RAIDZ expansion and dRAID excellent OpenZFS adventure

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is the foundation of almost every enterprise storage array in existence. Thus a technology change to a RAID implementation is a big deal. In recent weeks, we have witnessed not one, but two seismic development updates to the volume management RAID subsystem of the OpenZFS open source storage platform.

OpenZFS logo

For the uninformed, ZFS is one of the rarities in the storage industry which combines the volume manager and the file system as one. Unlike traditional volume management, ZFS merges both the physical data storage representations (eg. Hard Disk Drives, Solid State Drives) and the logical data structures (eg. RAID stripe, mirror, Z1, Z2, Z3) together with a highly reliable file system that scales. For a storage practitioner like me, working with ZFS is that there is always a “I get it!” moment every time, because the beauty is there are both elegances of power and simplicity rolled into one.

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OpenZFS 2.0 exciting new future

The OpenZFS (virtual) Developer Summit ended over a weekend ago. I stayed up a bit (not much) to listen to some of the talks because it started midnight my time, and ran till 5am on the first day, and 2am on the second day. Like a giddy schoolboy, I was excited, not because I am working for iXsystems™ now, but I have been a fan and a follower of the ZFS file system for a long time.

History wise, ZFS was conceived at Sun Microsystems in 2005. I started working on ZFS reselling Nexenta in 2009 (my first venture into business with my company nextIQ) after I was professionally released by EMC early that year. I bought a Sun X4150 from one of Sun’s distributors, and started creating a lab server. I didn’t like the workings of NexentaStor (and NexentaCore) very much, and it was priced at 8TB per increment. Later, I started my second company with a partner and it was him who showed me the elegance and beauty of ZFS through the command lines. The creed of ZFS as a volume and a file system at the same time with the CLI had an effect on me. I was in love.

OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020 Logo

OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020 Logo

Exciting developments

Among the many talks shared in the OpenZFS Developer Summit 2020 , there were a few ideas and developments which were exciting to me. Here are 3 which I liked and I provide some commentary about them.

  • Block Reference Table
  • dRAID (declustered RAID)
  • Persistent L2ARC

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Give back or no give

[ Disclosure: I work for iXsystems™ Inc. Views and opinions are my own. ]

If my memory served me right, I recalled the illustrious leader of the Illumos project, Garrett D’Amore ranting about companies, big and small, taking OpenZFS open source codes and projects to incorporate into their own technology but hardly ever giving back to the open source community. That was almost 6 years ago.

My thoughts immediately go back to the days when open source was starting to take off back in the early 2000s. Oracle 9i database had just embraced Linux in a big way, and the book by Eric S. Raymond, “The Cathedral and The Bazaar” was a big hit.

The Cathedral & The Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

Since then, the blooming days of proprietary software world began to wilt, and over the next twenty plus year, open source software has pretty much taken over the world. Even Microsoft®, the ruthless ruler of the Evil Empire caved in to some of the open source calls. The Microsoft® “I Love Linux” embrace definitely gave the victory feeling of the Rebellion win over the Empire. Open Source won.

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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btrfs butter gone bad?

I wrote about btrfs 8 years ago.

Since then, it has made its way into several small to mid-end storage solutions (more NAS inclined solutions) including Rockstor, Synology, Terramaster, and Asustor. In the Linux world, SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server and OpenSUSE® use btrfs as the default OS file system. I have decided to revisit btrfs filesystem to give some thoughts about its future.

Have you looked under the hood?

The sad part is not many people look under the hood anymore, especially for the market the btrfs storage vendors are targeting. The small medium businesses just want a storage which is cheap. But cheap comes at a risk where the storage reliability and data integrity are often overlooked.

The technical conversation is secondary and thus the lack of queries for strong enterprise features may be leading btrfs to be complacent in its development.

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Time for Fujitsu Malaysia to twist and shout and yet …

The worldwide storage market is going through unprecedented change as it is making baby steps out of one of the longest recessions in history. We are not exactly out of the woods yet, given the Eurozone crisis, slowing growth in China and the little sputters in the US economy.

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.

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AoE – All about Ethernet!

This is long overdue.

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!“.

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Run free … Symantec FileStore

It has been a rough and tough 3 weeks and I missed writing my blog. Last week, the toughest of the 3, was my CompTIA Storage+ training to Symantec SEs in Malaysia. They were a great crowd, and I loved it but I was really tired after that.

One exciting news during that week was the ouster of long time employee, and CEO of Symantec, Enrique Salem and replacing him with Steve Bennett, their Chairman. The news of that unfortunate event can be read from here and here. And almost hours after that, the calls to break up the Veritas portion of Symantec came up and putting pressure on the board of directors in Symantec to either spin-off the entity or sell it off.

To be fair, many observers, including me, believed that the marriage between Symantec and Veritas in 2005 wasn’t really what you would call a “match made in heaven”. It was more like strange bedfellows to me. And there was an internal joke (one that I could not verify) about the Veritas CEO, Gary Bloom’s promise to the Veritas board when he joined them from Oracle in 2000.

It went like this:

Gary Bloom promised the Veritas board of directors in 2000 that he would be able to bring Veritas to a USD$5 billion dollar company in 5 years time. Nearing the end of the 5 years in 2005, Gary fulfilled his promise by merging with Symantec, instantly making Veritas a USD$5 billion dollar company.”

Note: This is just an inside joke which I heard from a Veritas friend back in 2005, and by no means put Gary Bloom in a bad light. If I did, I apologize.

But back to the present. Our class last week brought up the subject of Symantec FileStore. When it first came out in October 2009, I thought it was an interesting solution. For once, I thought there was something could “out filesystem” NetApp’s ONTAP and WAFL, because Veritas had one of the best scale-out, clustered file systems. They just haven’t figured out the front end protocols yet, where NAS and iSCSI reigned. Veritas File System (VxFS) and Veritas Cluster File System as part of Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) was mature and proven in the enterprise. Along with Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), this was perhaps THE best file system/volume management suite around. Mind you, ZFS hasn’t reached the level of prominence yet at that time.

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