Tag Archives: object storage

The Prophet has arrived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ProphetStor How it works

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

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

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

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

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

Now let us pray … because the prophet has arrived.

Has Object Storage become the everything store?

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I picked up a copy of latest Brad Stone’s book, “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon“ at the airport on my way to Beijing last Saturday. I have been reading it my whole time I have been in Beijing, reading in awe about the turbulent ups and downs of Amazon.com.

The Everything Store cover

In its own serendipitous ways, Object-based Storage Devices (OSDs) have been floating in my universe in the past few weeks. Seems like OSDs have been getting a lot of coverage lately and suddenly, while in the shower, I just had an epiphany!

Are storage vendors now positioning Object-based Storage Devices (OSDs) as Everything Store?

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The future is intelligent objects

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We are used to block-based approach and also the file-based approach to data. The 2 diagrams below shows the basics of how we access data in both block-based and file-based data on the storage device.

 

For block-based , the storage of the blocks is merely in arrays of unrelated contiguous blocks. For file-based, as seen below,

 

there is another layer of abstraction, and this is called the file system. But if you seen both diagrams above, there are some random numbers in light blue and that is to represent the storage device, the hard disk drive’s export of “containers” to the file system or the application that is accessing the storage device. This is usually the LBA (Logical Block Addressing), which is basically set of schematics that defines the locations on the hard disk drives. LBA tells the location of where the data is stored. For more information about LBA, check out this Wikipedia definition. But the whole idea is LBA is dumb. It is pretty much static and exported to file systems and applications so that these guys can do something with it.

There’s something brewing in the background since 1994 and it is one of the many efforts to make intelligent storage devices. This new object-based interface was part of the research project done by Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU). Initially, it was known as Network Attached Secure Disk (NASD) but eventually made its way to the working group in SNIA, and developing it for ANSI T10 INCITS standard. ANSI T10 is the guardian of all SCSI standards. This is called Object Storage Device (OSD). The SCSI architecture diagram below shows the layer where OSD resides.

 

The motivation for this simple: To make storage devices of today to do more computational work, in particularly I/O, relieving the hosts and the local systems to concentrate other computational processing work. And the same time, the local systems must have some level of interactivity and management between the storage object and the computational hosts.

In the diagram below which compares both block-based and OSD,

 

you can see the separation of file system management interface that is at the kernel-space of the local host/system and this is replaced by the OSD Management interface at the storage device.

What does this all mean? This means that using LBA type of addressing that we are familiar with in the block-based and file-based storage is no longer the way to go, because as I mentioned before, LBA is dumb.

OSD, in some way, replaces the LBA with OIDs (Object IDs). The existing local system and/or its file system will interact with the storage devices with OIDs and the OIDs links to its respective objects storage. And the object will carry a lot of metadata, that represents the object, giving it the intelligent and management capability of the object.

 

 

The prominence of the metadata in the OSD would mean that we can build much more intelligent systems in the future. The OIDs and the objects can be grouped together in a flat design or can be organized and categorized in a virtual, hierarchical model.

 

Object storage is an intelligent evolution of disk drives that can store and serve objects rather than simply place data on tracks and sectors. And it can bring the following benefits:

  • Intelligent space management in the storage layer
  • Data aware pre-fetching and caching
  • Robust shared access by multiple clients
  • Scalable performance using off-loaded data path
  • Reliability security

Several vendors such as EMC and NetApp are already supporting OSD.