Category Archives: Infiniband

Microsoft desires Mellanox

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My lazy Thursday morning was spurred by a posting by Stephen Foskett, Chief Organizer of Tech Field Days. “Microsoft mulls the acquisition of Mellanox”

The AWS factor

A quick reaction leans towards a strange one. Microsoft of all people, buying a chip company? Does it make sense? However, leaning deeper, it starts to make some sense. And I believe the desire is spurred by Amazon Web Services announcement of their Graviton processor at AWS re:Invent last month.

AWS acquired Annapurna Labs in early 2015. From the sources, Annapurna was working on low powered, high performance networking chips for the mid-range market. The key words – lower powered, high performance, mid-range – are certainly the musical notes to the AWS opus. And that would mean the ability for AWS to control their destiny, even at the edge. Continue reading →

From the past to the future

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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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Sexy HPC storage is all the rage

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HPC is sexy

There is no denying it. HPC is sexy. HPC Storage is just as sexy.

Looking at the latest buzz from Super Computing Conference 2018 which happened in Dallas 2 weeks ago, the number of storage related vendors participating was staggering. Panasas, Weka.io, Excelero, BeeGFS, are the ones that I know because I got friends posting their highlights. Then there are the perennial vendors like IBM, Dell, HPE, NetApp, Huawei, Supermicro, and so many more. A quick check on the SC18 website showed that there were 391 exhibitors on the floor.

And this is driven by the unrelentless demand for higher and higher performance of computing, and along with it, the demands for faster and faster storage performance. Commercialization of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep Learning (DL) and newer applications and workloads together with the traditional HPC workloads are driving these ever increasing requirements. However, most enterprise storage platforms were not designed to meet the demands of these new generation of applications and workloads, as many have been led to believe. Why so?

I had a couple of conversations with a few well known vendors around the topic of HPC Storage. And several responses thrown back were to put Flash and NVMe to solve the high demands of HPC storage performance. In my mind, these responses were too trivial, too irresponsible. So I wanted to write this blog to share my views on HPC storage, and not just about its performance.

The HPC lines are blurring

I picked up this video (below) a few days ago. It was insideHPC Rich Brueckner interview with Dr. Goh Eng Lim, HPE CTO and renowned HPC expert about the convergence of both traditional and commercial HPC applications and workloads.

I liked the conversation in the video because it addressed the 2 different approaches. And I welcomed Dr. Goh’s invitation to the Commercial HPC community to work with the Traditional HPC vendors to help push the envelope towards Exascale SuperComputing.

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The Network is Still the Computer

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[Preamble: I have been invited by  GestaltIT as a delegate to their TechFieldDay from Oct 17-19, 2018 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation are covered by GestaltIT, 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]

Sun Microsystems coined the phrase “The Network is the Computer“. It became one of the most powerful ideologies in the computing world, but over the years, many technology companies have tried to emulate and practise the mantra, but fell short.

I have never heard of Drivescale. It wasn’t in my radar until the legendary NFS guru, Brian Pawlowski joined them in April this year. Beepy, as he is known, was CTO of NetApp and later at Pure Storage, and held many technology leadership roles, including leading the development of NFSv3 and v4.

Prior to Tech Field Day 17, I was given some “homework”. Stephen Foskett, Chief Cat Herder (as he is known) of Tech Field Days and Storage Field Days, highly recommended Drivescale and asked the delegates to pick up some notes on their technology. Going through a couple of the videos, Drivescale’s message and philosophy resonated well with me. Perhaps it was their Sun Microsystems DNA? Many of the Drivescale team members were from Sun, and I was previously from Sun as well. I was drinking Sun’s Kool Aid by the bucket loads even before I graduated in 1991, and so what Drivescale preached made a lot of sense to me.Drivescale is all about Scale-Out Architecture at the webscale level, to address the massive scale of data processing. To understand deeper, we must think about “Data Locality” and “Data Mobility“. I frequently use these 2 “points of discussion” in my consulting practice in architecting and designing data center infrastructure. The gist of data locality is simple – the closer the data is to the processing, the cheaper/lightweight/efficient it gets. Moving data – the data mobility part – is expensive.

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The Malaysian Openstack storage conundrum

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The Openstack blippings on my radar have ratcheted up this year. I have been asked to put together the IaaS design several times, either with the flavours of RedHat or Ubuntu, and it’s a good thing to see the Openstack interest level going up in the Malaysian IT scene. Coming into its 8th year, Openstack has become a mature platform but in the storage projects of Openstack, my observations tell me that these storage-related projects are not as well known as we speak.

I was one of the speakers at the Openstack Malaysia 8th Summit over a month ago. I started my talk with question – “Can anyone name the 4 Openstack storage projects?“. The response from the floor was “Swift, Cinder, Ceph and … (nobody knew the 4th one)” It took me by surprise when the floor almost univocally agreed that Ceph is one of the Openstack projects but we know that Ceph isn’t one. Ceph? An Openstack storage project?

Besides Swift, Cinder, there is Glance (depending on how you look at it) and the least known .. Manila.

I have also been following on many Openstack Malaysia discussions and discussion groups for a while. That Ceph response showed the lack of awareness and knowledge of the Openstack storage projects among the Malaysian IT crowd, and it was a difficult issue to tackle. The storage conundrum continues to perplex me because many whom I have spoken to seemed to avoid talking about storage and viewing it like a dark art or some voodoo thingy.

I view storage as the cornerstone of the 3 infrastructure pillars  – compute, network and storage – of Openstack or any software-defined infrastructure stack for that matter. So it is important to get an understanding the Openstack storage projects, especially Cinder.

Cinder is the abstraction layer that gives management and control to block storage beneath it. In a nutshell, it allows Openstack VMs and applications consume block storage in a consistent and secure way, regardless of the storage infrastructure or technology beneath it. This is achieved through the cinder-volume service which is a driver most storage vendors integrate with (as shown in the diagram below).

Diagram in slides is from Mirantis found at https://www.slideshare.net/mirantis/openstack-architecture-43160012

Diagram in slides is from Mirantis found at https://www.slideshare.net/mirantis/openstack-architecture-43160012

Cinder-volume together with cinder-api, and cinder-scheduler, form the Block Storage Services for Openstack. There is another service, cinder-backup which integrates with Openstack Swift but in my last check, this service is not as popular as cinder-volume, which is widely supported by many storage vendors with both Fibre Channel and iSCSi implementations, and in a few vendors, with NFS and SMB as well. Continue reading →

The leapfrog game in Asia with HPC

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Brunei, a country rich in oil and gas, is facing a crisis. Their oil & gas reserves are rapidly running dry and expected to be depleted within 2 decades. Their deep dependency on oil and gas, once the boon of their economy, is now the bane of their future.

Since 2000, I have been in and out of Brunei and got involved in several engagements there. It is a wonderful and peaceful country with friendly people, always welcoming visitors with open hearts. The country has prospered for decades, with its vast oil riches but in the past few years, the oil prices have been curbed. The profits of oil and gas no longer justify the costs of exploration and production.

2 years ago, I started pitching a new economy generator for the IT partners in Brunei. One that I believe will give a country like Brunei the ability to leapfrog their neighbours in South East Asia, which is to start build a High Performance Computing (HPC)-as-a-Service (HPC-as-a-Service) type of business.

Why HPC? Why do I think HPC will give a developing country like Brunei super powers in the digital economy?

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Storage dinosaurs evolving too

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[Preamble: I am a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I have been called a dinosaur. We storage networking professionals and storage technologists have been called dinosaurs. It wasn’t offensive or anything like that and I knew it was coming because the writing was on the wall, … or is it?

The cloud and the breakneck pace of all the technologies that came along have made us, the storage networking professionals, look like relics. The storage guys have been pigeonholed into a sunset segment of the IT industry. SAN and NAS, according to the non-practitioners, were no longer relevant. And cloud has clout (pun intended) us out of the park.

I don’t see us that way. I see that the Storage Dinosaurs are evolving as well, and our storage foundational knowledge and experience are more relevant that ever. And the greatest assets that we, the storage networking professionals, have is our deep understanding of data.

A little over a year ago, I changed the term Storage in my universe to Data Services Platform, and here was the blog I wrote. I blogged again just before the year 2018 began.

 

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The power of E8

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 14 from Nov 8-10, 2017. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

E8 Storage technology update at Storage Field Day 14 was impressive. Out of the several next generation NVMe storage technologies I have explored so far, E8 came out as the most complete. It was no surprise that they won the “Best of Show” in the Flash Memory Summits for the “Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology” in 2016 and “Most Innovative Flash Memory Enterprise Business Application” for 2017.

Who is E8 Storage?

They came out of stealth in August 2016 and have been making waves with very impressive stats. When E8 was announced, their numbers were more than 10 million IOPS, with 100µsecs for reads and 40µsecs for writes. And in the SFD14 demo, they reached and past the 10 million IOPS numbers.

The design philosophy of E8 Storage is different than the traditional dual controller scale-up storage architecture design or the multi-node scale-out cluster design. In fact, from a 30,000 feet view, it is quite similar to a “SAN-client” design advocated by Lustre, leveraging a very high throughput, low latency network.

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