Category Archives: Virtualization

Oops, excuse me but your silo is showing

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It is the morning that the SNIA Global Steering Committee reporting session is starting soon. I am in the office extremely early waiting for my turn to share the happenings in SNIA Malaysia.

And of late, I have been getting a lot of calls to catch up on hot technologies, notably All Flash Storage arrays and hyper-converged infrastructure. Even though I am now working for Interica, a company that focuses on Oil & Gas exploration and production software, my free coffee sessions with folks from the IT side have not diminished. And I recalled a week back in mid-March where I had coffee overdose!

Flash storage and hyperconvergence are HOT! Despite the hypes and frenzies of both flash storage and hyperconvergence, I still believe that integrating either or, or both, still have an effect that many IT managers overlook. The effect is a data silo.

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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 →

Hail Hydra!

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The last of the Storage Field Day 6 on November 7th took me and the other delegates to NEC. There was an obvious, yet eerie silence among everyone about this visit. NEC? Are you kidding me?

NEC isn’t exactly THE exciting storage company in the Silicon Valley, yet I was pleasantly surprised with their HydraStorprowess. It is indeed quite a beast, with published numbers of backup throughput of 4PB/hour, and scales to 100PB of capacity. Most impressive indeed, and HydraStor deserves this blogger’s honourable architectural dissection.

HydraStor is NEC’s grid-based, scale-out storage platform with an object storage backend. The technology, powered by the DynamicStor ™ software, a distributed file system laid over the HydraStor grid architecture. At the same time, it has the DataRedux™ technology that provides the global in-line deduplication as the HydraStor ingests data for data protection, replication, archiving and WORM purposes. It is a massive data consolidation platform, storing gazillion loads of data (100PB you say?) for short-term and long-term retention and recovery.

The architecture is indeed solid, and its data availability goes beyond traditional RAID-level resiliency. HydraStor employs their proprietary erasure coding, called Distributed Resilient Data™. The resiliency knob can be configured to withstand 6 concurrent disks or nodes failure, but by default configured with a resiliency level of 3.

We can quickly deduce that DynamicStor™, DataRedux™ and Distributed Resilient Data™ are the technology pillars of HydraStor. How do they work, and how do they work together?

Let’s look a bit deeper into the HydraStor architecture.

HydraStor is made up of 2 types of nodes:

  • Accelerator Nodes
  • Storage Nodes

The Accelerator Nodes (AN) are the access nodes. They interface with the HydraStor front end, which could be CIFS, NFS or OST (Open Storage Technology). The AN nodes chunks the in-coming data and performs in-line deduplication at a very high speed. It can reach speed of 300TB/hour, which is blazingly fast!

The AN nodes also runs DynamicStor™, handling the performance heavy-lifting portion of HydraStor. The chunked data from the AN nodes are then passed on to the Storage Nodes (SN), where they are further “deduped in-line” to determined if the chunks are unique or not. It is a two-step inline deduplication process. Below is a diagram showing the ANs built above the SNs in the HydraStor grid architecture.

NEC AN & SN grid architecture

 

The HydraStor grid architecture is also a very scalable architecture, allow the dynamic scale-in and scale-out of both ANs and SNs. AN nodes and SN nodes can be added or removed into the system, auto-configuring and auto-optimizing while everything stays online. This capability further strengthens the reliability and the resiliency of the HydraStor.

NEC Hydrastor dynamic topology

Moving on to DataRedux™. DataRedux™ is HydraStor’s global in-line data deduplication technology. It performs dedupe at the sub-file level, with variable length window. This is performed at the AN nodes and the SN nodes level,chunking and creating unique hash values. All unique chunks are further compressed with a modified LZ compression algorithm, shrinking the data to its optimized footprint on the disk storage. To maintain the global in-line deduplication, the hash table is available across the HydraStor cluster.

NEC Deduplication & Compression

The unique data chunk resulting from deduplication and compression are then written to disks using the configured Distributed Resilient Data™ (DRD) algorithm, at its set resiliency level.

At the junction of DRD, with erasure coding parity, the data is broken up into multiples of fragments and assigned a parity to a grouping of fragments. If the resiliency level is set to 3 (the default), the data is broken into 12 pieces, 9 data fragments + 3 parity fragments. The 3 parity fragments corresponds to the resiliency level of 3. See diagram below of the 12 fragments spread across a group of selected disks in the storage pool of the Storage Nodes.

NEC DRD erasure coding on Storage Nodes

 

If the HydraStor experiences a failure in the disks or nodes, and has resulted in the loss of a fragment or fragments, the DRD self-healing function will auto-rebuild and auto-reconfigure the recovered fragments in another set of disks, maintaining the level of 3 parities.

The resiliency level, as mentioned earlier, can be set up to 6, boosting the HydraStor survival factor of 6 disks or nodes failure in the grid. See below of how the autonomous DRD recovery works:

NEC Autonomous Data recovery

Despite lacking the razzle dazzle of most Silicon Valley storage startups and upstarts, credit be given where credit is due. NEC HydraStor is indeed a strong show stopper.

However, in a market that is as fickle as storage, deduplication solutions such as HydraStor, EMC Data Domain, and HP StoreOnce, are being superceded by Copy Data Management technology, touted by Actifio. It was rumoured that EMC restructured their entire BURA (Backup Recovery Archive) division to DPAD (Data Protection and Availability Division) to go after the burgeoning copy data management market.

It would be good if NEC can take notice and turn their HydraStor “supertanker” towards the Copy Data Management market. That would be something special to savour.

P/S: NEC. Sorry about the title. I just couldn’t resist it 😉

MASSive, Impressive, Agile, TEGILE

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Ah, my first blog after Storage Field Day 6!

It was a fantastic week and I only got to fathom the sensations and effects of the trip after my return from San Jose, California last week. Many thanks to Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett), Tom Hollingsworth (@networkingnerd) and Claire Chaplais (@cchaplais) of Gestalt IT for inviting me over for that wonderful trip 2 weeks’ ago. Tegile was one of the companies I had the privilege to visit and savour.

In a world of utterly confusing messaging about Flash Storage, I was eager to find out what makes Tegile tick at the Storage Field Day session. Yes, I loved Tegile and the campus visit was very nice. I was also very impressed that they have more than 700 customers and over a thousand systems shipped, all within 2 years since they came out of stealth in 2012. However, I was more interested in the essence of Tegile and what makes them stand out.

I have been a long time admirer of ZFS (Zettabyte File System). I have been a practitioner myself and I also studied the file system architecture and data structure some years back, when NetApp and Sun were involved in a lawsuit. A lot of have changed since then and I am very pleased to see Tegile doing great things with ZFS.

Tegile’s architecture is called IntelliFlash. Here’s a look at the overview of the IntelliFlash architecture:

Tegile IntelliFlash Architecture

So, what stands out for Tegile? I deduce that there are 3 important technology components that defines Tegile IntelliFlash ™ Operating System.

  • MASS (Metadata Accelerator Storage System)
  • Media Management
  • Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication

What is MASS? Tegile has patented MASS as an architecture that allows optimized data path to the file system metadata.

Often a typical file system metadata are stored together with the data. This results in a less optimized data access because both the data and metadata are given the same priority. However, Tegile’s MASS writes and stores the filesystem metadata in very high speed, low latency DRAM and Flash SSD. The filesystem metadata probably includes some very fine grained and intimate details about the mapping of blocks and pages to the respective capacity Flash SSDs and the mechanical HDDs. (Note: I made an educated guess here and I would be happy if someone corrected me)

Going a bit deeper, the DRAM in the Tegile hybrid storage array is used as a L1 Read Cache, while Flash SSDs are used as a L2 Read and Write Cache. Tegile takes further consideration that the Flash SSDs used for this caching purpose are different from the denser and higher capacity Flash SSDs used for storing data. These Flash SSDs for caching are obviously the faster, lower latency type of eMLCs and in the future, might be replaced by PCIe Flash optimized by NVMe.

Tegile DRAM-Flash Caching

This approach gives absolute priority, and near-instant access to the filesystem’s metadata, making the Tegile data access incredibly fast and efficient.

Tegile’s Media Management capabilities excite me. This is because it treats every single Flash SSD in the storage array with very precise organization of 3 types of data patterns.

  1. Write caching, which is high I/O is focused on a small segment of the drive
  2. Metadata caching, which has both Read and Write I/O  is targeted to a slight larger segment of the drive
  3. Data is laid out on the rest of the capacity of the drive

Drilling deeper, the write caching (in item 1 above) high I/O writes are targeted at the drive segment’s range which is over-provisioned for greater efficiency and care. At the same time, the garbage collection(GC) of this segment is handled by the respective drive’s controller. This is important because the controller will be performing the GC function without inducing unnecessary latency to the storage array processing cycles, giving further boost to Tegile’s already awesome prowess.

In addition to that, IntelliFlash ™ aligns every block and every page exactly to each segment and each page boundary of the drives. This reduces block and page segmentation, and thereby reduces issues with file locality and free blocks locality. It also automatically adjust its block and page alignments to different drive types and models. Therefore, I believe, it would know how to align itself to a 512-bytes or a 520-bytes sector drives.

The Media Management function also has advanced cell care. The wear-leveling takes on a newer level of advancement where how the efficient organization of blocks and pages to the drives reduces additional and often unnecessary erase and rewrites. Furthermore, the use of Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication also reduces the number of writes to drives media, increasing their longevity.

Tegile Inline Compression and Deduplication

Compression and deduplication are 2 very important technology features in almost all flash arrays. Likewise, these 2 technologies are crucial in the performance of Tegile storage systems. They are both inline i.e – Inline Compression and Inline Deduplication, and therefore both are boosted by the multi-core CPUs as well as the fast DRAM memory.

I don’t have the secret sauce formula of how Tegile designed their inline compression and deduplication. But there’s a very good article of how Tegile viewed their method of data reduction for compression and deduplication. Check out their blog here.

The metadata of data access of each and every customer is probably feeding into their Intellicare, a cloud-based customer care program. Intellicare is another a strong differentiator in Tegile’s offering.

Oh, did I mentioned they are unified storage as well with both SAN and NAS, including SMB 3.0 support?

I left Tegile that afternoon on November 5th feeling happy. I was pleased to catch up with Narayan Venkat, my old friend from NetApp, who is now their Chief Marketing Officer. I was equally pleased to see Tegile advancing ZFS further than the others I have known. With so much technological advancement and more coming, the world is their oyster.

Praying to the hypervisor God

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I was reading a great article by Frank Denneman about storage intelligence moving up the stack. It was pretty much in line with what I have been observing in the past 18 months or so, about the storage pendulum having swung back to DAS (direct attached storage). To be more precise, the DAS form factor I am referring to are physical server hardware that houses many disk drives.

Like it or not, the hypervisor has become the center of the universe in the IT space. VMware has become the indomitable force in the hypervisor technology, with Microsoft Hyper-V playing catch-up. The seismic shift of these 2 hypervisor technologies are leading storage vendors to place them on to the altar and revering them as deities. The others, with the likes of Xen and KVM, and to lesser extent Solaris Containers aren’t really worth mentioning.

This shift, as the pendulum swings from networked storage back to internal “direct-attached” storage are dictated by 4 main technology factors:

  • The x86 server architecture
  • Software-defined
  • Scale-out architecture
  • Flash-based storage technology

Anyone remember Thumper? Not the Disney character from the Bambi movie!

thumper-bambi-cartoon-character

When the SunFire X4500 (aka Thumper) was first released in (intermission: checking Wiki for the right year) in 2006, I felt that significant wound inflicted in the networked storage industry. Instead of the usual 4-8 hard disk drives in the all the industry servers at the time, the X4500 4U chassis housed 48 hard disk drives. The design and architecture were so astounding to me, I even went and bought a 1U SunFire X4150 for my personal server collection. Such was my adoration for Sun’s technology at the time.

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Technology prowess of Riverbed SteelFusion

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The Riverbed SteelFusion (aka Granite) impressed me the moment it was introduced to me 2 years ago. I remembered that genius light bulb moment well, in December 2012 to be exact, and it had left its mark on me. Like I said last week in my previous blog, the SteelFusion technology is unique in the industry so far and has differentiated itself from its WAN optimization competitors.

To further understand the ability of Riverbed SteelFusion, a deeper inspection of the technology is essential. I am fortunate to be given the opportunity to learn more about SteelFusion’s technology and here I am, sharing what I have learned.

What does the technology of SteelFusion do?

Riverbed SteelFusion takes SAN volumes from supported storage vendors in the central datacenter and projects the storage volumes (aka LUNs)to applications and hosts at the remote branches. The technology requires a paired relationship between SteelFusion Core (in the centralized datacenter) and SteelFusion Edge (at the branch). Both SteelFusion Core and Edge are fronted respectively by the Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization device, to deliver the performance required.

The diagram below gives an overview of how the entire SteelFusion network architecture is like:

Riverbed SteelFusion Overall Solution 2 Continue reading →

No Flash in the pan

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The storage networking market now is teeming with flash solutions. Consumers are probably sick to their stomach getting a better insight which flash solution they should be considering. There are so much hype, fuzz and buzz and like a swarm of bees, in the chaos of the moment, there is actually a calm and discerning pattern slowly, but surely, emerging. Storage networking guys would probably know this thing well, but for the benefit of the other readers, how we view flash (and other solid state storage) becomes clear with the picture below: Flash performance gap

(picture courtesy of  http://electronicdesign.com/memory/evolution-solid-state-storage-enterprise-servers)

Right at the top, we have the CPU/Memory complex (labelled as Processor). Our applications, albeit bytes and pieces of them, run in this CPU/Memory complex.

Therefore, we can see Pattern #1 showing up. Continue reading →

The Prophet has arrived

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Early last week, I had a catch up with my friend. He was excited to share with me the new company he just joined. It was ProphetStor. It was a catchy name and after our conversation, I have decided to spend a bit of my weekend afternoon finding out more about the company and its technology.

From another friend at FalconStor, I knew of this company several months ago. Ex-FalconStor executives have ventured to found ProphetStor as the next generation of storage resource orchestration engine. And it has found a very interesting tack to differentiate from the many would-bes of so-called “software-defined storage” leaders. ProphetStor made their early appearance at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong back in November last year, positioning several key technologies including OpenStack Cinder, SNIA CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) and SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification) to provide federation of storage resources discovery, provisioning and automation. 

The federation of storage resources and services solution is aptly called ProphetStor Federator. The diagram I picked up from the El Reg article presents the Federator working with different OpenStack initiatives quite nicely below:  There are 3 things that attracted me to the uniqueness of ProphetStor.

1. The underlying storage resources, be it files, objects, or blocks, can be presented and exposed as Cinder-style volumes.

2. The ability to define the different performance capabilities and SLAs (IOPS, throughput and latency) from the underlying storage resources and matching them to the right application requirements.

3. The use of SNIA of SMI-S and CDMI Needless to say that the Federator software will abstract the physical and logical structures of any storage brands or storage architectures, giving it a very strong validation of the “software-defined storage (SDS)” concept.

While the SDS definition is still being moulded in the marketplace (and I know that SNIA already has a draft SDS paper out), the ProphetStor SDS concept does indeed look similar to the route taken by EMC ViPR. The use of the control plane (ProphetStor Federator) and the data plane (underlying physical and logical storage resource) is obvious.

I wrote about ViPR many moons ago in my blog and I see ProphetStor as another hat in the SDS ring. I grabbed the screenshot (below) from the ProphetStor website which I thought did beautifully explained what ProphetStor is from 10,000 feet view.

ProphetStor How it works

The Cinder-style volume is a class move. It preserves the sanctity of many enterprise applications which still need block storage volumes but now it comes with a twist. These block storage volumes now will have different capability and performance profiles, tagged with the relevant classifications and SLAs.

And this is where SNIA SMI-S discovery component is critical because SMI-S mines these storage characteristics and presents them to the ProphetStor Federator for storage resource classification. For storage vendors that do not have SMI-S support, ProphetStor can customize the relevant interfaces to the proprietary API to discover the storage characteristics.

On the north-end, SNIA CDMI works with the ProphetStor Federator’s Offer & Provisioning functions to bundle wrap various storage resources for the cloud and other traditional storage network architectures.

I have asked my friend for more technology deep-dive materials (he has yet to reply me) of ProphetStor to ascertain what I have just wrote. (Simon, you have to respond to me!)

This is indeed very exciting times knowing ProphetStor as one of the early leaders in the SDS space. And I like to see ProphetStor go far with this.

Now let us pray … because the prophet has arrived.

SMB on steroids but CIFS lord isn’t pleased

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I admit it!

I am one of the guilty parties who continues to use CIFS (Common Internet File System) to represent the Windows file sharing protocol. And a lot of vendors continue to use the “CIFS” word loosely without knowing that it was a something from a bygone era. One of my friends even pronounced it as “See Fist“, which sounded even funnier when he said it. (This is for you Adrian M!)

And we couldn’t be more wrong because we shouldn’t be using the CIFS word anymore. It is so 90’s man! And the tell-tale signs have already been there but most of us chose to ignore it with gusto. But a recent SNIA Webinar titled “SMB 3.0 – New opportunities for Windows Environment” aims to dispel our incompetence and change our CIFS-venture to the correct word – SMB (Server Message Block).

A selfie photo of Dennis Chapman, Senior Technical Director for Microsoft Solutions at NetApp from the SNIA webinar slides above, wants to inform all of us that … SMB History Continue reading →

Novell Filr Technology Overview Part 1

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I am like a kid opening presents on Christmas mornings today.

Reading and understanding the Novell Filr architecture is exciting with each feature revealing something different, some that may not be entirely unique, but something done simplified. Novell Filr has simplified a few things that are much more appreciated from storage guys like me. Let me share with you this technology learning session.

2 Key Features

First of all, I see the Novell Filr as a Secure Access Broker.

The Novell Filr provides file access, file sharing and file synchronization with multiple mobile devices. The mobility revolution in the likes of smart phones, tablets and other “connected” devices in our personal lives are changing our habits in the way we want information to be accessed, which I can summarize in 2 words – SIMPLE, UNINHIBITED. It is the lack of inhibition that scares the hell out of IT because IT is losing control, and corporations fear data leaks.

Novell Filr lets users access their home directories and network folders from their mobile devices. It lets the users synchronize their files with Windows and MacOS computers, regardless if these devices are internal of the company’s firewalled networks or external of it. Here’s a simple diagram of how Novell Filr defines its position as a Secure Access Broker.

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