what the other requirement factors are, such as availability, performance, future growth, etc. Or even the goals to achieve when purchasing a storage system and operating it. What is the improvement they are looking for? What are the problems to solve?

Where is the OKR?

It pains me to say this. For the folks who have in the IT industry for years, both end users and IT purveyors alike, most are absolutely clueless about OKR (Objectives and Key Results) for their storage infrastructure project. Many cannot frame the data challenges they are facing, and they have no idea where to go next. There is no alignment. There is no strategy. Even worse, there is no concept of how their storage infrastructure investments will improve their business and operations.

Just the other day, one company director from a renown IT integrator here in Malaysia came calling. He has been in the IT industry since 1989 (I checked his Linkedin profile), asking to for a 100TB storage quote. I asked a few questions about availability, performance, scalability; the usual questions a regular IT guy would ask. He has no idea, and instead of telling me he didn’t know, he gave me a runaround of this and that. Plenty of yada, yada nonsense.

In the end, I told him to buy a consumer grade storage appliance from Taiwan. I will just let him make a fool of himself in front of his customer since he didn’t want to take accountability of ensuring his customer get a proper enterprise storage solution in good faith. His customer is probably in the same mould as well.

Defensive Strategies as Data Foundations

A strong storage infrastructure foundation is vital for good Data Credibility. If you do the right things for your data, there is Data Value, and it will serve your business well. Both Data Credibility and Data Value create confidence. And Confidence equates Trust.

In order to create the defensive strategies let’s look at storage Availability, Protection, Accessibility, Management Security and Compliance. These are 6 of the 8 data points of the A.P.P.A.R.M.S.C. framework.

Offensive Strategies as Competitive Advantage

Once we have achieved stability of the storage infrastructure foundation, then we can turn over and drive towards storage Performance, Recovery, plus things like Scalability and Agility.

With a strong data infrastructure foundation, the organization can embark on the offensive, and begin their business transformation journey, knowing that their data is well run, protection, and performs.

Alignment with Data and Business Goals

Why are the defensive and offensive strategies requiring alignment to business goals?

The fact is simple. It is about improving the business and operations, and setting OKRs is key to measure the ROI (return of investment) of getting the storage systems and the solutions in place. It is about switching the cost-fearing (negative) mindset to a profit-conviction (positive) mindset.

For example, maybe the availability of the data to the business is poor. Maybe there is the need to have access to the data 24×7, because the business is going online. The simple measurable fact is we can move availability from 95% uptime to 99.99% uptime with an HA storage system.

Perhaps there are concerns about recoverability in the deluge of ransomware threats. Setting new RPO goals from 24 hours to 4 hours is a measurable objective to enhance data resiliency.

Or getting the storage systems to deliver higher performance from 350 IOPS to 5000 IOPS for the database.

What I am saying here is these data points are measurable, and they can serve as checkpoints for business and operational improvements. From a management perspective, these can be used as KPI (key performance index) to define continuous improvement of Data Confidence.

Furthermore, it is easy when a OKR dashboard is used to map the improvement markers when organizations use storage to move from point A to point B, where B equates to a new success milestone. The alignment sets the paths to the business targets.

Storage does not mean only Capacity

The sad part is what the OKRs and the measured goals alignments are glaringly missing in the minds of many organizations purchasing a storage infrastructure and data management solution. The people tasked to source a storage technology solution are not placing a set of goals and objectives. Capacity appears to be the only thing on their mind.

I am about to meet a procurement officer of a customer soon. She asked me this question “Why is your storage so expensive?” over email. I want to change her mindset, just like the many officers and C-levels who hold the purse strings.

Let’s frame the use storage infrastructure in the real world. Nobody buys a storage system just to keep data in there much like a puddle keeps stagnant water. Sooner or later the value of the data in the storage evaporates or the value becomes dull if the data is not used well in any ways, shape or form.

Storage systems and the interconnected pathways from on premises, to the next premises, to the edge and to the clouds serve the greater good for Data. Data is used, shared, shaped, improved, enhanced, protected, moved, and more to deliver Value to the Business.

Storage capacity is just one of the few factors to consider when investing in a storage infrastructure solution. In fact, capacity is probably the least important piece when considering a storage solution to achieve the company’s OKRs. If we think about it deeper, setting the foundation for Data in the defensive manner will help elevate value of the data to be promoted with the offensive strategies to gain the competitive advantage.

Storage infrastructure and storage solutions along with data management platforms may appear to be a cost to the annual budgets. If you know set the OKRs, define A to get to B, alignment the goals, storage infrastructure and the data management platforms and practices are investments that are worth their weight in gold. That is my guarantee.

On the flip side, ignoring and avoiding OKRs, and set the strategies without prudence will yield its comeuppance. Technical debts will prevail.

Rant over.

OpenZFS dRAID has risen!

We await the 3rd iteration of TrueNAS® SCALE 23.10 codenamed Cobia. 23.10 means October 2023, and we are within weeks of its announcement.

One of the best features I have been waiting for is dRAID or distributed RAID. I have written about it dRAID a couple of years back. It was announced in 2021, in OpenZFS 2.1, but we have not seen an commercial implementation of dRAID … until iXsystems™ TrueNAS® SCALE 23.10. Why am I so excited?

I have followed the technology since Isaac Huang presented dRAID at the OpenZFS Summit in 2015. Through the years ahead, I have seen Isaac presenting dRAID at the summits, and with each iteration, dRAID got closer and closer to be developed into OpenZFS. It was not until 2021, in OpenZFS 2.1 when dRAID became part of filesystem. And now, dRAID is finally in the TrueNAS® SCALE offering.

Knowing RAID resilvering

RAID rebuilding or reconstruction is a painful and potentially risky process. In OpenZFS and ZFS speak, this process is called resilvering. In simple laymen terms, when a drive (or drives) failed in a parity-based RAID volume (eg. RAID-Z1 or RAID-Z2 vdev), the data which was previously in the failed drive is recreated in the newly integrated spare drive. The structural integrity of the RAID volume (and the storage pool) is preserved but the data that was lost is painstakingly remade through the mathematical algorithm of the parity function of the RAID volume.

When hard disk drives were small in capacity like 2TB or less, the RAID resilvering process was probably faster to complete, returning the parity RAID volume to a normal, online state. But today, drives are 22TB and higher, leaving the traditional RAID resilvering process to take days and even weeks. This leads the RAID volume vulnerable to another possible drive failure, weakening the integrity of the RAID volume. Even worse, most of modern day storage arrays have many disk drives, into the thousands even. And yes, solid state drives would probably be faster in the resilvering, but the same mechanics pretty much apply in OpenZFS.

At the same time, the spare drives are assigned physically and designated to the OpenZFS storage pool, and are not part of the vdev until the resilvering process kicks in.

Yes, this is pretty much a physical process that takes time, computing resources and patience. Note the operative word of “physical” here.

dRAID resilvering

dRAID speeds up the RAID resilvering process several folds, returning the RAID volume (or vdev) much faster than traditional OpenZFS RAID resilvering process. It uses a logical (as opposed to physical) RAID layout concept and uses “logical spare drives”. Thus, there will be many spares “blocks” distributed across the entire dRAID zpool, as shown in the diagram below.

Traditional RAID vdev vs dRAID vdev

Continue reading

Object Storage becoming storage lingua franca of Edge-Core-Cloud

Data Fabric was a big buzzword going back several years. I wrote a piece talking about Data Fabric, mostly NetApp®’s,  almost 7 years ago, which I titled “The Transcendence of Data Fabric“. Regardless of storage brands and technology platforms, and each has its own version and interpretations, one thing holds true. There must be a one layer of Data Singularity. But this is easier said than done.

Fast forward to present. The latest buzzword is Edge-to-Core-Cloud or Cloud-to-Core-Edge. The proliferation of Cloud Computing services, has spawned beyond to multiclouds, superclouds and of course, to Edge Computing. Data is reaching to so many premises everywhere, and like water, data has found its way.

Edge-to-Core-to-Cloud (Gratitude thanks to https://www.techtalkthai.com/dell-technologies-opens-iot-solutions-division-and-introduces-distributed-core-architecture/)

The question on my mind is can we have a single storage platform to serve the Edge-to-Core-to-Cloud paradigm? Is there a storage technology which can be the seamless singularity of data? 7+ years onwards since my Data Fabric blog, The answer is obvious. Object Storage.

The ubiquitous object storage and the S3 access protocol

For a storage technology that was initially labeled “cheap and deep”, object storage has become immensely popular with developers, cloud storage providers and is fast becoming storage repositories for data connectors. I wrote a piece called “All the Sources and Sinks going to Object Storage” over a month back, which aptly articulate how far this technology has come.

But unknown to many (Google NASD and little is found), object storage started its presence in SNIA (it was developed in Carnegie-Mellon University prior to that) in the early 90s, then known as NASD (network attached secure disk). As it is made its way into the ANSI T10 INCITS standards development, it became known as Object-based Storage Device or OSD.

The introduction of object storage services 16+ years ago by Amazon Web Services (AWS) via their Simple Storage Services (S3) further strengthened the march of object storage, solidified its status as a top tier storage platform. It was to AWS’ genius to put the REST API over HTTP/HTTPS with its game changing approach to use CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) operations to work with object storage. Hence the S3 protocol, which has become the de facto access protocol to object storage.

Yes, I wrote those 2 blogs 11 and 9 years ago respectively because I saw that object storage technology was a natural fit to the burgeoning new world of storage computing. It has since come true many times over.

Continue reading

As Disk Drive capacity gets larger (and larger), the resilient Filesystem matters

I just got home from the wonderful iXsystems™ Sales Summit in Knoxville, Tennessee. The key highlight was to christian the opening of iXsystems™ Maryville facility, the key operations center that will house iX engineering, support and part of marketing as well. News of this can be found here.

iX datacenter in the new Maryville facility

Western Digital® has always been a big advocate of iX, and at the Summit, they shared their hard disk drives HDD, solid state drives SSD, and other storage platforms roadmaps. I felt like a kid a candy store because I love all these excitements in the disk drive industry. Who says HDDs are going to be usurped by SSDs?

Several other disk drive manufacturers, including Western Digital®, have announced larger capacity drives. Here are some news of each vendor in recent months

Other than the AFR (annualized failure rates) numbers published by Backblaze every quarter, the Capacity factor has always been a measurement of high interest in the storage industry.

Continue reading

I built a 6-node Gluster cluster with TrueNAS SCALE

I haven’t had hands-on with Gluster for over a decade. My last blog about Gluster was in 2011, right after I did a proof-of-concept for the now defunct, Jaring, Malaysia’s first ISP (Internet Service Provider). But I followed Gluster’s development on and off, until I found out that Gluster was a feature in then upcoming TrueNAS® SCALE. That was almost 2 years ago, just before I accepted to offer to join iXsystems™, my present employer.

The eagerness to test drive Gluster (again) on TrueNAS® SCALE has always been there but I waited for SCALE to become GA. GA finally came on February 22, 2022. My plans for the test rig was laid out, and in the past few weeks, I have been diligently re-learning and putting up the scope to built a 6-node Gluster clustered storage with TrueNAS® SCALE VMs on Virtualbox®.

Gluster on OpenZFS with TrueNAS SCALE

Before we continue, I must warn that this is not pretty. I have limited computing resources in my homelab, but Gluster worked beautifully once I ironed out the inefficiencies. Secondly, this is not a performance test as well, for obvious reasons. So, this is the annals along with the trials and tribulations of my 6-node Gluster cluster test rig on TrueNAS® SCALE.

Continue reading

Time to Conflate Storage with Data Services

Around the year 2016, I started to put together a better structure to explain storage infrastructure. I started using the word Data Services Platform before what it is today. And I formed a pictorial scaffold to depict what I wanted to share. This was what I made at that time.

Data Services Platform (circa 2016)- Copyright Heoh Chin Fah

One of the reasons I am bringing this up again is many of the end users and resellers still look at storage from the perspective of capacity, performance and price. And as if two plus two equals five, many storage pre-sales and architects reciprocate with the same type of responses that led to the deteriorated views of the storage technology infrastructure industry as a whole. This situation irks me. A lot.

Continue reading

Exploring the venerable NFS Ganesha

As TrueNAS® SCALE approaches its General Availability date in less than 10 days time, one of the technology pieces I am extremely excited about in TrueNAS® SCALE is the NFS Ganesha server. It is still early days to see the full prowess of NFS Ganesha in TrueNAS® SCALE, but the potential of Ganesha’s capabilities in iXsystems™ new scale-out storage technology is very, very promising.

NFS Ganesha

I love Network File System (NFS). It was one of the main reasons I was so attracted to Sun Microsystems® SunOS in the first place. 6 months before I graduated, I took a Unix systems programming course in C in the university. The labs were on Sun 3/60 workstations. Coming from a background of a VAX/VMS system administrator in the school’s lab, Unix became a revelation for me. It completely (and blissfully) opened my eyes to open technology, and NFS was the main catalyst. Till this day, my devotion to Unix remained sacrosanct because of the NFS spark aeons ago.

I don’t know NFS Ganesha. I knew of its existence for almost a decade, but I have never used it. Most of the NFS daemons/servers I worked with were kernel NFS, and these included NFS services in Sun SunOS/Solaris, several Linux flavours – Red Hat®, SuSE®, Ubuntu, BSD variants in FreeBSD and MacOS, the older Unices of the 90s – HP-UX, Ultrix, AIX and Irix along with SCO Unix and Microsoft® XenixNetApp® ONTAP™, EMC® Isilon (very briefly), Hitachi® HNAS (née BlueArc) and of course, in these past 5-6 years FreeNAS®/TrueNAS™.

So, as TrueNAS® SCALE beckons, I took to this weekend to learn a bit about NFS Ganesha. Here are what I have learned.

Continue reading

Celebrating MinIO

Essentially MinIO is a web server …

I vaguely recalled Anand Babu Periasamy (AB as he is known), the CEO of MinIO saying that when I first met him in 2017. I was fresh “playing around” with MinIO and instantly I fell in love with software technology. Wait a minute. Object storage wasn’t supposed to be so easy. It was not supposed to be that simple to set up and use, but MinIO burst into my storage universe like the birth of the Infinity Stones. There was a eureka moment. And I was attending one of the Storage Field Days in the US shortly after my MinIO discovery in late 2017. What an opportunity!

I could not recall how I made the appointment to meeting MinIO, but I recalled myself taking an Uber to their cosy office on University Avenue in Palo Alto to meet. Through Andy Watson (one of the CTOs then), I was introduced to AB, Garima Kapoor, MinIO’s COO and his wife, Frank Wessels, Zamin (one of the business people who is no longer there) and Ugur Tigli (East Coast CTO) who was on the Polycom. I was awe struck.

Last week, MinIO scored a major Series B round funding of USD103 million. It was delayed by the pandemic because I recalled Garima telling me that the funding was happening in 2020. But I think the delay made it better, because the world now is even more ready for MinIO than ever before.

Continue reading

The future of Fibre Channel in the Cloud Era

The world has pretty much settled that hybrid cloud is the way to go for IT infrastructure services today. Straddled between the enterprise data center and the infrastructure-as-a-service in public cloud offerings, hybrid clouds define the storage ecosystems and architecture of choice.

A recent Blocks & Files article, “Broadcom server-storage connectivity sales down but recovery coming” caught my attention. One segment mentioned that the server-storage connectivity sales was down 9% leading me to think “Is this a blip or is it a signal that Fibre Channel, the venerable SAN (storage area network) protocol is on the wane?

Fibre Channel Sign

Thus, I am pondering the position of Fibre Channel SANs in the cloud era. Where does it stand now and in the near future? Continue reading