Many corporate IT users are moving away from pedantic corporate IT control toward the seemingly easy to synchronize, easy to share, cloud-based services such as Dropbox and Box.net. This practice exposes a big hole in the corporate network, leaking data and files, and yet most corporate IT users are completely ignorant about such a irresponsible act.

Corporate IT users cannot blame IT for being a big A-hole because they keep tight controls of the network and security. It is their job to safeguard the company’s data and files for security, compliance and privacy reasons.

In the past 9-12 months, IT has certainly relaxed (probably “relented” is a better word) their uptight demeanour because they know they couldn’t stop the onslaught of BYOD (bring your own devices). The C-level and the senior management have practically demanded it and had forced their way to bring in their own smart devices and tablets to increase their productivity (Yeah, right!).

To alleviate data security concerns, MDM (Mobile Device Management) solutions are now hot items on the IT shopping list. Since we are talking about Novell, I also got to know that Novell also has an MDM solution called ZenWorks Mobile Management. Novell Zenworks is already well integrated with the proven Novell track record of user and identity management as well as integration with LDAP authentication systems such as Active Directory and eDirectory.

The collision of the BYOD phenomena and the need to securely share corporate data and files security conceives the Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing market.

Besides a well integrated BYOD & MDM strategy, I believe one of the key criteria of Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing is the ability of the enterprise solution to preserve the existing corporate File Server and NAS storage infrastructure and setup while finding a way to appease the BYOD demands of corporate IT users. After all, the Corporate File Servers and NAS storage are still the workhorses of the corporate network, and they hold data and files to drive the business.

Many EFSS vendors require the corporations data and files to be shipped to some public, private, hybrid or managed clouds before the actual EFSS solution can be realized. Many corporations do not want that, because they still have plenty of file servers and NAS within their corporate networks.

The prudent marriage of BYOD/MDM to Corporate File Servers/NAS Storage will unleash the real power and potential of truly bringing corporate information to the fingertips of the employees anywhere whilst allowing IT to maintain control and security. This is not easy and that’s why I said that “there are many pretenders and too few real players” in my previous blog entry.

If done right and if it has the right ingredients, I believe, this will be TRUE DATA MOBILITY, TRULY SECURED and PROTECTED DATA. The corporate data and files remain safe behind the corporation wall (and firewalls) and IT can confidently allow files to be shared to mobile devices and other mobile platforms.

To set the scene, I looked at 3 competing EFSS solutions from storage vendors I am familiar with, in the likes of EMC Syncplicity, HDS HCP Anywhere and NetApp ionGrid in the same ring as Novell Filr.

Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere (HCPA) was just released 2 days ago. There were plenty of fanfare about HCPA, but as I read the news and articles of its release, I believe the customer must move their data and files to the HCP Platform or even to the newly minted Hitachi Cloud Services. This defeats the purpose of the customers wanting to keep their corporate data and files with their existing file servers and NAS.

Similarly, NetApp also has started building a mobility solution when they acquired ionGrid in February this year. Unfortunately, NetApp’s objective seems all too clear and that is to lock the  customer’s data and files into a NetApp storage platform. The ionGrid solution should be open to work with any file sharing services.

EMC Syncplicity holds better promise as it seems. In its roadmap, it will certify and support 3rd party storage systems, as quoted in this article. But the realization of that day when EMC Syncplicity will suppport a 3rd party storage is still far off.

We are talking about today, where an EFSS solution is required here and now. Is there one out there that can meet open requirements? Let me count the ways:

1. We want an EFSS solution that has true intentions to unleash the power of existing corporate file sharing services and securely put the corporate data and files into the hands of the mobile corporate IT users.
2. We want one EFSS solution that should not prescribe what platform we should use to share our corporate files to the mobile devices
3. We want a well-integrated mobile device management solution with user and identity management and authentication system for security, compliance and data privacy.

As I explore the Novell Filr from the 3 different angles above, Novell Filr seems to have all the ingredients when meeting head-to-head with the 3 storage vendors’ solutions.

It does not disrupt the corporations’ existing File Server or NAS storage infrastructure and is vendor agnostic. This allows corporations to securely share their corporate data and files beyond the realms of the firewalled corporate networks without losing control or violate compliance and privacy regulations.

Novell already is a proven enterprise user and identity management solution leader and coupled with their Zenworks Mobile Management solution, they have a well integrated BYOD/MDM/EFSS framework for the enterprise. Novell Filr definitely having the right stuff as I see it.

Here’s a high level overview of the Novell Filr:

The journey continues for me. I hope to be able to share deeper into Novell Filr technology next.

Gartner defines this market as Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) and it is already a very crowded market given the popularity of Dropbox, Box.net, Sugarsync and many, many others. It is definitely a market that is coveted by many but mastered by a few. There are just too many pretenders and too few real players.

The proliferation of smart phones and tablets and other mobile devices has opened up a burgeoning need to have data everywhere. The wonderfulness of having data right at the fingertips every time they are wanted give rise to the need of wanting business and corporate data to be available as well. The power of having data instantly at the swipe of our fingers on the touchscreen is akin us feeling like God, giving life to our communication and us making opportunities come alive at the very moment.

Well, guess what … (as quoted in Spiderman) – “With great powers comes great responsibilities“. The corporate data and files shared must be made available with control and security. That’s what folks at IT and MIS want to do and that is to control and secure the files and data so that they don’t go beyond the boundaries and domain of corporate network. And IT is constantly challenged to fight data leakage and intends to keep data and files as secure as possible.

Unfortunately, many employees chose convenience and productivity of sharing files and data over the pedantic control and security of IT. This has lead to the popularity of cloud-based file sharing and multi-device file synchronization services such as Dropbox, Box.net and many, many others. These start-ups with different variations of File Synchronization and Sharing are growing like wildfire and this only confirms and validates the significance of this market.

But what most do not realize is that these “Dropbox”-like file synchronization and sharing services have 2 main flaws:

1) They are not Enterprise, which means they constantly lacks the security, service availability and they do not meet many companies’ data privacy and compliance regulations.

2) This market is burgeoning and dominated by start-ups. The big boys have started to take notice and soon, the market will go through a shake-up which can either have the start-ups being acquired or reduced to rubble in the wake of wealthier and stronger competitors. This means there is a possibility this is not a viable long-term strategy, something businesses and corporations fear.

At one end, in the more consumer space and the social media savvy crowd, there is Google GDrive, Microsoft SkyDrive and Apple iCloud, Dropbox Enterprise trying to convince businesses by offering very low cost services with the enterprise “look-and-feel”. However, these services require businesses to move their data into the Cloud with little regard that there are many internal file sharing services via file servers and NAS storage that are driving employees’ home directories, user working folders and even enterprise business applications. Businesses do not take such risks moving their file services to the cloud.

Coming from the other end, enterprise solution companies have began offering Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) solutions. There are NetApp with ionGrid, EMC Syncplicity, Acronis GroupLogic, VMware Project Horizon, Citrix ShareFile and a few more. And then there is the Novell Filr, which has just been released into the open at the end of April 2013.

I promised more than a year ago to write about the Novell Filr when it is released and this blog entry is to start off that journey to discover more about the Novell Filr technology.

The landscape has certainly changed since then. The file synchronization and sharing market is beginning to take on the Enterprise responsibilities. IT and MIS have released some of their fears of losing security and control of BYOD/File sharing as solutions such as Novell Filr are beginning to help alleviate fears and challenges by imposing greater control on security concerns but at the same time, unleashing the internal and corporate file sharing and NAS services beyond corporate networks to increase the convenience and simplicity of accessing these data and files and improves employees’ productivity with multi-device and mobility support.

In the coming blog entries, I intend to delve deeper into Novell Filr technology and share with you where Novell Filr is different amid the sea of enterprise file synchronization and sharing solutions.

In the release announcement, EMC claimed the following (a cut-&-paste from the announcement):

• The EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform uniquely provides the ability to both manage storage infrastructure (Control Plane) and the data residing within that infrastructure (Data Plane).
• The EMC ViPR Controller leverages existing storage infrastructures for traditional workloads, but provisions new ViPR Object Data Services (with access via Amazon S3 or HDFS APIs) for next-generation workloads. ViPR Object Data Services integrate with OpenStack via Swift and can be run against enterprise or commodity storage.
• EMC ViPR integrates tightly with VMware’s Software Defined Data Center through industry standard APIs and interoperates with Microsoft and OpenStack.

The separation of the Control Plane and the Data Plane of the ViPR allows the abstraction of 2 main layers.

Layer 1 is the abstraction of the underlying storage hardware infrastructure. Although I don’t have the full details (EMC guys please enlighten me, please!), I believe storage administrator no longer need to carve out LUNs from RAID groups or Storage Pools, striped and sliced them and further provision them into meta file systems before they are exported or shared through NAS protocols. I am , of course, quoting the underlying provisioning architecture of Celerra, which can be quite complex. Anyone who has done manual provisioning with Celerra Manager should know what I mean.

Here’s the provisioning architecture of Celerra:

Even though NetApp’s ONTAP and WAFL provisioning architecture is more simplified than the original Celerra provisioning architecture, and EMC VNX Unisphere has un-obfuscate the file provisioning process in unified VNX, fundamentally, the process and the science behind storage capacity provisioning have not changed.

EMC ViPR Controller, which is the Control Plane, now looks at the storage components and resources as a consolidated resource repository (I am resisting to call it a pool for obvious reasons). The beauty of this approach is that a storage administrator can now call the shots of storage provisioning that is more congruent with business and operational requirements.

I believe one can say -”Give me 10GB of capacity that will continue to serve an requirement of 5% growth rate and is able to meet an RPO of 8 hours. Meanwhile the data in the provisioned capacity should meet an expected SLA of a defined level metrics, and has priorities for certain transactional requirements and yet maintain compliance and recovery throughout a certain geographic region”. And all the storage administrator has to do is to create a job policy that will provision the storage, and manage the underlying storage and data infrastructure throughout the lifecycle of the storage container and capacity as it is used.

Or course, I could be completely wrong with what I just wrote in the above, and I am hoping that someone with deep knowledge of the EMC ViPR controller’s administration to give me lesson of storage admin that I would never forget.

But still, that is one heck of a wish. It’s like Tony Stark commanding Jarvis in the most sarcastic and yet subtle manner, and Jarvis is still able to pull it off excellently. Well, I do hope that the EMC ViPR controller job policy engine could evolve into what Jarvis can do for Ironman and Tony Stark.

And it would be super cool to have a EMC ViPR dashboard interface like Jarvis. See below:

The other layer is the Data Plane and this is something that is extremely interesting because it would be able to switch between traditional workload and “next-generation” workload. If the workload is for SAN or NAS, i.e. blocks and files respectively, ViPR does not take an active role and basically passes off the data plane function to the underlying storage array controller.

However, for “next-generation” workload that involves hyperscaling of storage resources for cloud computing and big data, those that involves data of the 3Vs (volume, variety and velocity) nature, the Data Plane takes the data and objectify them into object-based data objects and distributing them with HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), across platforms like OpenStack Swift and Amazon S3. At the same time, newer access methods such as REST and HDFS are integrated as part of the “next-generation” data object access and delivery mechanism. The HDFS Data Service also provide in-place analytics. In all, this is the EMC ViPR Data Object Services.

EMC has announced that the initial ViPR will support EMC Atmos, EMC VNX and EMC Isilon as the persistent layer of storage infrastructure and also commodity hardware (for OpenStack Swift and Amazon S3). I even read somewhere that NetApp FAS and E-Series are supported as well, but don’t quote me for that.

The idea of having policy-based provisioning is not new. I have seen from time and time again, many 3rd party storage software solutions meaning to do just that.

One that comes to mind is the vendor-agnostic DataCore SANSymphony solution and they have been doing it for years. Another one that is closer to the heart is a little known company called Menloware. I personally know the creator, and founder of Menloware and I would suppose he would be happy if I did a little advertising for him.

Below is the architecture diagram of the policy-based storage management software:

Note: If you guys are interested in Menloware, a policy-based storage management software which is vendor-agnostic, let me know. (Brad, this is for you!)

I am not going to decide if this “Software-defined Storage”(SDS) thingy warrants any debate. I will let the analysts and punters do that. The satisfying thing for me was to read the type of spin and BS everyone has on SDS, and trying to bash EMC’s version of SDS. It is really funny when you have this “pot calling the kettle back” situation.

Read this article to see how hard NetApp is trying to convince everyone about them being hardware independent.  Or this article on several EMC competitors’ take on SDS.

This is the one that HDS encounters epic failure when their CTO, Hu Yoshida, said in a different article, that “people are buying dumb storage“. How can you say you are software-defined storage when your CTO is bashing customers buying dumb storage? If it is SDS, then obviously the intelligence is in the software but apparently their CTO wants people to buy intelligent storage hardware. HDS has to make up their mind where they want their storage intelligence to be – software or hardware?

I am not saying what EMC is doing is the correct way of doing SDS, but when one starts to decouple the storage hardware and storage software, customers will have a choice to decide what type of storage hardware they want to use, especially with commodity hardware.

It’s been too long that customers are pulled through their nose rings and locked in by proprietary storage hardware. EMC ViPR can be a turning point. I think the storage vendors owe the customer that.

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.

We are also beginning to see all-flash-based appearing as a component in the networking in item (2). EMC called this Caching Area Network (CAN) to accelerate read and write I/Os downstream from the servers. EMC Project Thunder will be addressing just that as seen in an old PPT slide below:

I have not been touch about the availability of EMC’s Project Thunder, and it is likely that the solution will be out this year. In the same beat, NetApp has quietly acquired CacheIQ to accelerate NAS performance and could probably built upon CacheIQ RapidCache’s technology to address the non-NAS requirements in the future.

In item (3) above, NetApp has been beating its drums for years with the FlashCache solution. Initially known as PAM cards, this storage-side PCIe card accelerates read I/O operations and they are part of NetApp’s Virtual Storage Tier (VST) strategy.

The last item, item (4) basically introduces SSDs to the disk shelves of the NetApp and EMC, as well as the other storage vendors. They are typically used as either an extension of the storage system’s memory, as seen in EMC VNX FastCache technology or as a Tier 0 level in an automated storage tiering technology offering, such as EMC FAST2.

But the argument of the article is that both NetApp and EMC are in quandary. Both their storage operating system and its corresponding filesystem are “ancient” from a flash perspective. They were designed and developed for block-based disk devices to make a set of disks look like a disk to the hosting operating systems or applications. Technically, these storage filesystems are “not optimized” for flash.

NAND Flash is at present the most popular of all the solid state storage technologies. And NAND Flash has a few idiosyncrasies of its own that is probably not anticipated by traditional block-based filesystems. These idiosyncrasies include:

• Blocks in the flash memory cells have to be explicitly erased before they can be written to. This means that if a write is directed to a byte, the entire block to be written to 1 before the byte can be overwritten with 1s or 0s. This Block Erasure behaviour affects write performance of the NAND Flash.
• Flash memory does not impose seek time but most block-based file systems infer that disk seek time as part of its design. Therefore, the random access in flash memory can be affected because of the Block Erasure behaviour (see previous point) as well as the copy-on-write nature of flash friendly filesystems by writing updates to new fresh blocks rather than returning to modify the old blocks. I wrote about the effects of copy-on-write filesystems with SSDs more than a year ago.
• Wear-leveling effect where filesystems considerations have to be made to address the possibility of dying flash memory cells due to overwriting to the same location repeatedly. Wear leveling algorithms include spreading and balancing writes across the mappable surface of the flash memory, additional flash memory buffer for spare blocks, error correction and so on.

With the rapid rise in the adoption of flash-based storage devices, the article argues that it would be hard for EMC or NetApp to rip out and replace their (“ancient and less flash-friendly”) filesystems from their enterprise storage arrays. EMC has quickly addressed this gap by acquiring XtremIO last year while NetApp has announced their flash strategy with the FlashRay architecture back in November 2012.

Side note: I have not spend my time studying about EMC XtremIO or NetApp FlashRay although I am happy to have known Shahar Frank, one of the founders of XtremIO, through my blog. Note to self -> Reading something there

As I scour the web for flash-friendly filesystems, all signs point to Log-based Filesystems. It appears that log-based filesystems have most of the attractive properties for a flash-friendly filesystem. While I do not understand the design of log-based file system in depth, it appears to have the characteristics that fit into the idiosyncrasies of NAND Flash as described above.

The log-based filesystem treats the all the freely writable storage capacity as a circular log, which has a head and a tail. The log-based filesystem writes forward in a sequential continuous stream (known as a log) to the head of the log but must reclaim the used but obsolete block at the tail of the circular log. This behaviour of the log-based filesystem mimics part of the wear-leveling implementation by writing to new blocks in the flash memory and doing block erasure and garbage collection at the beginning of the flash memory space.

The heavy lifting of wear-leveling, error checking, erasing unused or obsolete blocks, garbage collection can be addressed by the flash controller. The read I/O operations can be accelerated with having all flash memory caching mechanisms such as storage-side PCIe and in storage SSDs, leaving the log-based filesystem to concentrate on optimizing sequential writes to the flash storage blocks.

Linux is already building a flash-friendly kernel with the implementation of a Flash Translation Layer (FTL) to address the idiosyncrasies of flash memory. Here’s a diagram I found from Usenix that shows the FTL implementation:

There is no doubt that flash-based storage will continue to grow and flash-friendly filesystems should not be too far behind. And the big boys are definitely not going to let the new boys like Nimble Storage, Tintri and Tegile to eat into their flash storage pie!

NOTE: The understanding of the Log-based filesystem is based on my comprehension and interpretation. I do not claim to be an expert in this field and this is an opportunity for me to learn and share. 

Back in early 2012, Fujitsu has shown good signs of taking market share in the enterprise storage but what happened to that? In the last 2 quarters, the server boys in the likes of HP, IBM and Dell storage market share have either shrunk (in the case of HP and Dell) or tanked (as in IBM). I would have expected Fujitsu to continue its impressive run and continue to capture more of the enterprise market, and yet it didn’t. Why?

I was given an Eternus storage technology update by the Fujitsu Malaysia pre-sales team more than a year ago. It has made some significant gains in technology such as Advanced Copy, Remote Copy, Thin Provisioning, and Eco-Mode, but I was unimpressed. The technology features were more like a follower, since every other storage vendor in town already has those features.

And there were noticeable gaps too, especially the lack of an integrated NAS solution, which Fujitsu could have proudly called “unified storage”. Several other vendors have already integrated object-based storage into their unified platforms, Fujitsu’s cloud storage offering is yet to be seen.

The storage market, as I have seen in Malaysia, is getting very crowded now. Start-ups such Nimble Storage, Nimbus Data, Nutanix, Violin Memory and a few others have already made it to our shores months ago, focusing on the scaling performance or scaling capacity selling (as in scale-out architectures) or leveraging on the server or desktop virtualization play with all-flash or hybrid strategy.

With the soft storage market and the server boys of IBM, Dell and HP (especially HP and Dell) faltering, Fujitsu can be in a great position to take advantage of the market, if they want to.

Their partnership with Sun (I mean Oracle) on the SPARC server is going great, with recent SPARC T5 and M5 launch. They should leverage on that partnership at a local level, in both Malaysia and Singapore, by doing testing and validation of Sun’s (damn it, I mean Oracle!) ZFS storage appliance. That will solve their NAS deficiency immediately.

Secondly, they should also leverage their partnership with Violin Memory to bolster their flash offering. I hardly hear of Fujitsu Malaysia speaking much about this partnership. After all, Violin Memory claims to be the fastest all-flash in the world! And there is a Fusion IO relationship in there somewhere!

Thirdly, their Primergy servers are one of the better enterprise servers in the local Malaysian market. The Eternus enterprise storage should be part of the attached sales as well, as HP and Dell in Malaysia have been doing for years.

So, in my analysis, Fujitsu is well positioned to gain greater local market awareness for their Eternus enterprise storage offering. After all, Fujitsu claims to have 40 years of building enterprise storage and 1,000 storage engineers in its arsenal. See link here and screenshot below:

Whatever Fujitsu Malaysia needs to do, it has to be done within the next 2 quarters. The startups I mentioned are already building their market, and make their presence felt locally. As they mature and with Dell and HP distracted, Fujitsu Malaysia got to be ready take advantage of this lull period.

I have the utmost respect for Fujitsu Malaysia, because the Japanese makes damn reliable products. But they just got to make themselves more well known, solution-wise, technology-wise, prowess-wise. For their sake.

I woke up in Bangalore in India at 3am, not having adjusted myself to the local timezone. Plenty of things were on my mind but I can’t help thinking about what’s happening in the enterprise storage market after the Gartner Worldwide External Controller-Based report for 4Q12 came out  last night. Below is the consolidated table from Gartner:

Just a few weeks ago, it was IDC with its Worldwide Disk Storage Tracker and below is their table as well:

Both reports painted the same landscape, with EMC slowly but surely become a storage behemoth because competitors like IBM, HP, NetApp and HDS are not doing enough to win against EMC. In fact, some vendors like HP, Oracle and Dell are really tripping themselves over if you look at the numbers on both tables. HP is probably the worst of the lot, reporting -7.4% revenue loss in the IDC table and a whopping -13.7% in the Gartner report! What the hell is HP doing? Running scared?

2 good HP Malaysia buddies of mine, both with more than 15 years in HP, have left. I have been hearing HP storage guys in Malaysia desperately trying to leave, and knowing a couple of seniors who have left to join Fujitsu and Netapp Malaysia respectively.

And about a month ago, I went for an interview for the HP Malaysia storage country manager job. HP and IBM Malaysia aren’t really the type of companies I would like work for. I prefer start-ups who can afford my screw-ups (ha ha) but that’s how we grow together. We fail, we learn, and we grow. That was my experience when I was the first employee of NetApp Malaysia. (Well, technically I was the second employee because the country manager then left less than 6 months into his job)

NetApp Malaysia from the year 2000 has grown strength to strength, not because of my 5.5 years there, but more about NetApp’s ability to get their people to tell the beautiful story together. The employees, the partners, and entire ecosystem sing the same notes, pull the same heartstrings and speak that impassioned storage story. Even guys like me, who has left NetApp Malaysia 8 years ago, continue to evangelize and influence my circle about NetApp.

Back to this HP interview. I didn’t know what got over me when the head hunter asked me to “try” for the HP Malaysia Storage Country Manager job. So I took her invitation, and went for the interview, having the notion that this was a technology job and lead the HP Malaysia Storage team and their partners. I had the belief that I could use my experience in building and liven up the technology community for HP Storage. To me, it was another opportunity to learn and share HP storage technology. The definitive word here being SHARE, which is equated with story telling.

Mind you, I know HP has great technology and innovation in their storage solutions. Yet, after the interview with HP’s managing director, it turned out that their primary concern was about bringing the numbers first and placed a lesser priority in building what a strong technology ecosystem could bring to HP Malaysia in the long run. His immediate vision, perhaps stifled by the pressures of HP management, was too short term. In my opinion, HP was scared in making mistakes and scared of telling beautiful story of their storage technology and culture.

Obviously I was the wrong guy for the job and I am not writing this entry to spite HP Malaysia. I was grateful for the opportunity to meet and learn.

But I believed in story telling part of my daily muse in evangelizing any storage technology that I know, and the things that I believed in. And I am not just NetApp all the way, because I also do the same thing for EMC as well. And Sun too but Oracle Malaysia is screwing up big time with their storage story.

Just a week later after the interview, I was one of the speakers at CIO Asia and you can look at the agenda here. One of the key things I said as I addressed the crowd was “a CIO has to be courageous to break the rules, tell that beautiful story and energize the organization” There was a deja vu moment when I was up on stage, thinking about the interview with HP Malaysia. Where was the courage for HP Malaysia?

This week I am in India conducting a NetApp course for IBM India and last week I was conducting another NetApp course for HP outsourcing guys in Malaysia. And students come up to me asking if I could introduce them to NetApp opportunities. You can figure out for yourself why IBM and HP are losing the mindshare battle of their storage against NetApp. NetApp has energized people like me to lead a tribe and tell that beautiful NetApp story.

I continue to believe that EMC and NetApp have been great because they provided a platform and an ecosystem for the story-tellers to tell their beautiful storage stories, with EMC executing better than the rest. I am beginning to see HDS coming up too, after being a laggard for years.

This is what executing the story is all about. And you win when you are telling the beautiful story about your storage technology. 

IMPORTANT NOTE BELOW:

p/s: Sometimes I wonder why IBM or HP or Fujitsu or HDS or others don’t approach me to brainwash me. I can brainwash a lot of folks with my story telling, you know (hint hint)

Thanks for your support

I have always maintain that VMware has to power to become a storage killer. I mentioned that it was a silent storage killer in my blog post many moons ago.

And this week, VMware is not so silent anymore. Earlier this week, VMware had just acquired Virsto, a storage hypervisor technology company. News of the acquisition are plentiful on the web and can be found here and here. VMware is seriously pursuing its “Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)” agenda and having completed its software-defined networking component with the acquisition of Nicira back in July 2012, the acquisition of Virsto represents another bedrock component of SDDC, software-defined storage.

Who is Virsto and what do they do? Well, in a nutshell, they abstract the underlying storage architecture and presents a single, global namespace for storage, a big storage pool for VM datastores. I got to know about their presence last year, when I was researching on the topic of storage virtualization.

I was looking at Datacore first, because I was familiar with Datacore. I got to know Roni Putra, Datacore’s CTO, through a mutual friend, when he was back in Malaysia. There was a sense of pride knowing that Roni is a Malaysian. That was back in 2004. But Datacore isn’t the only player in the game, because the market is teeming with folks like Tintri, Nutanix, IBM, HDS and many more. It just so happens that Virsto has caught the eye of VMware as it embarks its first high-profile step (the one that VMware actually steps on the toes of the Storage Big 6 literally) into the storage game. The Big 6 are EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP, HDS and Dell (maybe I should include Fujitsu as well, since it has been taking market share of late)

Virsto installs as a VSA (virtual storage appliance) into ESXi, and in version 2.0, it plugs right in as an almost-native feature of ESXi, not a vCenter tab like most other storage. It looks and feels very much like a vSphere functionality and this blurs the lines of storage and VM management. To the vSphere administrator, the only time it needs to be involved in storage administration is when he/she is provisioning storage or expanding it. Those are the only 2 common “touch-points” that a vSphere administrator has to deal with storage. This, therefore, simplifies the administration and management job.

Here’s a look at the Virsto Storage Hypervisor architecture (credits to Google Images):

What Virsto does, as I understand from high-level, is to take any commodity storage and provides a virtual storage layer and consolidate them into a very large storage pool. The storage pool is called vSpace (previously known as LiveSpace?) and “allocates” Virsto vDisks to each VMs. Each Visto vDisk will look like a native zeroed thick VMDK, with the space efficiency of Linked Clones, but without the performance penalty of provisioning them.  The Virsto vDisks are presented as NFS exports to each VM.

Another important component is the asynchronous write to Virsto vLogs. This is configured at the deployment stage, and this is basically a software-based write cache, quickly acknowledging all writes for write optimization and in the background, asynchronously de-staged to the vSpace. Obviously it will have its own “secret sauce” to optimize the writes.

Within the vSpace, as disk clone groups internal to the Virsto, storage related features such as tiering, thin provisioning, cloning and snapshots are part and parcel of it. Other strong features of Virsto are its workflow wizard in storage provisioning, and its intuitive built-in performance and management console.

As with most technology acquisitions, the company will eventually come to a fork where they have to decide which way to go. VMware has experienced it before with its Nicira acquisition. It had to decide between VxLAN (an IETF standard popularized by Cisco) or Nicira’s own STT (Stateless Transport Tunneling). There is no clear winner because choosing one over the other will have its rewards and losses.

Likewise, the Virsto acquisition will have to be packaged in a friendly manner by VMware. It does not want to step on all toes of its storage Big 6 partners (yet). It still has to abide to some industry “co-opetition” game rules but it has started the ball rolling.

And I see that 2 critical disruptive points about this acquisition in this:

1. It has endorsed the software-defined storage/storage hypervisor/storage virtualization technology and started the commodity storage hardware technology wave. This could the beginning of the end of proprietary storage hardware. This is also helped by other factors such as the Open Compute Project by Facebook. Read my blog post here.
2. It is pushing VMware into a monopoly ala-Microsoft of the yesteryear. But this time around, Microsoft Hyper-V could be the benefactor of the VMware agenda. No wonder VMware needs to restructure and streamline its business. News of VMware laying off about 900 staff can be read here. Its unfavourable news of its shares going down can be read here.

I am sure the Storage Big 6 is on the alert and is probably already building other technology and partnerships beyond VMware. It the natural thing to do but there is no stopping VMware if it wants to step on the Big 6 toes now!

It is the Open Compute Project (OCP), and its mission is to redesign the modern-day data centers and drive open hardware and architectural designs and specifications, including storage. The overall goals are to drive greater data center efficiency, flexibility, energy savings and cost effectiveness in a new class of “hyperscale” datacenters. Facebook, Google and Amazon are some of the examples of hyperscale datacenters, where their businesses relies on massive computing power, exponential storage performance and racks and racks of computing infrastructure to drive their web-computing or cloud-computing services.

Some of the cool technology innovations in mind includes having systems that support any CPUs from any vendors including Intel and AMD. We may even see both processor brands running on the same motherboard. The Open Common Slots component for processors is based on PCIe. Intel has pledged their Decathlete motherboard specifications for OCP and likewise AMD has produced its Roadrunner mobo series specification for the project as well. The ARM processor could also be supported in the near future in this “mix-and-match” OCP ideals.

Other proposed changes include OpenRack specifications, “sleds”, and of course, the Open Vault project for storage (aka “Knox”).

As the Open Vault Storage specification version 0.5 states, the hardware design of Open Vault is a 2U storage enclosure that holds up to 30 units of 3.5″ HDDs. Basically it is really 2  1U trays holding 15 HDDs each. Both 1U trays are interconnected via 4 SAS x4 6Gbps expander boards, 2 (SEB-A and SEB-B below) on each tray.

Here is a high level look at the system components layout of 1 tray:

Here is another view from the front, with both 1U trays together making it 2U.

There is also a photo I got from the specification document, which I like:

All these proposals to the OCP project are really fantastic because it looks like it is going to take off in a big, big way.

I have already seen these significant changes to storage space, as industry players, driven by server virtualization are “cutting the fat“ in between the compute layer and the storage layer, moving the I/O processing and communication closer and closer to the processing power.

From another point of view, pretty soon the storage networking industry would have to drop the “networking” portion and the storage landscape in the hyperscaling datacenters will be dearth of networking protocols such as iSCSI and Fibre Channel. It will be back to the days of DAS (direct-attached storage) once again, but this time, the networking will be based on channel-based, high performing, and low-latency communications such as PCIe.

The “addressing”, delivery methods and configuration will be handled by the software itself, running at the compute layer and we no longer have to configure IP for storage, iSCSI sessions or Fibre Channel zoning to link the LUNs to the applications.

And it is already happening today as we have seen how VMware VSA (virtual storage appliance) doing all that using NFS with internal direct-attached storage. Bigger things are coming too from VMware, like the Virtual SAN technology and it is going to disrupt the storage industry in a big way. I reiterate my stand that VMware is going to be a storage killer. Read my blog post here.

So, if Facebook and its Open Compute Project supporters have it their way, that could spell  a paradigm shift for storage networking professionals (or should I say storage professionals). We would see a new breed of cloud computing professionals coming up in the near future that will have compute, networking, storage, applications, service delivery and business management skill sets, to dominate the job landscape.

At the same time, OCP could define how storage hardware is designed in the future for hyperscalability, creating a snowballing effect on the storage networking industry as a whole. The strongest effect, I believe, will be how future storage OSes are designed to fit into the Open Vault storage specifications.

Perhaps the least important requirement of the Open Vault specification is “vanity-free” but that could take away those ugly bezel designs I see nowadays on the storage hardware. I am hoping and praying …

The assimilation of compute and storage is seen as one of the early steps in the brave new world. As the Borgs would say, “Resistance is futile”.

This one Facebook likes …

A reader of my blog asked if I could do a piece on Coraid. Coraid who?

This name is probably a name not many people heard of in Malaysia. Even most the storage guys that I talk to never heard of it.

I have known about Coraid for a few years now (thanks to my incessant reading habits), looking at it from nonchalant point of view.  But when the reader asked about Coraid, I contacted Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, whom I am not exactly sure how I was connected through LinkedIn. Kevin was very responsive and got one of their Directors to contact me. Kaushik Shirhatti was his name and he was very passionate to share their Coraid technology with me. Thanks Kevin and Kaushik!

That was months ago but the thought of writing this blog post has been lingering. I had to scratch the itch.

So, what’s up with Coraid? I can tell that they are different but seems to me that their entire storage architecture is so simple that it takes a bit of time for even storage guys to wrap their head around it. Why do I say that?

For storage guys (like me), we are used to layers. One of the memorable movie quotes I recalled was from Shrek: “Orges are like onions! Onions have layers!“.

When we dissect the storage networking topology, we have the RAID layer, the abstraction into LUNs layer, the network layer, the session layer, the zoning layer, the masking and mapping layers, and so on, and so forth. You know what I mean. Those are the constructs of a typical SAN architecture. When iSCSI came along more than a decade ago, that layering gotten thicker with more layers, but somehow the customers adopted it. iSCSI, love it or loathe it, has been eating up the Fibre Channel SAN market in the past few years.

Why? I believe the familiarity of “local disk” kept the customers feeling good, within their comfort zone. “It looks and feels like a D: drive”. iSCSI runs on the Ethernet network, not that complex Fibre Channel stuff.

And this is helped by applications such as databases which want and demand local ownership of the storage space. So, the local disk phenomenon continues, despite our usual grouches and complaints about iSCSI performance and security, among others.

But those layers bothers us. Between the compute layer and the storage layer, there are just too many “layers” of ensuring data delivery, consistency, protection, etc, etc. The storage layer is too far apart from the compute layer and in this era of virtualization and cloud, the storage layer must be as close as possible to the compute layer. No wonder we storage guys get blamed for not delivering fast I/O to the compute layer. We have too many layers in between. Maybe we should rope in the network guys to be blamed as well because that’s the layer in between!

No wonder some vendors (VMware included with its VSA architecture) are beginning to reignite the DAS (direct-attached storage) architecture again, coupling it with scale-out and global namespace features.

Well, Coraid is a very good fit into the requirements SAN guys might love. Here are a few I can think of:

• Lesser layers resulting in higher data delivery throughput and lower latency in response time
• Higher security because IP (Internet Protocol) is less involved. We all know the proliferation of IP, but it is also where the exposure to routing that is the bane of security concerns when it comes to networked storage
• Removing traditional SAN implementation such as multipathing, zoning, firewalls etc will inadvertently reduce cost of managing the storage architecture
• Local disk flavour reduces fear and still dances within the customers’ comfort zone

AoE Ethernet type is 0x88A2.

The whole Ethernet SAN architecture, as prescribed by Coraid, is still pretty much the initiator and target concepts, with no architectural change to the Ethernet network. Coraid supplies the HBA (which I was informed is a reflashed Gigabit Ethernet NIC), the AoE driver (easy to install and available for Windows and Linux platforms), and the Coraid EtherDrive SRX storage array. The SRX supports SATA, SAS and SSD drives mixed within the appliance’s chassis.

We know well enough we should never bet against Ethernet, so the future looks bright as the Ethernet speed is moving towards 40Gbit/sec and 100Gbit/sec mainstream is not too far away.

There is no need for multipathing as the AoE driver at the host and OS level installs the AoE mapping layer, which essentially dices all data blocks into 8KB chunks and tracks the sending, the acknowledgment and the receiving of these chunks between the AoE HBA and the SRX storage array. It uses “configuration strings” to ensure consistency and implements a “host-based cooperative locking“.

According to the description from Wikipedia, when more than 1 initiator is accessing the AoE target (the SRX appliance), the AoE target acts as an arbitrator to record and keeps track of which host is accessing the storage blocks at a particular point in time. If there is a conflict, only one access is accepted and the other host is informed of the conflict. The AoE mapping layer will then handle the retransmit if required.

Each segmented 8KB blocks are sent over multiple Ethernet frames, through all available AoE HBA ports as a unicast link. This method ensures the highest possible I/O throughput to the SRX storage array. Coraid claims that their SRX appliance can deliver up to 1,800 MB/sec throughput and 200,000 IOPS in a single 4U appliance.

But my reader wanted to know about Coraid replication technology. Coraid implements remote data copy (which can be viewed as a replication or mirroring technology) in 2 possible ways (excluding host-based replication/mirroring) at their technology’s level.

One of the methods is to introduce the Coraid EtherDrive VSX. Here’s a high level look at the VSX architecture implemented with SRX (courtesy of Coraid):

The EtherDrive VSX appliance integrates multiple EtherDrive SRX appliances and allows block-level synchronous mirroring and asynchronous remote replication. In addition to that, the VSX is also responsible for implementing storage virtualization, snapshots, cloning and thin provisioning.

Hence, their architecture is rather different than other more traditional storage vendors where all these technologies such as replication, snapshots and thin provisioning are all integrated into their storage array. By separating the VSX and the SRX, I can only assume that this will give Coraid the ability to adapt their architecture in a much more flexible manner, leaving the EtherDrive SRX appliance to do what it does best – which is to deliver local drive storage in the high performing manner with the lowest latency through the Ethernet architecture.

The world is changing and the demands of delivering unified storage is on everybody’s lips. So, in July 2012, if I am not wrong about the date, Coraid has licensed ZFS to deliver high-performance NAS with their Coraid ZX appliance. Here’s a high level diagram I got from Coraid’s website.

As you know, I am big fan of ZFS. (read my blog post here). I think by introducing ZFS into their offering, Coraid has completed their portfolio of storage solutions. Of course, ZFS also adds another data replication method. This is the second way that Coraid can deliver remote replication in a disaster recovery situation. Kaushik also shared this slide with me:

Coupled with the acquisition of Yunteq in late 2011, Coraid is integrating their Storage Manager management interface into EtherCloud, their all-encompassing storage management interface. According to IDC, in which I quote:

“Coraid EtherCloud is designed to make every aspect of storage management and
control programmable using a REST API. Using the API, administrators can easily
automate workflows related to storage provisioning and management, and integrate
the management of storage with the rest of the infrastructure.

EtherCloud consists of a policy engine that allows storage to be dynamically allocated
and managed according to application requirements and business policies with endto-
end visibility and control. This allows IT administrators to reduce infrastructure
provisioning times significantly and provide a programmable platform to integrate
storage resources with networking and computing resources. EtherCloud also allows
application owners to deploy storage with one-click provisioning in a multitenant
environment without having to deal with the complexity of underlying storage
operations.”

The overall Coraid architecture is shown below:

Coraid is indeed evolving moving into quite a complete storage solution. As Kevin Brown, Coraid CEO once quoted “We use raw Ethernet for a SAN”.

Indeed AoE is All About Ethernet.

p/s: I just want it clear that I am not paid write this. I do not owe any favour to anyone but I wanted to share with my readers (especially in Malaysia) that there is an interesting storage technology and we should not fear learning about it. 

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