Category Archives: Linux

Ryussi MoSMB – High performance SMB

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I am back in the Silicon Valley as a Storage Field Day 12 delegate.

One of the early presenters was Ryussi, who was sharing a proprietary SMB server implementation of Linux and Unix systems. The first thing which comes to my mind was why not SAMBA? It’s free; It works; It has the 25 years maturity. But my experience with SAMBA, even in the present 4.x, does have its quirks and challenges, especially in the performance of large file transfers.

One of my customers uses our FreeNAS box. It’s a 50TB box for computer graphics artists and a rendering engine. After running the box for about 3 months, one case escalated to us was the SMB shares couldn’t be mapped all of a sudden. All the Windows clients were running version 10. Our investigation led us to look at the performance of SMB in the SAMBA 4 of FreeNAS.

This led to other questions such as the vfs_aio_pthread, FreeBSD/FreeNAS implementation of asynchronous I/O to overcome the performance weaknesses of the POSIX AsyncIO interface. The FreeNAS forum is flooded with sightings of missing SMB service that during large file transfer. Without getting too deep into the SMB performance issue, we decided to set the “Server Minimum Protocol” and “Server Maximum Protocol” to be SMB 2.1. The FreeNAS box at the customer has been stable now for the past 5 months.

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Can CDMI emancipate an interoperable medical records cloud ecosystem?

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PREFACE: This is just a thought, an idea. I am by no means an expert in this area. I have researched this to inspire a thought process of how we can bring together 2 disparate worlds of medical records and imaging with the emerging cloud services for healthcare.

Healthcare has been moving out of its archaic shell in the past few years, and digital healthcare technology and services are booming. And this movement is part of the digital transformation which could eventually lead to a secure and compliant distribution and collaboration of health data, medical imaging and electronic medical records (EMR).

It is a blessing that today’s medical imaging industry has been consolidated with the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) standard. DICOM dictates the how medical imaging information and pictures are used, stored, printed, transmitted and exchanged. It is also a communication protocol which runs over TCP/IP, and links up different service class providers (SCPs) and service class users (SCUs), and the backend systems such as PACS (Picture Archiving & Communications Systems) and RIS (Radiology Information Systems).

Another well accepted standard is HL7 (Health Level 7), a similar Layer 7, application-level communication protocol for transferring and exchanging clinical and administrative data.

The diagram below shows a self-contained ecosystem involving the front-end HIS (Hospital Information Systems), and the integration of healthcare, medical systems and other DICOM modalities.

Hospital Enterprise

(Picture courtesy of Meddiff Technologies)

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The reverse wars – DAS vs NAS vs SAN

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It has been quite an interesting 2 decades.

In the beginning (starting in the early to mid-90s), SAN (Storage Area Network) was the dominant architecture. DAS (Direct Attached Storage) was on the wane as the channel-like throughput of Fibre Channel protocol coupled by the million-device addressing of FC obliterated parallel SCSI, which was only able to handle 16 devices and throughput up to 80 (later on 160 and 320) MB/sec.

NAS, defined by CIFS/SMB and NFS protocols – was happily chugging along the 100 Mbit/sec network, and occasionally getting sucked into the arguments about why SAN was better than NAS. I was already heavily dipped into NFS, because I was pretty much a SunOS/Solaris bigot back then.

When I joined NetApp in Malaysia in 2000, that NAS-SAN wars were going on, waiting for me. NetApp (or Network Appliance as it was known then) was trying to grow beyond its dot-com roots, into the enterprise space and guys like EMC and HDS were frequently trying to put NetApp down.

“It’s a toy…”  was the most common jibe I got in regular engagements until EMC suddenly decided to attack Network Appliance directly with their EMC CLARiiON IP4700. EMC guys would fondly remember this as the “NetApp killer“. Continue reading →

The big boys better be flash friendly

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An interesting article came up in the news this week. The article, from the ever popular The Register, mentioned 3 up and rising storage stars, Nimble Storage, Tintri and Tegile, and their assault on a flash strategy “blind spot” of the big boys, notably EMC and NetApp.

I have known about Nimble Storage and Tintri for a couple of years now, and I did take some time to read up on their storage technology offering. Tegile is new to me when it appeared on my radar after SearchStorage.com announced as the Gold Winner of the enterprise storage category for 2012.

The Register article intriqued me because it implied that these traditional storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp are probably doing a “band-aid” when putting together their flash storage strategy. And typically, I see these strategic concepts introduced by these 2 vendors:

  1. Have a server-side cache strategy by putting a PCIe card on the hosting server
  2. Have a network-based all-flash caching area
  3. Have a PCIe-based flash card on the storage system
  4. Have solid state drives (SSDs) in its disk shelves enclosures

In (1), EMC has VFCache (the server side caching software has been renamed to XtremSW Cache and under repackaging with the Xtrem brand name) and NetApp has it FlashAccel solution. Previously, as I was informed, FlashAccel was using the FusionIO ioTurbine solution but just days ago, NetApp expanded the LSI Nytro WarpDrive into its FlashAccel solution as well. The main objective of a server-side caching strategy using flash is to accelerate mostly read-based I/O operations for specific application workloads at the server side.

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Say VDI very fast

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This one bugs me.

All the talk about Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and how VDI is the next IN thing is beginning to look like hulla baloo to me. Every storage vendor in town is packaging their VDI messaging in the best gift wrapping paper possible, trying to win the hearts of potential customers. But I have a creeping feeling that the customers in Malaysia and even perhaps some in the region are going to be disappointed when all the fluff and huff of VDI meets reality.

I have to admit that I have no experience with VDI. I have no implementation experience, and I have no selling experience of VDI, but having gone through the years looking and observing at the centralized computing and thin client space, history could be repeating itself (again!). Many previous pre-VDI experiences have fallen flat on the face.

Remember the days of X-terminals, early versions of thin clients? Remember the names such as NCD (Network Computing Devices), Wyse Technologies (they were recently acquired by Dell), SCO Tarantella and the infamous Javastation? I don’t know about you, but that Javastation design was one ugly motherf****r.

So, it is my pleasure to remind you again and hopefully give you some nightmares too 😉

Back to VDI. Yes, the thin-client/zero-client/remote desktop/VDI concept is a great idea! I would have love VDI to be successful. It will be the implementation and the continuous user complaints that will be the bane of its problems. Ultimately, it’s the user’s experience that counts. Continue reading →