Cohesity SpanFS – a foundational shift

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

Cohesity SpanFS impressed me. Their filesystem was designed from ground up to meet the demands of the voluminous cloud-scale data, and yes, the sheer magnitude of data everywhere needs to be managed.

We all know that primary data is always the more important piece of data landscape but there is a growing need to address the secondary data segment as well.

Like a floating iceberg, the piece that is sticking out is the more important primary data but the larger piece beneath the surface of the water, which is the secondary data, is becoming more valuable. Applications such as file shares, archiving, backup, test and development, and analytics and insights are maturing as the foundational data management frameworks and fast becoming the bedrock of businesses.

The ability of businesses to bounce back after a disaster; the relentless testing of large data sets to develop new competitive advantage for businesses; the affirmations and the insights of analyzing data to reduce risks in decision making; all these are the powerful back engine applicability that thrust businesses forward. Even the ability to search for the right information in a sea of data for regulatory and compliance reasons is part of the organization’s data management application.

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Magic happening

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[Preamble: I am a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

The magic is happening.

Dropbox, the magical disruptor, is going IPO.

When Dropbox first entered into the market which eventually termed as BYOD (Bring your Own Device), it was a phenomenon. There was nothing else that matched its simplicity and ease-of-use. A file uploaded into the cloud was instantaneously available on the tablets and smart phones. It was on every storage vendor’s presentation slides, using Dropbox as the perennial name dropping tactic to get end users buy-in.

Dropbox was more than that, and it went on to define a whole new market segment known as Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS), together with everybody else such as Box, Easishare (they are here in South East Asia), and just about everybody else. And the executive team at Dropbox knew they were special too, so much so that they rejected a buyout attempt by Apple in 2011.

Today, Dropbox is beyond BYOD and EFSS. They are a full fledged collaboration platform that includes project management, project workflow, file versioning, secure file transfer, smart file synchronization and Dropbox Paper. And they offer comprehensive plans from Basic, Plus and Professional to Business and Enterprise. Their upcoming IPO, I am sure, will give them far greater capital to expand, and realize their full potential as the foremost content-based collaboration platform in the world.

Dropbox began their exodus from AWS a couple of years ago. They wanted to control their destiny and have moved more than 500PB into their own private data center for their customer data. That was half-an-exabyte, people! And two years later, they saved $75million of operating costs after they exited AWS. Today, they have more than 1 Exabyte of customer data! That is just incredible.

And Dropbox’s storage architecture started with a simple foundational design called “Magic Pocket“. Magic Pocket is a “fixed-length, immutable” block storage layer.

The block size is fixed at 4MB chunks (for parallel performance and service resumption reasons), compressed and deduped (for capacity savings reasons), encrypted (for security reasons) and replicated (for high availability reasons).

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Storage dinosaurs evolving too

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[Preamble: I am a delegate of Storage Field Day 15 from Mar 7-9, 2018. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I have been called a dinosaur. We storage networking professionals and storage technologists have been called dinosaurs. It wasn’t offensive or anything like that and I knew it was coming because the writing was on the wall, … or is it?

The cloud and the breakneck pace of all the technologies that came along have made us, the storage networking professionals, look like relics. The storage guys have been pigeonholed into a sunset segment of the IT industry. SAN and NAS, according to the non-practitioners, were no longer relevant. And cloud has clout (pun intended) us out of the park.

I don’t see us that way. I see that the Storage Dinosaurs are evolving as well, and our storage foundational knowledge and experience are more relevant that ever. And the greatest assets that we, the storage networking professionals, have is our deep understanding of data.

A little over a year ago, I changed the term Storage in my universe to Data Services Platform, and here was the blog I wrote. I blogged again just before the year 2018 began.

 

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My dilemma of stateful storage marriage

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I should be a love match maker.

I have been spending much hours in the past few months, thinking of stateful data in stateful storage containers and how they would consummate with distributed applications containers and functions-as-a-service (aka serverless, aka Lambda). It still hasn’t made much sense, and I have not solved this problem yet. Although there were bits and pieces that coming together and the jigsaw looked well enough to give a cackled reply, what I have now is still not good enough for me. I am still searching for answers, better than the ones I have now.

The CAP theorem is in center of my mind. Distributed data, distributed states of data are on my mind. And by the looks of things, the computing world is heading towards containers and serverless computing too. Both distributed applications containers and serverless computing make a lot of sense. If we were to engage a whole new world of fog computing, edge computing, IoT, autonomous systems, AI, and other real-time computing, I would say that the future belongs to decentralization. Cloud Computing and having edge systems and devices getting back to the cloud for data is too slow. The latency of micro- or even nano-seconds is just not good enough. If we rely on the present methods to access the most relevant data, we are too late.

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Always serendipitous Storage Field Days

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I am off to the Silicon Valley again in the first week of March. Storage Field Day 15 happens from March 7-9, 2018 and this will be my 4th time as a delegate. I am happy because there is always something new, something exciting, and on every occasion, serendipity happened for me.

There is plenty on my mind for this trip. There are several exciting technology vendors I am keen to learn from, notably Hedvig and WekaIO. With so much talks about multicloud and cloud lock-ins these days, there are a bunch of questions on my mind, and a few more that I am trying to piece together.

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Data services platforms – 2018 and beyond

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2017 is drawing to a close. Sadly, I was greeted with the news of Oracle laying off their storage hardware sales team yesterday. And I couldn’t help to see where all this is going, the Oracle Cloud. The cloud has become the data services platform of choice, not on-premise storage infrastructure anymore.

Years ago, when I first started blogging, I wrote that Cloud Computing could make you lose your job unless… I don’t usually make predictions but that prediction in 2011 is becoming true and more prevalent.

What is the future looking like?

For one, it is not bleak and plenty to look forward to. Forrester predicts that in 2018 (or at the end of it), Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google will capture 76% of all cloud platform revenue and 80% by 2020. More data will be generated at the edge than it is being created centrally on public clouds. The demand for high performance data services platforms will be beyond your usual object-based storage and having a data singularity where data can transcend across premises will become crucial in maintaining, extending and improving the services from core-to-edge. Multi-Cloud or Cross-Cloud services platforms are maturing because the cloud platform space, while dominated by AWS, Azure and Google, includes IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Rackspace, Alibaba Cloud, and is also about localized and regionalized players like Markely, Virtustream and ReScale serving unique and niche markets.

To address this shift, data services platforms are reinventing itself to be different. Flash-based, NVMe storage (err, I mean data services platform) is the foundation of building and drive self-service analytics, whether it is file-aware or content-aware, or infrastructure-aware. This new found “awareness” would inculcate platform intelligence and data intelligence, driving automation towards predictive and preemptive actions.

From a security point of view, data privacy and data governance take precedence of form and shape. As Europe enforces the General Data Protection Regulation in May of 2018, the proliferation of multi-clouds and cross-clouds will be questions. How safe is my organization’s data? How will it be regulated as the data crosses cloud boundaries? How to ensure that data workflows and pipelines move freely to shared and unencumbered? These questions are surely be eyeballed in any data regulated segments of the businesses and the individuals who have dealings in those markets.

What about people like us who have been in the storage technology industry for a lot time? I have reverberated that a technology person doing technical work has stand out. Going back to my old 2011 blog, you have to be better than better, knowing the technologies deeper than deeper, and be more connected than you are connected right now. Be EXTRAORDINARY than the typical run-of-the-mill engineer or consultant or architect. Stand Out!

This is not a prediction for the future. I am not a futurist but the signs of change upon the data services platforms (storage for you dinosaurs, yours truly included) are shaping up to tangible forms. And we are going to see lots of more disruptive stuff in 2018 and beyond.

Just my once-in-a-while ranting and we will have a fantastic 2018!

 

Of Object Storage, Filesystems and Multi-Cloud

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Data storage silos everywhere. The early clarion call was to eliminate IT data storage silos by moving to the cloud. Fast forward to the present. Data storage silos are still everywhere, but this time, they are in the clouds. I blogged about this.

Object Storage was all the rage when it first started. AWS, with its S3 (Simple Storage Service) offering, started the cloud storage frenzy. Highly available, globally distributed, simple to access, and fitted superbly into the entire AWS ecosystem. Quickly, a smorgasbord of S3-compatible, S3-like object-based storage emerged. OpenStack Swift, HDS HCP, EMC Atmos, Cleversafe (which became IBM SpectrumScale), Inktank Ceph (which became RedHat Ceph), Bycast (acquired by NetApp to be StorageGrid), Quantum Lattus, Amplidata, and many more. For a period of a few years prior, it looked to me that the popularity of object storage with an S3 compatible front has overtaken distributed file systems.

What’s not to like? Object storage are distributed, they are metadata rich (at a certain structural level), they are immutable (hence secure from a certain point of view), and some even claim self-healing (depending on data protection policies). But one thing that object storage rarely touted dominance was high performance I/O. There were some cases, but they were either fronted by a file system (eg. NFSv4.1 with pNFS extensions), or using some host-based, SAN-client agent (eg. StorNext or Intel Lustre). Object-based storage, in its native form, has not been positioned as high performance I/O storage.

A few weeks ago, I read an article from Storage Soup, Dave Raffo. When I read it, it felt oxymoronic. SwiftStack was just nominated as a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. But according to Dave’s article, Swiftstack did not want to be “associated” with object storage that much, even though Swiftstack’s technology underpinning was all object storage. Strange.

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The power of E8

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 14 from Nov 8-10, 2017. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

E8 Storage technology update at Storage Field Day 14 was impressive. Out of the several next generation NVMe storage technologies I have explored so far, E8 came out as the most complete. It was no surprise that they won the “Best of Show” in the Flash Memory Summits for the “Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology” in 2016 and “Most Innovative Flash Memory Enterprise Business Application” for 2017.

Who is E8 Storage?

They came out of stealth in August 2016 and have been making waves with very impressive stats. When E8 was announced, their numbers were more than 10 million IOPS, with 100µsecs for reads and 40µsecs for writes. And in the SFD14 demo, they reached and past the 10 million IOPS numbers.

The design philosophy of E8 Storage is different than the traditional dual controller scale-up storage architecture design or the multi-node scale-out cluster design. In fact, from a 30,000 feet view, it is quite similar to a “SAN-client” design advocated by Lustre, leveraging a very high throughput, low latency network.

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DellEMC SC progressing well

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[Preamble: I was a delegate of Storage Field Day 14. My expenses, travel and accommodation were paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I haven’t had a preview of the Compellent technology for a long time. My buddies at Impact Business Solutions were the first to introduce the Compellent technology called Data Progression to the local Malaysian market and I was invited to a preview back then. Around the same time, I also recalled another rather similar preview invitation by PTC Singapore for the 3PAR technology called Adaptive Provisioning (it is called Adaptive Optimization now).

Storage tiering was on the rise in the 2009-2010 years. Both Compellent and 3PAR were neck and neck leading the conversation and mind share of storage tiering, and IBM easyTIER and EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) were nowhere to be seen or heard. Vividly, the Compellent Data Progression technology was much more elegant compared to the 3PAR technology. While both intelligent storage tiering technologies were equally good, I took that the 3PAR founders were ex-Sun Microsystems folks, and Unix folks sucked at UX. In this case, Compellent’s Data Progression was a definitely a leg up better than 3PAR.

History aside, this week I have the chance to get a new preview of the Compellent technology again. Compellent was now rebranded as the SC series and was positioned as the mid-range storage arrays of DellEMC. And together with the other Storage Field Day 14 delegates, I have the pleasure to experience the latest SC Data Progression technology update, as well their latest SC All-Flash.

In Data Progression, one interesting feature which caught my attention was the RAID Tiering. This was a dynamic auto expand and auto contract set of RAID tiers – RAID 10 and RAID 5/6 in the Fast Tier and RAID 5/6 in the Lower Tier. RAID 10, RAID 5 and RAID 6 on the same set of drives (including SSDs), and depending on the “hotness” of the data, the location of the data blocks switched between the several RAID tiers in the Fast Tier. Over a longer period, the data blocks would relocate transparently to the Capacity Tier from the Fast Tier.

The Data Progression technology is extremely efficient. The movement of the data between the RAID Tiers and between the Performance/Capacity Tiers are in pages instead of blocks, making the write penalty and bandwidth to a negligible minimum.

The Storage Field Day 14 delegates were also privileged to be the first to get into the deep dive of the new All-Flash SC, just days of the announcement of the All-Flash SC. The All Flash SC redefines and refines the Data Progression to the next level. Among the new optimization, NAND Flash in the SC (both SLCs and MLCs, read-intensive and write-intensive) set the Data Progression default page size from 2MB to 512KB. These smaller 512KB pages enabled reduced bandwidth for tiering between the write-intensive and the read-intensive tier.

I didn’t get the latest SC family photos yet, but I managed to grab a screenshot of the announcement from The Register of the new DellEMC SC Series.

I was very encouraged with the DellEMC Midrange Storage presentation. Besides giving us a fantastic deep dive about the DellEMC SC All-Flash Storage, I was also very impressed by the candid and straightforward attitude of the team, led by their VP of Product Management, Pierluca Chiodelli. An EMC veteran, he was taking up the hard questions onslaught by the SFD14 delegate like a pro. His team’s demeanour was critical in instilling confidence and trust in how the bloggers and the analysts viewed Dell EMC merger, and how the SC and the Unity series would pan out in the technology roadmap.

Unlike the fiasco I went through with the DellEMC Forum 2017 in Malaysia, where I was disturbed with 3 calls in 3 consecutive days by DellEMC Malaysia, I was left with a profound respect for this DellEMC Storage team. They strongly supported their position within the DellEMC storage universe, and imparted their confidence in their technology solution in the marketplace.

Without a doubt, in my point of view, this DellEMC Mid-Range Storage team was the best I have enjoyed in Storage Field Day 14. Thank you.

Commvault UDI – a new CPUU

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[Preamble: I am a delegate of Storage Field Day 14. My expenses, travel and accommodation are paid for by GestaltIT, the organizer and I am not obligated to blog or promote the technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I am here at the Commvault GO 2017. Bob Hammer, Commvault’s CEO is on stage right now. He shares his wisdom and the message is clear. IT to DT. IT to DT? Yes, Information Technology to Data Technology. It is all about the DATA.

The data landscape has changed. The cloud has changed everything. And data is everywhere. This omnipresence of data presents new complexity and new challenges. It is great to get Commvault acknowledging and accepting this change and the challenges that come along with it, and introducing their HyperScale technology and their secret sauce – Universal Dynamic Index.

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