Storage Optimization Archives - Page 3 of 6

Dell EMC Isilon is an Emmy winner!

By cfheoh | March 16, 2020 - 7:41 am |March 17, 2020 100Gigabit Ethernet, Acquisition, Analytics, Appliance, CIFS, Cloud, Clusters, Containers, Data Availability, deduplication, Deduplication, Deep Learning, Dell, DellEMC, Disks, EMC, Flash, Gartner, High Performance Computing, Isilon, Mellanox, Mellanox Technologies, NAS, NetApp, NFS, Performance Caching, Pure Storage, Qumulo, Scale-out architecture, SMB, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage, Solid State Devices, Storage Field Day, Storage Market Share, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Tech Field Day, WekaIO

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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.

NetApp acquired Spinnaker in 2003
Part of Auspex was acquired by NetApp in 2003; The other by Glasshouse Technologies
Procom was picked up by Sun Microsystems in 2005
Polyserve went to HP in 2007
Ibrix joined HP as well in 2009
Isilon got acquired by EMC in 2010
BlueArc gobbled up by HDS in 2011

Continue reading →

StorageGRID gets gritty

By cfheoh | March 9, 2020 - 7:06 am |March 9, 2020 Acquisition, Amazon Web Services, Analytics, API, Appliance, Artificial Intelligence, Backup, Big Data, Cloud, Clusters, Data Archiving, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Protection, Deep Learning, Filesystems, HDS, Hitachi Vantara, ILM, Machine Learning, NAS, NetApp, Object Storage, Software Defined Storage, Storage Field Day, Storage Market Share, Storage Optimization, Tech Field Day

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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 the event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]

NetApp® presented StorageGRID® Webscale (SGWS) at Storage Field Day 19 last month. It was timely when the general purpose object storage market, in my humble opinion, was getting disillusioned and almost about to deprive itself of the value of what it was supposed to be.

“Cheap and deep“, “Race to Zero” were some of the less storied calls I have come across when discussing about object storage, and it was really de-valuing the merits of object storage as vendors touted their superficial glory of being in the IDC Marketscape for Object-based Storage 2019.

Almost every single conversation I had in the past 3 years was either explaining what object storage is or “That is cheap storage right?”

Continue reading →

Green Storage? Meh!

By cfheoh | December 3, 2019 - 11:19 am |December 3, 2019 Amazon Web Services, Analytics, API, Artificial Intelligence, Backup, Big Data, Business Continuity, Cloud, Composable Infrastructure, Data, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Protection, Data Security, Deduplication, Digital Transformation, Disaster Recovery, Disks, Edge Computing, Google, Green, Green Computing, High Performance Computing, Hyperconvergence, IoT, Liqid, Machine Learning, Openstack, Oracle Cloud, Performance Benchmark, Performance Caching, Rackspace, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Solid State Devices, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Strongbox, Tape storage, Unified Storage, virtual tape library

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Something triggered my thoughts a few days ago. A few of us got together talking about climate change and a friend asked how green was the datacenter in IT. With cloud computing booming, I would say that green computing isn’t really the hottest thing at present. That in turn, leads us to one of the most voracious energy beasts in the datacenter, storage. Where is green storage in the equation?

What is green?

Over the past decade, several storage related technologies were touted as more energy efficient. These include

Tape – when tapes are offline, they do not consume power and do not require cooling
Virtualization – Virtualization reduces the number of servers and desktops, and of course storage too
MAID (Massive Array of Independent Disks) – the arrays spin down the HDDs if idle for a period of time
SSD (Solid State Drives) – Compared to HDDs, SSDs consume much less power, and overall reduce the cooling needs
Data Footprint Reduction – Deduplication, compression and other technologies to reduce copies of data
SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) Drives – Higher areal density means less drives but limited by physics.

The largest gorilla in storage technology

HDDs still dominate the market and they are the biggest producers of heat and vibration in a storage array, along with the redundant power supplies and fans. Until and unless SSDs dominate, we have to live with the fact that storage disk drives are not green. The statistics from Statistica below forecasts that in 2021, the shipment of SSDs will surpass HDDs.

Today the areal density of HDDs have increased. With SMR (shingled magnetic recording), the areal density jumped about 25% more than the 1Tb/inch (Terabit per inch) in the CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives. The largest SMR in the market today is 16TB from Seagate with 18TB SMR in the horizon. That capacity is going to grow significantly when EAMR (energy assisted magnetic recording) – which counts heat assisted and microwave assisted – drives enter the market next year. The areal density will grow to 1.6Tb/inch with a roadmap to 4.0Tb/inch. Continue reading →

Brainy Commvault

By cfheoh | October 17, 2019 - 3:40 am |October 17, 2019 Acquisition, Analytics, API, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Business Continuity, Cloud, Commvault, Containers, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Corruption, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Data Security, Deep Learning, Digital Transformation, Disaster Recovery, Filesystems, Hedvig, Hyperconvergence, IoT, Kubernetes, Machine Learning, Object Storage, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Storage Field Day, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Tech Field Day, Unified Storage, Virtualization

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[Disclosure: I was invited by Commvault as a Media person and Social Ambassador to their Commvault GO 2019 Conference and also a Tech Field Day eXtra delegate from Oct 13-17, 2019 in the Denver CO, USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Commvault, 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]

The waltz across the Commvault-Hedvig mine field will not be easy. Commvault will have a lot of open discussions about their acquisition of Hedvig and how Hedvig “primary storage platform” will fit into a “secondary storage framework” of Commvault. The outcome of this consummation is yet to appear as a structured form. The storyline will eventually form as Commvault’s diligence to define their strategy moving forward.

Day 1

Day 1 was my open day at Commvault GO. I was absorbing the first impressions of Commvault again even though this was my third Commvault GO, after Washington DC and Nashville in 2017 and 2018 respectively. There was certainly a “startup” feeling again in Commvault since the appointment of Sanjay Mirchandani as CEO 9 months ago.

A lot of excitement and buzz were generated around the metallic, the Commvault venture into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The SaaS solution is targeted at the mid-market for organizations with 500-2500 staff count. Its simplicity and pricing were the 2 things which gave me a good feeling all over. There is even a 45-day trial for metallic.

Getting Brainy

My Day 2 itinerary was more specific because my agenda for this trip was to seek answers to the realization of Commvault-Hedvig.

Commvault took the distinction of using the vision of a DataBrain (#databrain) to define their strategy. From the picture below, the left and right hemisphere of the DataBrain forms the Storage Management piece on the left and Data Management on the right.

Continue reading →

Commvault coming all together

By cfheoh | October 15, 2019 - 2:58 pm |October 15, 2019 Acquisition, Analytics, Appliance, Artificial Intelligence, Backup, Big Data, Business Continuity, Cloud, Clusters, Commvault, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Corruption, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Privacy, Data Protection, Data Security, Deduplication, Digital Transformation, Disaster Recovery, Edge Computing, eDiscovery, Filesystems, Forrester, Gartner, Hyperconvergence, Industry 4.0, Machine Learning, NAS, Object Storage, SAP, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Software-defined Datacenter, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Tech Field Day, Unified Storage, Virtualization

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This trip to the Commvault GO conference was pretty much a mission to find answers to their Hedvig acquisition just a month ago. It was an unprecedented move for Commvault and I, as an industry observer and pundit, took the news positively. I wrote in my blog about Commvault’s big bet and I liked their boldness in their approach.

But the news did not bode well back here in Malaysia. The local technology news portal, Data Storage Asean picked up the news in a rather unconvinced way. 2 long time Commvault partners I spoke to were obviously unhappy because the acquisition made little sense to them on the back of closing of the Commvault Malaysia office just weeks before this with more unsettling rumours of the Commvault team in Asia Pacific. The broken trust and the fear of what the future held for the Commvault customers in Malaysia and in the region were riding along with me on this trip.

But I have seen the beginning of the Commvault transformation from the Commvault GO conferences I have attended since 2017. This is my 3rd Commvault GO and I ended Day 1 with good vibes.

Here were some of my highlights in the first day. Continue reading →

Storage Performance Considerations for AI Data Paths

By cfheoh | June 17, 2019 - 10:50 am |June 17, 2019 100Gigabit Ethernet, Algorithm, Analytics, API, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud, Composable Infrastructure, Data, Data Fabric, Data Management, Data Privacy, Data Security, Digital Transformation, Drivescale, E8 Storage, Edge Computing, Elastifile, Excelero, Filesystems, High Performance Computing, Hyperconvergence, Industry 4.0, Infiniband, Intel, Liqid, Lustre, Machine Learning, Mellanox Technologies, NVMe, Object Storage, Performance Benchmark, Performance Caching, Quantum Corporation, RDMA, Software-defined Datacenter, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, ThinkParq, Vast Data, Virtualization, WekaIO

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The hype of Deep Learning (DL), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached an unprecedented frenzy. Every infrastructure vendor from servers, to networking, to storage has a word to say or play about DL/ML/AI. This prompted me to explore this hyped ecosystem from a storage perspective, notably from a storage performance requirement point-of-view.

One question on my mind

There are plenty of questions on my mind. One stood out and that is related to storage performance requirements.

Reading and learning from one storage technology vendor to another, the context of everyone’s play against their competitors seems to be “They are archaic, they are legacy. Our architecture is built from ground up, modern, NVMe-enabled“. And there are more juxtaposing, but you get the picture – “We are better, no doubt“.

Are the data patterns and behaviours of AI different? How do they affect the storage design as the data moves through the workflow, the data paths and the lifecycle of the AI ecosystem?

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Figuring out storage for Kubernetes and containers

By cfheoh | April 16, 2019 - 6:44 pm |April 16, 2019 Amazon Web Services, API, Cloud, Containers, Data, Data Archiving, Data Availability, Data Management, Data Protection, Data Security, Docker, Edge Computing, Elastifile, Fibre Channel, Filesystems, Google, Hyperconvergence, Kubernetes, NFS, Openstack, Performance Benchmark, Performance Caching, Robin.io, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage, Storage Optimization, Virtualization, VMware

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Oops! I forgot about you!

To me, containers and container orchestration (CO) engines such as Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker Swarm are fantastic. They scale effortlessly and are truly designed for cloud native applications (CNA).

But one thing irks me. Storage management for containers and COs. It was as if when they designed and constructed containers and the containers orchestration (CO) engines, they forgot about the considerations of storage and storage management. At least the persistent part of storage.

Over a year ago, I was in two minds about persistent storage, especially when it comes to the transient nature of microservices which was so prevalent and were inundating the cloud native applications landscape. I was searching for answers in my blog. The decentralization of microservices in containers means mass deployment at the edge, but to have the pre-processed and post-processed data stick to the persistent storage at the edge device is a challenge. The operative word here is “STICK”.

Two different worlds

Containers were initially designed and built for lightweight applications such as microservices. The runtime, libraries, configuration files and dependencies are all in one package. They were meant to do simple tasks quickly and scales to thousands easily. They could be brought up and brought down in little time and did not have to bother about the persistent data stored by the host. The state of the containers were also not important to the application tasks at hand.

Today containers like Docker have matured to run enterprise applications and the state of the container is important. The applications must know the state and the health of the container. The container could be in online mode, online but not accepting data mode, suspended mode, paused mode, interrupted mode, quiesced mode or halted mode. Each mode or state of the container is important to the running applications and the container can easily brought up or down in an instance of a command. The stateful nature of the containers and applications is critical for the business. The same situation applies to container orchestration engines such as Kubernetes.

Container and Kubernetes Storage

Docker provides 3 methods to local storage. In the diagram below, it describes:

Continue reading →

WekaIO controls their performance destiny

By cfheoh | March 17, 2019 - 5:33 pm |March 17, 2019 Amazon Web Services, Analytics, Appliance, Big Data, CIFS, Cloud, Deep Learning, Filesystems, Flash, High Performance Computing, Infiniband, Linux, Lustre, Machine Learning, Mellanox Technologies, NAS, NetApp, NFS, NVMe, Object Storage, PCIe, Performance Benchmark, Performance Caching, RDMA, Scale-out architecture, SMB, Software Defined Storage, Storage Field Day, Storage Optimization, Storage Tiering, Tech Field Day, Virtualization, WekaIO, Western Digital

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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 →

StorPool – Block storage managed well

By cfheoh | March 13, 2019 - 8:34 am |March 13, 2019 100Gigabit Ethernet, API, Cloud, Clusters, Data Availability, Data Management, Disks, Filesystems, High Performance Computing, iSCSI, Linux, Lustre, Nexenta, NVMe, Openstack, Performance Benchmark, Performance Caching, Scale-out architecture, Server SAN, Software Defined Storage, Storage Field Day, Storage Optimization, Storpool, Tech Field Day, Virtualization, VMware

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Storage technology is complex. Storage infrastructure and data management operations are not trivial, despite what the hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure would like you to think. As the adoption of cloud infrastructure services grow, the small and medium businesses/enterprises (SMB/SME) are usually left to their own devices to manage the virtual storage infrastructure. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) addressing the SMB/SME market are looking for easier, worry-free, software-defined storage to elevate their value to their customers.

Managed high performance block storage

Enter StorPool.

StorPool is a scale-out block storage technology, capable of delivering 1 million+ IOPS with sub-milliseconds response times. As described by fellow delegate, Ray Lucchesi in his recent blog, they were able to achieve these impressive performance numbers in their demo, without the high throughput RDMA network or the storage class memory of Intel Optane. Continue reading →

The Malaysian Openstack storage conundrum

By cfheoh | October 9, 2018 - 8:24 pm |October 9, 2018 CIFS, Cloud, Data Availability, Data Management, Disaster Recovery, Excelero, Fibre Channel, Filesystems, High Performance Computing, HP, Infiniband, Linux, Mellanox, NAS, NFS, NVMe, Openstack, RDMA, Server SAN, SMB, Snapshots, Software Defined Storage, Storage Optimization, Virtualization

Category Archives: Storage Optimization