June 2015 – Silverton Consulting

Seagate releases 4TB Backup Plus drive with Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage

Posted on June 25, 2015June 25, 2015 by Ray in Cloud storage, Data density, USB

Seagate today announced the release of a single platter, 4TB Backup Plus drive. The new (20.5mm) thin device offers USB 3.0 and is targeted for PC backup applications. The drive has a MSRP of $239.99 US and is expected to be available for sale in July.

It comes with 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage. Microsoft recently opened up their OneDrive cloud service API’s for developers and other manufacturers. It’s unclear whether the Backup Plus OneDrive offer is available as a coupon/key code or takes advantage of the new OneDrive APIs to offer its services.

Seagate already has a 4TB Backup Plus drive but it is a multi-platter device. This new drive will be considerably slimmer and more suitable for portable applications.

There are other semi-portable 4TB drives on the market but none as sleek as this one and none with Microsoft OneDrive tie in.

Now if they just had one that worked with Mac OSX.

Photo Credits: Seagate website

Springpath SDS springs forth

Posted on June 8, 2015June 8, 2015 by Ray in Clustered storage, Data compression, Data reduction, Disk storage, File Storage, SSD storage, Storage, Strategic Inflection Points

Springpath presented at SFD7 and has a new Software Defined Storage (SDS) that attempts to provide the richness of enterprise storage in a SDS solution running on commodity hardware. I would encourage you to watch the SFD7 video stream if you want to learn more about them.

HALO software

Their core storage architecture is called HALO which stands for Hardware Agnostic Log-structured Object store. We have discussed log-structured file systems before. They are essentially a sequential file that can be randomly accessed (read) but are sequentially written. Springpath HALO was written from scratch, operates in user space and unlike many SDS solutions, has no dependencies on Linux file systems.

HALO supports both data deduplication and compression to reduce storage footprint. The other unusual feature is that they support both blade servers and standalone (rack) servers as storage/compute nodes.

Tiers of storage

Each storage node can optionally have SSDs as a persistent cache, holding write data and metadata log. Storage nodes can also hold disk drives used as a persistent final tier of storage. For blade servers, with limited drive slots, one can configure blades as part of a caching tier by using SSDs or PCIe Flash.

All data is written to the (replicated) caching tier before the host is signaled the operation is complete. Write data is destaged from the caching tier to capacity tier over time, as the caching tier fills up. Data reduction (compression/deduplication) is done at destage.

The caching tier also holds read cached data that is frequently read. The caching tier also has a non-persistent segment in server RAM.

Write data is distributed across caching nodes via a hashing mechanism which allocates portions of an address space across nodes. But during cache destage, the data can be independently spread and replicated across any capacity node, based on node free space available. This is made possible by their file system meta-data information.

The capacity tier is split up into data and a meta-data partitions. Meta-data is also present in the caching tier. Data is deduplicated and compressed at destage, but when read back into cache it’s de-compressed only. Both capacity tier and caching tier nodes can have different capacities.

HALO has some specific optimizations for flash writing which includes always writing a full SSD/NAND page and using TRIM commands to free up flash pages that are no longer being used.

HALO SDS packaging under different Hypervisors

In Linux & OpenStack environments they run the whole storage stack in Docker containers primarily for image management/deployment, including rolling upgrade management.

In VMware and HyperVM, Springpath runs as a VM and uses direct path IO to access the storage. For VMware Springpath looks like an NFSv3 datastore with VAAI and VVOL support. In Hyper-V Springpath’s SDS is an SMB storage device.

For KVM its an NFS storage, for OpenStack one can use NFS or they have a CINDER plugin for volume support.

The nice thing about Springpath is you can build a cluster of storage nodes that consists of VMware, HyperV and bare metal Linux nodes that supports all of them. (Does this mean it’s multi protocol, supporting SMB for Hyper-V, NFSv3 for VMware?)

HALO internals

Springpath supports (mostly) file, block (via Cinder driver) and object access protocols. Backend caching and capacity tier all uses a log structured file structure internally to stripe data across all the capacity and caching nodes. Data compression works very well with log structured file systems.

All customer data is supported internally as objects. HALO has a write-log which is spread across their caching tier and a capacity-log which is spread across the capacity tier.

Data is automatically re-balanced across nodes when new nodes are added or old nodes deleted from the cluster.

Data is protected via replication. The system uses a minimum of 3 SSD nodes and 3 drive (capacity) nodes but these can reside on the same servers to be fully operational. However, the replication factor can be configured to be less than 3 if you’re willing to live with the potential loss of data.

Their system supports both snapshots (2**64 times/object) and storage clones for test dev and backup requirements.

Springpath seems to have quite a lot of functionality for a SDS. Although, native FC & iSCSI support is lacking. For a file based, SDS for hypbervisors, it seems to have a lot of the bases covered.

Comments?

Nanterro emerges from stealth with CNT based NRAM

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Ray in data access, Distributed computing, Energy efficiency, Mobile computing, SSD storage, Storage density, Storage energy use, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points

Nanterro just came out of stealth this week and bagged $31.5M in a Series E funding round. Apparently, Nanterro has been developing a new form of non-volatile RAM (NRAM), based on Carbon Nanotubes (CNT), which seems to work like an old T-bar switch, only in the NM sphere and using CNT for the wiring.

They were founded in 2001, and are finally ready to emerge from stealth. Nanterro already has 175+ issued patents, with another 200 patents pending. The NRAM is currently in production at 7 CMOS fabs already and they are sampling 4Mb NRAM chips to a number of customers.

NRAM vs. NAND

Performance of the NRAM is on a par with DRAM (~100 times faster than NAND), can be configured in 3D and supports MLC (multi-bits per cell) configurations. NRAM also supports orders of magnitude more (assume they mean writes) accesses and stores data much longer than NAND.

The only question is the capacity, with shipping NAND on the order of 200Gb, NRAM is about 2**14X behind NAND. Nanterre claims that their CNT-NRAM CMOS process can be scaled down to <5nm. Which is one or two generations below the current NAND scale factor and assuming they can pack as many bits in the same area, should be able to compete well with NAND.They claim that their NRAM technology is capable of Terabit capacities (assumed to be at the 5nm node).

The other nice thing is that Nanterro says the new NRAM uses less power than DRAM, which means that in addition to attaining higher capacities, DRAM like access times, it will also reduce power consumption.

It seems a natural for mobile applications. The press release claims it was already tested in space and there are customers looking at the technology for automobiles. The company claims the total addressable market is ~$170B USD. Which probably includes DRAM and NAND together.

CNT in CMOS chips?

Key to Nanterro’s technology was incorporating the use of CNT in CMOS processes, so that chips can be manufactured on current fab lines. It’s probably just the start of the use of CNT in electronic chips but it’s one that could potentially pay for the technology development many times over. CNT has a number of characteristics which would be beneficial to other electronic circuitry beyond NRAM.

How quickly they can ramp the capacity up from 4Mb seems to be a significant factor. Which is no doubt, why they went out for Series E funding.

So we have another new non-volatile memory technology.On the other hand, these guys seem to be a long ways away from the lab, with something that works today and the potential to go all the way down to 5nm.

It should interesting as the other NV technologies start to emerge to see which one generates sufficient market traction to succeed in the long run. Especially as NAND doesn’t seem to be slowing down much.

Comments?

Picture Credits: Wikimedia.com