The instant value of Open Source Storage

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[ Full disclosure: I work for iXsystems™ . Opinions and views are mine. ]

TrueNAS Open Storage logo

The story began …

It was 2011. A friend of a friend called me out of the blue. He was rambling about his company’s storage needs. I recalled vividly that he wanted 100TB, and Dell and HP (before HPE) were hopeless doing NAS (network attached storage) in an Apple environment. They assembled a Frankenstein-ish NAS and plastered a price over MYR$100K around it.

In his environment, the Apple workstations were connected to dozens of WD Cloud Book storage (whatever it was called back then), daisy chained via Firewire to each other. I recalled one workstation had 3 WD “books” daisy chained together. They got the exploding storage needs but performance sucked. With every 2nd or 3rd user, access to files were at a snail pace, taking up to more than 2 minutes to open a file sometimes.

At that time, my old colleague at Sun was fervently talking about ZFS and OpenSolaris™. I told him about this opportunity, and so we began. It was him who used the word “crafter”. “We are not building“, he said, “we are crafting“. He was right.

OpenSolaris logo

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Intel is still a formidable force

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It is easy to kick someone who is down. Bad news have stronger ripple effects than the good ones. Intel® is going through a rough patch, and perhaps the worst one so far. They delayed their 7nm manufacturing process, one which could have given Intel® the breathing room in the CPU war with rival AMD. And this delay has been pushed back to 2021, possibly 2022.

Intel Apple Collaboration and Partnership started in 2005

Their association with Apple® is coming to an end after 15 years, and more security flaws surfaced after the Spectre and Meltdown debacle. Extremetech probably said it best (or worst) last month:

If we look deeper (and I am sure you have), all these negative news were related to their processors. Intel® is much, much more than that.

Their Optane™ storage prowess

I have years of association with the folks at Intel® here in Malaysia dating back 20 years. And I hardly see Intel® beating it own drums when it comes to storage technologies but they are beginning to. The Optane™ revolution in storage, has been a game changer. Optane™ enables the implementation of persistent memory or storage class memory, a performance tier that sits between DRAM and the SSD. The speed and more notable the latency of Optane™ are several times faster than the Enterprise SSDs.

Intel pyramid of tiers of storage medium

If you want to know more about Optane™’s latency and speed, here is a very geeky article from Intel®:

The list of storage vendors who have embedded Intel® Optane™ into their gears is long. Vast Data, StorOne™, NetApp® MAX Data, Pure Storage® DirectMemory Modules, HPE 3PAR and Nimble Storage, Dell Technologies PowerMax, PowerScale, PowerScale and many more, cement Intel® storage prowess with Optane™.

3D Xpoint, the Phase Change Memory technology behind Optane™ was from the joint venture between Intel® and Micron®. That partnership was dissolved in 2019, but it has not diminished the momentum of next generation Optane™. Alder Stream and Barlow Pass are going to be Gen-2 SSD and Persistent Memory DC DIMM respectively. A screenshot of the Optane™ roadmap appeared in Blocks & Files last week.

Intel next generation Optane roadmap

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Valuing the security value of NAS storage

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Garmin paid, reportedly millions. Do you sleep well at night knowing that the scourge of ransomware is rampant and ever threatening your business. Is your storage safe enough or have you invested in a storage which was the economical (also to be known as cheap) to your pocket?

Garmin was hacked by ransomware

I have highlighted this before. NAS (Network Attached Storage) has become the goldmine for ransomware. And in the mire of this COVID-19 pandemic, the lackadaisical attitude of securing the NAS storage remains. Too often than not, end users and customers, especially in the small medium enterprises segment, continue to search for the most economical NAS storage to use in their business.

Is price the only factor?

Why do customers and end users like to look at the price? Is an economical capital outlay of a cheap NAS storage with 3-year hardware and shallow technical support that significant to appease the pocket gods? Some end users might decided to rent cloud file storage, Hotel California style until they counted the 3-year “rental” price.

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The prudence needed for storage technology companies

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Blitzscaling has been on my mind a lot. Ever since I discovered that word a while back, it has returned time and time again to fill my thoughts. In the wake of COVID-19, and in the mire of this devastating pandemic, is blitzscaling still the right strategy for this generation of storage technology, hyperconverged, data management and cloud storage startups?

What the heck is Blitzscaling? 

For the uninformed, here’s a video of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked and a member of the Paypal mafia, explaining Blitzscaling.

Blitzscaling is about hyper growing, scaling ultra fast and rocketing to escape velocity, at the expense of things like management efficiency, financial prudence, profits and others. While this blog focuses on storage companies, blitzscaling is probably most recognizable in the massive expansion of Uber (and contraction) a few years ago. In the US, the ride hailing war is between Uber and Lyft, but over here in South East Asia, just a few years back, it was between Uber and Grab. In China it was Uber and Didi.

From the storage angle, 2 segments exemplified the blitzscaling culture between 2015 and 2020.

  • All Flash Startups
  • Hyper Converged Infrastructure Startups

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Persistent Storage could stifle Google Anthos multi-cloud ambitions

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To win in the multi-cloud game, you have to be in your competitors’ cloud. Google Cloud has been doing that since they announced Google Anthos just over a year ago. They have been crafting their “assault”, starting with on-premises, and Anthos on AWS. Anthos on Microsoft® Azure is coming, currently in preview mode.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announcing Google Anthos at Next ’19

BigQuery Omni conversation starter

2 weeks ago, whilst the Google Cloud BigQuery Omni announcement was still under wraps, local Malaysian IT portal Enterprise IT News sent me the embargoed article to seek my views and opinions. I have to admit that I was ignorant about the deeper workings of BigQuery, and haven’t fully gone through the works of Google Anthos as well. So I researched them.

Having done some small works on Qubida (defunct) and Talend several years ago, I have grasped useful data analytics and data enablement concepts, and so BigQuery fitted into my understanding of BigQuery Omni quite well. That triggered my interests to write this blog and meshing the persistent storage conundrum (at least for me it is something to be untangled) to Kubernetes, to GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine), and thus Anthos as well.

For discussion sake, here is an overview of BigQuery Omni.

An overview of Google Cloud BigQuery Omni on multiple cloud providers

My comments and views are in this EITN article “Google Cloud’s BigQuery Omni for Multi-cloud Analytics”.

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The True Value of TrueNAS CORE

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A funny thing came up on my Twitter feed last week. There was an ongoing online voting battle pitting FreeNAS™ (now shall be known as TrueNAS® CORE) against Unraid. I wasn’t aware of it before that and I would not comment about Unraid because I have no experience with the software. But let me share with you my philosophy and my thoughts why I would choose TrueNAS® CORE over Unraid and of course TrueNAS® Enterprise along with it. We have to bear in mind that TrueNAS® SCALE is in development and will soon be here next year in 2021.

The new TrueNAS CORE logo

The real proving grounds

I have been in enterprise storage for a long time. If I were to count the days I entered the industry, that was more than 28 years ago. When people talked about their first PC (personal computer), they would say Atari or Commodore 64, or something retro that was meant for home use. Not me.

My first computer I was affiliated with was a SUN SPARC®station 2 (SS2). I took it home (from the company I was working with), opened it apart, and learned about the SBUS. My computer life started with a technology that was meant for the businesses, for the enterprise. Heck, I even installed and supported a few of the Sun E10000 for 2 years when I was with Sun Microsystems. Since that SS2, my pursuit of knowledge, experience and worldview evolved around storage technologies for the enterprise.

Open source software has also always interested me. I tried a few file systems including Lustre®, that parallel file system that powered some of the world’s supercomputers and I am a certified BeeGFS® Systems Engineer too. In the end, for me, and for many, the real proving grounds isn’t on personal and home use. It is about a storage systems and an OS that are built for the enterprise.

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Resilient Integrated Data Protection against Ransomware

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Early in the year, I wrote about NAS systems being a high impact target for ransomware. I called NAS a goldmine for ransomware. This is still very true because NAS systems are the workhorses of many organizations. They serve files and folders and from it, the sharing and collaboration of Work.

Another common function for NAS systems is being a target for backups. In small medium organizations, backup software often direct their backups to a network drive in the network. Even for larger enterprise customers too, NAS is the common destination for backups.

Backup to NAS system

Typical NAS backup for small medium organizations.

Backup to Data Domain with NAS Protocols

Backup to Data Domain with NAS (NFS, CIFS) Protocols

Ransomware is obviously targeting the backup as another high impact target, with the potential to disrupt the rescue and the restoration of the work files and folders.

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FUDs for Real

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We human beings hate losing. It puts a psychological anxiety of not having to own and we are missing out on something. That “some thing” could be adulation, attention, rewards and many other things that seem to enrich our superficial lives. FOMO (fear of missing out) is real, ladies and gentlemen.

When we see a sign like the one below, what do you think is going through our mind?

Limited Time Offer

Limited Time Offer sign

OMG! I got to get it because the deal is for a limited time only! It will never happen again in my lifetime and I gotta buy it!

The game of FUD

F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). We in the technology business have seen tons of tactics to entice someone to buy our products or switch allegiance to the our side. And we do it ourselves too, consciously and unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally. There is no denying to that.

Based on what is known, and what is unknown to us, we share information which are available to us, in ways we want to influence and effect. But let it be known that we do not have a world view of everything, and thus, we chose to believe what we see and hear and experience. As human beings, we cannot 100% subscribe to be fearless, 100% certain that we are right, and 100% without a doubt do things or acts upon things that will be 100% correct. The outcome of FUD to create a convoluted messed up thought process that will deliver the desired effect and action. It is the universal Law of Cause and Effect.

The effect the marketers want you to think will speed up or delay your decision making, throw a spanner in to the thought process, and illogically gives you meaningless and meaningful (to your desires) heebee jeebees. The feeling of loss or missing out creates “displaced anxiety“, a Freudian concept where the projected fear and emotions will land into something that felt safer, even if the safer “target” may be irrelevant. And it is this irrelevant decision that marketers want to you take, because what they are selling is the “safer” decision.

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Glusterific!

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A conversation with a storage executive last week brought up Gluster, a clustered file system I have not explored in many years. I had one interaction months before its acquisition by RedHat® in 2011.

I remembered the Gluster demo at Jaring over a video call, because I was the lead consultant pitching the scale-out NAS solution. It did not go well, and there were “bugs” which made the Head of IT flinched in her seat. Despite Jaring being Malaysia’s technology trailblazer, the impression of Gluster was forgettable. I stayed on the GlusterFS architecture a little while and then it dropped off my radar.

Gluster Logo Scale Out NAS

Gluster Scale Out NAS

But after the conversation last week, I am elated to revive my interest in Gluster, knowing that something big and impressive in coming into the fore very soon. Studying the architecture (again!), there are 2 parts of Gluster which excite me. One is the Brick and the other is the lack of a Metadata service.

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