Category Archives: Linux

Rethinking Storage OKRs for AI Data Infrastructure – Part 1

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[ Preamble: This analysis focuses on my own journey as I incorporate my past experiences into this new market segment called AI Data Infrastructure, and gaining new ones.

There are many elements of HPC (High Performance Computing) at play here. Even though things such as speeds and feeds, features and functions crowd many conversations, as many enterprise storage vendors like to do, these conversations, in my opinion, are secondary. There are more vital and important operational technology and technical elements that an organization has to consider prudently, vis-a-vis to ROIs (returns of investments). They involve asking the hard questions beyond the marketing hype and fluff. I call these elements of consideration Storage Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for AI Data Infrastructure.

I had to break this blog into 2 parts. It has become TL;DR-ish. This is Part 1 ]

I have just passed my 6-month anniversary with DDN. Coming into the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) market segment, with the strong focus on the distributed parallel filesystem of Lustre®, there was a high learning curve for me. I spend over 3 decades in Enterprise Storage, with some of the highest level of storage technologies there were in that market segment. And I have already developed my own approach to enterprise storage, based on the A.P.P.A.R.M.S.C.. That was already developed and honed from 25 years ago.

The rapid adoption of AI has created a technology paradigm shift. Artificial Intelligence (AI) came in and blurred many lines. It also has been evolving my thinking when it comes to storage for AI. There is also a paradigm shift in my thoughts, opinions and experiences as well.

AI has brought HPSS technologies like Lustre® in DDN EXAscaler platform , proven in the Supercomputing world, to a new realm – the AI Data Infrastructure market segment. On the other side, many enterprise storage vendors aspire to be a supplier to the AI Data Infrastructure opportunities as well. This convergence from the top storage performers for Supercomputing, in the likes of DDN, IBM® (through Storage Scale), HPE® (through Cray, which by-the-way often uses the open-source Lustre® edition in its storage portfolio), from the software-defined storage players in Weka IO, Vast Data, MinIO, and from the enterprise storage array vendors such as NetApp®, Pure Storage®, and Dell®.

[ Note that I take care not to name every storage vendor for AI because many either do OEMs or repacking and rebranding of SDS technology into their gear such as HPE® GreenLake for Files and Hitachi® IQ. You can Google to find out who the original vendors are for each respectively. There are others as well. ]

In these 3 simplified categories (HPSS, SDS, Enterprise Storage Array), I have begun to see a pattern of each calling its technology as an “AI Data Infrastructure”. At the same time, I am also developing a new set of storage conversations for the AI Data Infrastructure market segment, one that is based on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) rather than just features, features and more features that many SDS and enterprise storage vendors like to tout. Here are a few thoughts that we should look for when end users are considering a high-speed storage solution for their AI journey.

AI Data Infrastructure

GPU is king

In the AI world, the GPU infrastructure is the deity at the altar. The utilization rate of the GPUs is kept at the highest to get the maximum compute infrastructure return-on-investment (ROI). Keeping the GPUs resolutely busy is a must. HPSS is very much part of that ecosystem.

These are a few OKRs I would consider the storage or data infrastructure for AI.

  • Reliability
  • Speed
  • Power Efficiency
  • Security

Let’s look at each one of them from the point of view of a storage practitioner like me.

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Deploying a MinIO SNMD Object Storage Server in TrueNAS SCALE

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[ Preamble ] This deployment of MinIO SNMD (single node multi drive) object storage server on TrueNAS® SCALE 24.04 (codename “Dragonfish”) is experimental. I am just deploying this in my home lab for the fun of it. Do not deploy in any production environment.

I have been contemplating this for quite a while. Which MinIO deployment mode on TrueNAS® SCALE should I work on? For one, there are 3 modes – Standalone, SNMD (Single Node Multi Drives) and MNMD (Multi Node Multi Drives). Of course, the ideal lab experiment is MNMD deployment, the MinIO cluster, and I am still experimenting this on my meagre lab resources.

In the end, I decided to implement SNMD since this is, most likely, deployed on top of a TrueNAS® SCALE storage appliance instead an x-86 bare-metal or in a Kubernetes cluster on Linux systems. Incidentally, the concept of MNMD on top of TrueNAS® SCALE is “Kubernetes cluster”-like albeit a different container platform. At the same time, if this is deployed in a TrueNAS® SCALE Enterprise, a dual-controller TrueNAS® storage appliance, it will take care of the “MinIO nodes” availability in its active-passive HA architecture of the appliance. Otherwise, it can be a full MinIO cluster spread and distributed across several TrueNAS storage appliances (minimum 4 nodes in a 2+2 erasure set) in an MNMD deployment scheme.

Ideally, the MNMD deployment should look like this:

MinIO distributed multi-node cluster architecture (credit: MinIO)

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Enhancing NAS client resiliency and performance with SMB Multichannel and NFS nconnect

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NAS (network attached storage) is obviously the file-level workhorse for shared resources in the network of any organization. SMB (server message block) for Windows environments and NFS (network file system) for Linux platforms are the 2 most prominent protocols that rule the NAS world. Of course we have SMB implementations in the form of Samba and others in non-Windows, Linux and NFS implementations in Windows as well.

As the versions of both network file sharing protocols iterated, present versions of SMB v3.x and NFS v4.x (NFS v3 on the supported Linux kernel version) on the client-side have evolved well. Both now have enhanced resiliency and performance improvement features. And there is an underlying similarity of both implementations. This blog looks at the client-side architectures of both.

One TCP connection

NAS is a client-server architecture. Over the network, NAS clients (SMB or NFS) access their corresponding NAS server(s) – SMB or NFS server(s) – through the TCP/IP network.

NAS client-server architecture (Credit: https://hypertecsp.com/en-CA/knowledge-base/nas-vs-san/)

One very important key starting point to note is the use of one TCP connection per NAS client to the NAS server relationship. For both SMB and NFS, there is just one TCP link between client and the server even if there are several SMB mapped shares or NFS mount points respectively on the clients.

For a long time, this one TCP connection is sufficient for the NAS traffic. But as the network file accesses grow, this connection becomes both a single point of failure as well as a performance bottleneck.

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Proxmox storage with TrueNAS iSCSI volumes

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A few weeks ago, I decided to wipe clean my entire lab setup running Proxmox 6.2. I wanted to connect the latest version of Proxmox VE 8.0-2 using iSCSI LUNs from the TrueNAS® system I have with me. I thought it would be fun to have the configuration steps and the process documented. This is my journal on how to provision a TrueNAS® CORE iSCSI LUN to Proxmox storage. This iSCSI volume in Proxmox is where the VMs will be installed into.

Here is a simplified network diagram of my setup but it will be expanded to a Proxmox cluster in the future with the shared storage.

Proxmox and TrueNAS network setup

Preparing the iSCSI LUN provisioning

The iSCSI LUN (logical unit number) is provisioned as a logical disk volume to the Proxmox node, where the initiator-target relationship and connection are established.

This part assumes that a zvol has been created from the zpool. At the same time, the IQN (iSCSI Qualified Name) should be known to the TrueNAS® storage as it establishes the connection between Proxmox (iSCSI initiator) and TrueNAS (iSCSI target).

The IQN for Proxmox can be found by viewing the content of the /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi within the Proxmox shell as shown in the screenshot below.

Where to find the Proxmox iSCSI IQN

The green box shows the IQN number of the Proxmox node that starts with iqn.year-month.com.domain:generated-hostname. This will be used during the iSCSI target portal configuration in the TrueNAS® webGUI.

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OpenZFS dRAID has risen!

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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

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Open Source Storage and Data Responsibility

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There was a Super Blue Moon a few days ago. It was a rare sky show. Friends of mine who are photo and moon gazing enthusiasts were showing off their digital captures online. One ignorant friend, who was probably a bit envious of the other people’s attention, quipped that his Oppo Reno 10 Pro Plus can take better pictures. Oppo Reno 10 Pro Plus claims 3x optical zoom and 120x digital zoom. Yes, 120 times!

Yesterday, a WIRED article came out titled “How Much Detail of the Moon Can Your Smartphone Really Capture?” It was a very technical article. I thought the author did an excellent job explaining the physics behind his notes. But I also found the article funny, flippant even, when I juxtaposed this WIRED article to what my envious friend was saying the other day about his phone’s camera.

Super Blue Moon 2023

Open Source storage expectations and outcomes

I work for iXsystems™. Open Source has been its DNA for over 30 years. Similarly, I have also worked on Open Source (decades before it was called open source) in my home labs ever since I entered the industry. I had SoftLanding Linux System 3.5″ diskette (Linux kernel 0.99), and I bought a boxed set of FreeBSD OS from Walnut Creek (photo below). My motivation was to learn as much as possible about information technology world because I was making my first steps into building my career (I was also quietly trying to prove my father wrong) in the IT industry.

FreeBSD Boxed Set (circa 1993)

 

Open source has democratized technology. It has placed the power of very innovative technology into the hands of the common people With Open Source, I see the IT landscape changing as well, especially for home labers like myself in the early years. Social media platforms, FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), etc, etc, have amplified that power (to the people). But with that great power, comes great responsibility. And some users with little technology background start to have hallucinated expectations and outcomes. Just like my friend with the “powerful” Oppo phone.

Likewise, in my world, I have plenty of anecdotes of these types of open source storage users having wild expectations, but little skills to exact the reality.

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Open Source on my mind

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Last week was cropped with topics around Open Source software. I want to voice my opinions here (with a bit of ranting) and hoping not to rouse many abhorrent comments from different parties and views. This blog is to create conversations, even controversial ones, but we must first agree that there will be disagreements. We must accept disagreements as part of this conversation.

In my 30 years career, Open Source has been a big part of my development and progress. The ideas of freely using (certain) software without any licensing implications and these software being openly available were not always welcomed, as they are now. I think the Open Source revolution has created an innovation movement that is still going strong, and it has not only permeated completely into the IT industry, Open Source has also now in almost every part of the technology-based industries as well. The Open Source influence is massive.

Open Source word cloud

In the beginning

In the beginning, in my beginning in 1992, the availability of software and its source codes was a closed one. Coming from a VAX/VMS background (I was a system admin in my mathematics department’s mini computers), Unix liberated my thinking. The final 6 months in the university was systems programming in C, and it completely changed how I wanted my career to shape. The mantra of “Free as in Freedom” in General Public License GPL (which I got know of much later) boded well with my own tenets in life.

If closed source development models led to proprietary software and a centralized way to distributing software with license, I would count the Open Source development models as one of the earliest decentralized technology frameworks. Down with the capitalistic corporations (aka Evil Empires)!

It was certainly a wonderful and generous way to make the world that it is today. It is a better world now.

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Stating the case for a Storage Appliance approach

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I was in Indonesia last week to meet with iXsystems™‘ partner PT Maha Data Solusi. I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with many people there and one interesting and often-replayed question arose. Why aren’t iX doing software-defined-storage (SDS)? It was a very obvious and deliberate question.

After all, iX is already providing the free use of the open source TrueNAS® CORE software that runs on many x86 systems as an SDS solution and yet commercially, iX sell the TrueNAS® storage appliances.

This argument between a storage appliance model and a storage storage only model has been debated for more than a decade, and it does come into my conversations on and off. I finally want to address this here, with my own views and opinions. And I want to inform that I am open to both models, because as a storage consultant, both have their pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages. Up front I gravitate to the storage appliance model, and here’s why.

My story of the storage appliance begins …

Back in the 90s, most of my work was on Fibre Channel and NFS. iSCSI has not existed yet (iSCSI was ratified in 2003). It was almost exclusively on the Sun Microsystems® enterprise storage with Sun’s software resell of the Veritas® software suite that included the Sun Volume Manager (VxVM), Veritas® Filesystem (VxFS), Veritas® Replication (VxVR) and Veritas® Cluster Server (VCS). I didn’t do much Veritas® NetBackup (NBU) although I was trained at Veritas® in Boston in July 1997 (I remembered that 2 weeks’ trip fondly). It was just over 2 months after Veritas® acquired OpenVision. Backup Plus was the NetBackup.

Between 1998-1999, I spent a lot of time working Sun NFS servers. The prevalent networking speed at that time was 100Mbits/sec. And I remember having this argument with a Sun partner engineer by the name of Wong Teck Seng. Teck Seng was an inquisitive fella (still is) and he was raving about this purpose-built NFS server he knew about and he shared his experience with me. I detracted him, brushing aside his always-on tech orgasm, and did not find great things about a NAS storage appliance. Auspex™ was big then, and I knew of them.

I joined NetApp® as Malaysia’s employee #2. It was an odd few months working with a storage appliance but after a couple of months, I started to understand and appreciate the philosophy. The storage Appliance Model made sense to me, even through these days.

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

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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.

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Building Trust in the Storage Brand

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Trust is everything. When done right, the brand is trust.

One Wikibon article last month “Does Hardware (still) Matter?” touched on my sentiments and hit close to the heart. As the world becomes more and more data driven and cloud-centric, the prominence of IT infrastructure has diminished from the purview of the boardroom. The importance of IT infrastructure cannot be discounted but in this new age, storage infrastructure has become invisible.

In the seas of both on-premises and hybrid storage technology solutions, everyone is trying to stand out, trying to eke the minutest ounces of differentiation and advantage to gain the customer’s micro-attention. With all the drum beatings, the loyalty of the customer can switch in an instance unless we build trust.

I ponder a few storage industry variables that help build trust.

Open source Communities and tribes

During the hey-days of proprietary software and OSes, protectionism was key to guarding the differentiations and the advantages. Licenses were common, and some were paired with the hardware hostid to create that “power combination”. And who can forget those serial dongles license keys? Urgh!!

Since the open source movement (Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar publication) began, the IT world has begun to trust software and OSes more and more. Open Source communities grew and technology tribes were formed in all types of niches, including storage software. Trust grew because the population of the communities kept the vendors honest. Gone are the days of the Evil Empire. Even Microsoft® became a ‘cool kid’.

TRUST

One open source storage filesystem I worked extensively on is OpenZFS. From its beginnings after Open Solaris® (remember build 134), becoming part of the Illumos project and then later in FreeBSD® and Linux upstream. Trust in OpenZFS was developed over time because of the open source model. It has spawned many storage projects including FreeNAS™ which later became TrueNAS®.

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