FreeBSD Archives - Storage Gaga

Open Source on my mind

By cfheoh | July 25, 2022 - 6:30 am |July 25, 2022 Ceph, Cloud, Decentralized Storage, Digital Transformation, FreeNAS, iXsystems, Kubernetes, Linux, Minio, NFS, Nutanix, Object Storage, Openstack, OpenZFS, TrueNAS

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Last week was cropped with topics around Open Source software. I want to voice my opinions here (with a bit of ranting) and hoping not to rouse many abhorrent comments from different parties and views. This blog is to create conversations, even controversial ones, but we must first agree that there will be disagreements. We must accept disagreements as part of this conversation.

In my 30 years career, Open Source has been a big part of my development and progress. The ideas of freely using (certain) software without any licensing implications and these software being openly available were not always welcomed, as they are now. I think the Open Source revolution has created an innovation movement that is still going strong, and it has not only permeated completely into the IT industry, Open Source has also now in almost every part of the technology-based industries as well. The Open Source influence is massive.

Open Source word cloud

In the beginning

In the beginning, in my beginning in 1992, the availability of software and its source codes was a closed one. Coming from a VAX/VMS background (I was a system admin in my mathematics department’s mini computers), Unix liberated my thinking. The final 6 months in the university was systems programming in C, and it completely changed how I wanted my career to shape. The mantra of “Free as in Freedom” in General Public License GPL (which I got know of much later) boded well with my own tenets in life.

If closed source development models led to proprietary software and a centralized way to distributing software with license, I would count the Open Source development models as one of the earliest decentralized technology frameworks. Down with the capitalistic corporations (aka Evil Empires)!

It was certainly a wonderful and generous way to make the world that it is today. It is a better world now.

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Give back or no give

By cfheoh | September 7, 2020 - 9:15 am |September 5, 2020 Amazon Web Services, Ceph, Cloud, Datto, Filesystems, FreeNAS, Gluster, Hadoop, iXsystems, Joyent, Linux, Lustre, Microsoft, Minio, NAS, Nexenta, Openstack, QNAP, Redhat, SuSE, Synology, Tegile

Open Source bag of worms

Even with the concerted efforts of the open source communities and projects, there were many situations which have caused frictions and inadvertently, major issues as well. There are several open source projects licenses, and they are not always compatible when different open source projects mesh together for the greater good.

On the storage side of things, 2 “incidents” caught the attention of the masses. For instance, Linus Torvalds, Linux BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) and emperor supremo said “Don’t use ZFS” partly due to the ignorance and incompatibility of Linux GPL (General Public License) and ZFS CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). That ruffled some feathers amongst the OpenZFS community that Matt Ahrens, the co-creator of the ZFS file system and OpenZFS community leader had to defend OpenZFS from Linus’ comments.

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The instant value of Open Source Storage

By cfheoh | August 24, 2020 - 9:15 am |August 23, 2020 Apple, Appliance, Ceph, Filesystems, FreeNAS, Gluster, iXsystems, Minio, NAS, Object Storage, Openstack, Software Defined Storage, TrueNAS

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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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The True Value of TrueNAS CORE

By cfheoh | July 20, 2020 - 9:00 am |July 21, 2020 Appliance, BeeGFS, CIFS, Clusters, Data Direct Networks, Datto, Filesystems, FreeNAS, High Performance Computing, iXsystems, Joyent, Linux, Lustre, NAS, NetApp, Nexenta, NFS, Pure Storage, QNAP, Scale-out architecture, Software Defined Storage, Tegile, TrueNAS

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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Dell EMC Isilon is an Emmy winner!

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

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[ Disclosure: I was invited by GestaltIT as a delegate to their Storage Field Day 19 event from Jan 22-24, 2020 in the Silicon Valley USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by GestaltIT, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote the vendors’ technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views ]

And the Emmy® goes to …

Yes, the Emmy® goes to Dell EMC Isilon! It was indeed a well deserved accolade and an honour!

Dell EMC Isilon had just won the Technology & Engineering Emmy® Awards a week before Storage Field Day 19, for their outstanding pioneering work on the NAS platform tiering technology of media and broadcasting content according to business value.

A lasting true clustered NAS

This is not a blog to praise Isilon but one that instill respect to a real true clustered, scale-out file system. I have known of OneFS for a long time, but never really took the opportunity to really put my hands on it since 2006 (there is a story). So here is a look at history …

Back in early to mid-2000, there was a lot of talks about large scale NAS. There were several players in the nascent scaling NAS market. NetApp was the filer king, with several competitors such as Polyserve, Ibrix, Spinnaker, Panasas and the young upstart Isilon. There were also Procom, BlueArc and NetApp’s predecessor Auspex. By the second half of the 2000 decade, the market consolidated and most of these NAS players were acquired.

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

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Ryussi MoSMB – High performance SMB

By cfheoh | March 9, 2017 - 1:52 am |March 9, 2017 ATA over Ethernet, CIFS, Data Management, Filesystems, FreeNAS, Linux, Microsoft, NAS, NFS, Ryuusi, Virtualization

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I am back in the Silicon Valley as a Storage Field Day 12 delegate.

One of the early presenters was Ryussi, who was sharing a proprietary SMB server implementation of Linux and Unix systems. The first thing which comes to my mind was why not SAMBA? It’s free; It works; It has the 25 years maturity. But my experience with SAMBA, even in the present 4.x, does have its quirks and challenges, especially in the performance of large file transfers.

One of my customers uses our FreeNAS box. It’s a 50TB box for computer graphics artists and a rendering engine. After running the box for about 3 months, one case escalated to us was the SMB shares couldn’t be mapped all of a sudden. All the Windows clients were running version 10. Our investigation led us to look at the performance of SMB in the SAMBA 4 of FreeNAS.

This led to other questions such as the vfs_aio_pthread, FreeBSD/FreeNAS implementation of asynchronous I/O to overcome the performance weaknesses of the POSIX AsyncIO interface. The FreeNAS forum is flooded with sightings of missing SMB service that during large file transfer. Without getting too deep into the SMB performance issue, we decided to set the “Server Minimum Protocol” and “Server Maximum Protocol” to be SMB 2.1. The FreeNAS box at the customer has been stable now for the past 5 months.

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