Category Archives: SMB

btrfs butter gone bad?

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I wrote about btrfs 8 years ago.

Since then, it has made its way into several small to mid-end storage solutions (more NAS inclined solutions) including Rockstor, Synology, Terramaster, and Asustor. In the Linux world, SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server and OpenSUSE® use btrfs as the default OS file system. I have decided to revisit btrfs filesystem to give some thoughts about its future.

Have you looked under the hood?

The sad part is not many people look under the hood anymore, especially for the market the btrfs storage vendors are targeting. The small medium businesses just want a storage which is cheap. But cheap comes at a risk where the storage reliability and data integrity are often overlooked.

The technical conversation is secondary and thus the lack of queries for strong enterprise features may be leading btrfs to be complacent in its development.

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Dell EMC Isilon is an Emmy winner!

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[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]

And the Emmy® goes to …

Yes, the Emmy® goes to Dell EMC Isilon! It was indeed a well deserved accolade and an honour!

Dell EMC Isilon had just won the Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards a week before Storage Field Day 19, for their outstanding pioneering work on the NAS platform tiering technology of media and broadcasting content according to business value.

A lasting true clustered NAS

This is not a blog to praise Isilon but one that instill respect to a real true clustered, scale-out file system. I have known of OneFS for a long time, but never really took the opportunity to really put my hands on it since 2006 (there is a story). So here is a look at history …

Back in early to mid-2000, there was a lot of talks about large scale NAS. There were several players in the nascent scaling NAS market. NetApp was the filer king, with several competitors such as Polyserve, Ibrix, Spinnaker, Panasas and the young upstart Isilon. There were also Procom, BlueArc and NetApp’s predecessor Auspex. By the second half of the 2000 decade, the market consolidated and most of these NAS players were acquired.

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Komprise is a Winner

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[Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies to be presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I, for one perhaps have seen far too many “file lifecycle and data management” software solutions that involved tiering, hierarchical storage management, ILM or whatever you call them these days. If I do a count, I would have managed or implemented at least 5 to 6 products, including a home grown one.

The whole thing is a very crowded market and I have seen many which have come and gone, and so when the opportunity to have a session with Komprise came at Storage Field Day 19, I did not carry a lot of enthusiasm.

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NAS is the next Ransomware goldmine

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I get an email like this almost every day:

It is from one of my FreeNAS customers daily security run logs, emailed to our support@katanalogic.com alias. It is attempting a brute force attack trying to crack the authentication barrier via the exposed SSH port.

Just days after the installation was completed months ago, a bot has been doing IP port scans on our system, and found the SSH port open. (We used it for remote support). It has been trying every since, and we have been observing the source IP addresses.

The new Ransomware attack vector

This is not surprising to me. Ransomware has become more sophisticated and more damaging than ever because the monetary returns from the ransomware are far more effective and lucrative than other cybersecurity threats so far. And the easiest preys are the weakest link in the People, Process and Technology chain. Phishing breaches through social engineering, emails are the most common attack vectors, but there are vhishing (via voicemail) and smshing (via SMS) out there too. Of course, we do not discount other attack vectors such as mal-advertising sites, or exploits and so on. Anything to deliver the ransomware payload.

The new attack vector via NAS (Network Attached Storage) and it is easy to understand why.

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Secure Private Sync and Share with EasiShare

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Shadow IT /sh-A-doE  Eye-Tee/

noun: An IT project outside the organization IT department’s domain and often unapproved. A dark area.

verb: A defiant user-level practice to perform IT activities where the organization’s IT department has little or no control.

Shadow IT or Stealth IT

There was a BYOD (bring your own device) craze about a decade ago. The darling of the BYOD craze, Dropbox was on every vendor’s lips and many look-a-likes sprouted like mushrooms. Microsoft OneDrive (previously known as SkyDrive), Google Drive, and of course, Dropbox and many others are still serving a growing customer base, together with many others. But most of them have taken a different, more mature form, a market where Gartner has defined as Enterprise File Sync and Share several years ago. And today, that market is shifting again, and soon to be known as Content Collaboration Platform.

But Shadow IT remains where many users are facing challenges with their IT department. Rigid, archaic, and difficult have forced end users to take matters into their own hands to share files, away from the controls and structures. And those free GBs from those cloud storage providers looked so tempting …

The picture above is someone unlocking a safe. I have literally seen an IT department keeping their files on disks and then keep them in a safe! When they want to share it, they have to run the safe combinations to bring out the disks, and they did it in front of me. It was funny then but the paranoia is real! Some IT departments are really that pain-in-the-a$$.

A business risk

Shadow IT is a risk. Security is often the touted risk, but the issue goes beyond just security. Often, the compromised issue represents a degradation of the company’s brand, image and customer confidence, and could lead to negative reverberation of the company’s business.

Time to regain control and secure file access

EasiShare, a private military-grade, enterprise file sync and share platform is a solution I am exploring. It is similar to the Dropbox concept many are familiar with, but without the security concerns and heavy applications of Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive.

Many organizations in Malaysia have expressed concerns about data privacy and security. And this is a great opportunity for Malaysian companies to consider data privacy and security seriously, especially with Shadow IT looming to comprise the control of the IT departments.

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WekaIO controls their performance destiny

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[Preamble: I have been invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Tech Field Day for Storage Field Day 18 from Feb 27-Mar 1, 2019 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel and accommodation were 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]

I was first introduced to WekaIO back in Storage Field Day 15. I did not blog about them back then, but I have followed their progress quite attentively throughout 2018. 2 Storage Field Days and a year later, they were back for Storage Field Day 18 with a new CTO, Andy Watson, and several performance benchmark records.

Blowout year

2018 was a blowout year for WekaIO. They have experienced over 400% growth, placed #1 in the Virtual Institute IO-500 10-node performance challenge, and also became #1 in the SPEC SFS 2014 performance and latency benchmark. (Note: This record was broken by NetApp a few days later but at a higher cost per client)

The Virtual Institute for I/O IO-500 10-node performance challenge was particularly interesting, because it pitted WekaIO against Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) Summit supercomputer, and WekaIO won. Details of the challenge were listed in Blocks and Files and WekaIO Matrix Filesystem became the fastest parallel file system in the world to date.

Control, control and control

I studied WekaIO’s architecture prior to this Field Day. And I spent quite a bit of time digesting and understanding their data paths, I/O paths and control paths, in particular, the diagram below:

Starting from the top right corner of the diagram, applications on the Linux client (running Weka Client software) and it presents to the Linux client as a POSIX-compliant file system. Through the network, the Linux client interacts with the WekaIO kernel-based VFS (virtual file system) driver which coordinates the Front End (grey box in upper right corner) to the Linux client. Other client-based protocols such as NFS, SMB, S3 and HDFS are also supported. The Front End then interacts with the NIC (which can be 10/100G Ethernet, Infiniband, and NVMeoF) through SR-IOV (single root IO virtualization), bypassing the Linux kernel for maximum throughput. This is with WekaIO’s own networking stack in user space. Continue reading →

The Return of SAN and NAS with AWS?

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AWS what?

Amazon Web Services announced Outposts at re:Invent last week. It was not much of a surprise for me because when AWS had their partnership with VMware in 2016, the undercurrents were there to have AWS services come right at the doorsteps of any datacenter. In my mind, AWS has built so far out in the cloud that eventually, the only way to grow is to come back to core of IT services – The Enterprise.

Their intentions were indeed stealthy, but I have been a believer of the IT pendulum. What has swung out to the left or right would eventually come back to the centre again. History has proven that, time and time again.

SAN and NAS coming back?

A friend of mine casually spoke about AWS Outposts announcements. “Does that mean SAN and NAS are coming back?” I couldn’t hide my excitement hearing the return but … be still, my beating heart!

I am a storage dinosaur now. My era started in the early 90s. SAN and NAS were a big part of my career, but cloud computing has changed and shaped the landscape of on-premises shared storage. SAN and NAS are probably closeted by the younger generation of storage engineers and storage architects, who are more adept to S3 APIs and Infrastructure-as-Code. The nuts and bolts of Fibre Channel, SMB (or CIFS if one still prefers it), and NFS are of lesser prominence, and concepts such as FLOGI, PLOGI, SMB mandatory locking, NFS advisory locking and even iSCSI IQN are probably alien to many of them.

What is Amazon Outposts?

In a nutshell, AWS will be selling servers and infrastructure gear. The AWS-branded hardware, starting from a single server to large racks, will be shipped to a customer’s datacenter or any hosting location, packaged with AWS popular computing and storage services, and optionally, with VMware technology for virtualized computing resources.

Taken from https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/

In a move ala-Azure Stack, Outposts completes the round trip of the IT Pendulum. It has swung to the left; it has swung to the right; it is now back at the centre. AWS is no longer public cloud computing company. They have just become a hybrid cloud computing company. Continue reading →

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 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 →