FC – Silverton Consulting

NetApp’s new NVMeoF/FC AFF & Cloud Data Volumes for every cloud

We attended a NetApp analyst event in their CA HQ last week and they had some interesting announcements as well other information to share. 1st up new faster ONTAP storage.

NVMeoF AFF

NetApp announced this week that their latest generation AFF (All Flash FAS) systems will support FC NVMeoF. We asked if this was just for NVMe SSDs or did it apply to all AFF media. The answer was it’s just another host interface which the customer can license for NVMe SSDs (available only on AFF F800) or SAS SSDs (A700S, A700, and A300). The only AFF not supporting the new host interface is their lowend AFF A220.

As for which NVMeoF, they only support FC at the moment, and it’s our belief that the FC NVMeoF spec is most well defined these days and the FC switch hardware (Brocade-Broadcom since Gen 5, now shipping Gen 6, Cisco not sure) already has NVMeoF support.

NetApp also mentioned support for 100GbE (A800 & A700S only) and 32Gbs FC hardware (all AFF systems but A220). So, presumably they offer NVMeoF for both 32Gbps and 16Gbps FC.

No word on when this will be available for Ethernet FCoE or iSCSI (iNVMe?) but with all the major storage vendors bar one, moving to NVMe SSDs it’s only a matter of time before they also support Ethernet NVMeoF.

As for AFF NVMeoF performance, the answer wasn’t entirely satisfactory. The indication was that the interface reduced response time by 10 usecs or so for NVMe SSDs over SAS SSDs. But I didn’t see any other performance information to substantiate that.

We did see on their AFF d atasheet that with NVMe SSDs and NVMeoF FC, the AFF A800 response time was sub 200usec with throughput of 300GB/s (in a 24 node cluster, 12 HA pairs). This means they add only about 100usec for ONTAP data services, a decent trade off from our perspective. Later in their datasheet they say the A800 is capable of 1.3M IOPS and sub-500usec latencies. Unsure why they quoted both numbers.

Cloud Data Volumes

NetApp is taking storage to the cloud. They just announced that NetApp Cloud Data Volumes will be available as a native service under Google Cloud Platform (GCP). NetApp Cloud Data Volume is a storage-as-a-service offering that provides on demand ONTAP file services in the cloud.

For GCP, both Google and NetApp will be offering the service. Dianne Green, GCP VP said Cloud Data Volumes are a bit like Kubernetes, disruption without disrupting. Customers can easily migrate their onprem file based applications to the cloud without having to worry about the performance of their data or data protection for that matter.

Getting the data there is another matter, but NetApp has other services like CloudSync and someday (maybe for Cloud Data Volumes), SnapMirror, which can help customers move data to and from the cloud.

Currently Cloud Data Volumes are in public preview as an Microsoft Azure Enterprise NFS (and SMB) service. It’s also in beta (I think) in AWS marketplace. And availability on GCP is still restricted. There’s a lot of emphasis at NetApp events on Cloud Data Volumes given its current status on public cloud providers but we think they are trying to gain some experience before they roll it out to the rest of the world.

However, Jean English, NetApp CMO mentioned that NetApp’s Cloud Data Service business unit has over 1800 customers and currently supports a multi-PB storage footprint in various clouds. Note, this is not just Cloud Data Volumes but comprises all NetApp Cloud Data Services, which includes ONTAP Cloud, NPS, CloudSync, AltaVault, etc. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive indicator of just how far they have come in applying their storage magic to the public cloud in a short time. The hyperscalers (read public cloud providers) say NetApp is 2 or more years ahead of all the other competition and from what we can see, it’s true.

One of the key differentiators between NetApp Cloud Data Volumes and ONTAP Cloud is performance SLAs. Cloud Data Volume customers can select and purchase a specified performance SLA. We believe it comes at three levels and is normally purchased on a pay as you go, consumption based, service offering. However, it’s also available to be billed periodically, other purchase options may be available as well.

When asked what storage was behind the service, the only thing NetApp would confirm was that it was ONTAP storage, present in public cloud data centers in various regions. So Cloud Data Volumes is available in only specific regions but I would expect that to expand over time.

Data Visualization Center

They also christened their new Data Visualization Center (DVC) and we had a multi-course meal at the Bistro at the center. The DVC had a wrap around, 1.5 floor tall screen which showed some of NetApp customer success stories. Inside the screen was a more immersive setting and there was plenty of VR equipment in work spaces alongside customer conference rooms.

Full Disclosure: NetApp paid for all our travel, hotel and food during the analyst event and gave us all Google Home Minis as going away presents and NetApp is a long time customer of my firm.

QoM1610: Will NVMe over Fabric GA in enterprise AFA by Oct’2017

Posted on October 16, 2016 by Ray in Block Storage, CIFS/SMB, Ethernet, FC, FCoE, File Storage, Forecasting, Infiniband, iSCSI, Networking, NFS, NVMe, NVMe storage, Omni-Path, QoM 2016, RDMA, RoCE, SSD storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points

NVMe over fabric (NVMeoF) was a hot topic at Flash Memory Summit last August. Facebook and others were showing off their JBOF (see my Facebook moving to JBOF post) but there were plenty of other NVMeoF offerings at the show.

NVMeoF hardware availability

When Brocade announced their Gen6 Switches they made a point of saying that both their Gen5 and Gen6 switches currently support NVMeoF protocols. In addition to Brocade’s support, in Dec 2015 Qlogic announced support for NVMeoF for select HBAs. Also, as of July 2016, Emulex announced support for NVMeoF in their HBAs.

From an Ethernet perspective, Qlogic has a NVMe Direct NIC which supports NVMe protocol offload for iSCSI. But even without NVMe Direct, Ethernet 40GbE & 100GbE with iWARP, RoCEv1-v2, iSCSI SER, or iSCSI RDMA all could readily support NVMeoF on Ethernet. The nice thing about NVMeoF for Ethernet is not only do you get support for iSCSI & FCoE, but CIFS/SMB and NFS as well.

InfiniBand and Omni-Path Architecture already support native RDMA, so they should already support NVMeoF.

So hardware/firmware is already available for any enterprise AFA customer to want NVMeoF for their data center storage.

NVMeoF Software

Intel claims that ~90% of the software driver functionality of NVMe is the same for NVMeoF. The primary differences between the two seem to be the NVMeoY discovery and queueing mechanisms.

There are two fabric methods that can be used to implement NVMeoF data and command transfers: capsule mode where NVMe commands and data are encapsulated in normal fabric packets or fabric dependent mode where drivers make use of native fabric memory transfer mechanisms (RDMA, …) to transfer commands and data.

A (Linux) host driver for NVMeoF is currently available from Seagate. And as a result, support for NVMeoF for Linux is currently under development, and not far from release in the next Kernel (I think). (Mellanox has a tutorial on how to compile a Linux kernel with NVMeoF driver support).

With Linux coming out, Microsoft Windows and VMware can’t be far behind. However, I could find nothing online, aside from base NVMe support, for either platform.

NVMeoF target support is another matter but with NICs/HBAs & switch hardware/firmware and drivers presently available, proprietary storage system target drivers are just a matter of time.

Boot support is a major concern. I could find no information on BIOS support for booting off of a NVMeoF AFA. Arguably, one may not need boot support for NVMeoF AFAs as they are probably not a viable target for storing App code or OS software.

From what I could tell, normal fabric multi-pathing support should work fine with NVMeoF. This should allow for HA NVMeoF storage, a critical requirement for enterprise AFA storage systems these days.

NVMeoF advantages/disadvantages

Chelsio and others have shown that NVMeoF adds ~8μsec of additional overhead beyond native NVMe SSDs, which if true would warrant implementation on all NVMe AFAs. This may or may not impact max IOPS depending on scale-ability of NVMeoF.

For instance, servers (PCIe bus hardware) typically limit the number of private NVMe SSDs to 255 or less. With an NVMeoF, one could potentially have 1000s of shared NVMe SSDs accessible to a single server. With this scale, one could have a single server attached to a scale-out NVMeoF AFA (cluster) that could supply ~4X the IOPS that a single server could perform using private NVMe storage.

Base level NVMe SSD support and protocol stacks are starting to be available for most flash vendors and operating systems such as, Linux, FreeBSD, VMware, Windows, and Solaris. If Intel’s claim of 90% common software between NVMe and NVMeoF drivers is true, then it should be a relatively easy development project to provide host NVMeoF drivers.

The need for special Ethernet hardware that supports RDMA may delay some storage vendors from implementing NVMeoF AFAs quickly. The lack of BIOS boot support may be a minor irritant in comparison.

NVMeoF forecast

AFA storage systems, as far as I can tell, are all about selling high IOPS and very-low latency IOs. It would seem that NVMeoF would offer early adopter AFA storage vendors a significant performance advantage over slower paced competition.

In previous QoM/QoW posts we have established that there are about 13 new enterprise storage systems that come out each year. Probably 80% of these will be AFA, given the current market environment.

Of the 10.4 AFA systems coming out over the next year, ~20% of these systems pride themselves on being the lowest latency solutions in the market, and thus command high margins. One would think these systems would be the first to adopt NVMeoF. But, most of these systems have their own, proprietary flash modules and do not use standard (NVMe) SSDs and can use their own proprietary interface to their proprietary flash storage. This will delay any implementation for them until they can convert their flash storage to NVMe which may take some time.

On the other hand, most (70%) of the other AFA systems, that currently use SAS/SATA SSDs, could boost their IOP counts and drastically reduce their IO response times, by implementing NVMe SSDs and NVMeoF. But converting SAS/SATA backends to NVMe will take time and effort.

But, there are a select few (~10%) of AFA systems, that already use NVMe SSDs in their AFAs, and for these few, they would seem to have a fast track towards implementing NVMeoF. The fact that NVMeoF is supported over all fabrics and all storage interface protocols make it even easier.

Moreover, NVMeoF has been under discussion since the summer of 2015, which tells me that astute AFA vendors have already had 18+ months to develop it. With NVMeoF host drivers & hardware available since Dec. 2015, means hardware and software exist to test and validate against.

I believe that NVMeoF will be GA’d within the next 12 months by at least one enterprise AFA system. So my QoM1610 forecast for NVMeoF is YES, with a 0.83 probability.

Comments?

VMware VVOLs potential performance problems

Posted on February 16, 2015February 16, 2015 by Ray in Block Storage, FC, Server virtualization, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage performance

We discussed vSphere 6 VVOLs (Virtual Volumes) on this month’s GreyBeardsonStorage (GBoS) podcast with Howard Marks (@DeepStorageNet) and Satyam Vaghani (@SatyamVaghani, “Father of VVOLs”, CoFounder & CTO of PernixData).

VVOLs queue depth problem?

One performance problem from my perspective is that all VVOL FC IO is now funeled through a single Protocol Endpoint (PE) LUN for a single storage system. There may be some potential queue depth issues, but Satyam and Howard both said that queue depths have been greatly increased over the last decade or so and this shouldn’t be a problem, as long as you’re configured properly.

What about VVOL PEs on ALUA storage?

In an ALUA (Asymmetrical Logical Unit Access) Active/Passive, dual controller storage system, a set of LUNs is assigned to one controller, the “active” side of an Active/Passive ALUA storage system. Many ALUA vendors now support “Active/Active” configurations such that 1/2 the LUNs are assigned to one side and the other 1/2 assigned to the other sider, for an Active/Passive & Passive/Active pair or Active/Active configuration.

So, ALUA storage systems have a LUN “allegiance” to a controller. If this continues to be the case under VVOLs, then a PE would only be processed by one side of an ALUA dual controller system, effectively reducing the horse power to process VVOL IO to 1/2 of an ALUA storage system.

Now just because there is a LUN allegiance in ALUA storage doesn’t necessarily mean that all internal IO processing for a LUN is done on only one controller. But historically that has been the case. For instance, during an ALUA system non-disruptive code update, an “active” ALUA side must “failover” its LUNs to the other side to provide continuous IO activity, while the formerly active ALUA side taken down and updated with new code.

Potential solutions to ALUA PE performance?

One way to get around the VVOL ALUA performance problem is to have multiple PEs in a single storage system for the same vSphere Cluster VVOLs. I don’t know anything that would inhibit a storage system from supporting multiple PEs today, they already need to support multiple PEs for multiple vSphere clusters. Also, a VMware vSphere cluster must support multiple PEs for multiple storage systems.

I am also not aware of any VASA 2.0 requirement that restricts the number of PEs for a storage system’s support of a single vSphere cluster. But I could be mistaken here. So there should be nothing to inhibit multiple PEs from the same ALUA storage system to the same vSphere cluster.

Of course, this means an ALUA storage VVOLs would need to be divided across ALUA PEs.

Another solution is to eliminate any LUN allegiance for ALUA controllers. This requires shared memory between controllers to hold IO state and this is what non-ALUA storage does already.

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It’s just like Howard said on the GBoS podcast, “there’s going to be good and bad implementations of VVOLs” and telling the difference between the two will need to be done.

Comments?

Photo Credit(s): Passport Please by Oren Levine

Latest SPC-2 performance results – chart of the month

Posted on March 19, 2014March 21, 2014 by Ray in Block Storage, Disk storage, FC, LDQ, LFP, MPBS, SPC-2, SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance, Storage Performance Council, VOD

In the figure above you can see one of the charts from our latest performance dispatch on SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmark results. The above chart shows SPC-2 throughput results sorted by aggregate MB/sec order, with all three workloads broken out for more information.

Just last quarter I was saying it didn’t appear as if any all-flash system could do well on SPC-2, throughput intensive workloads. Well I was wrong (again) and with an aggregate MBPS™ of ~33.5GB/sec. Kaminario’s all-flash K2 took the SPC-2 MBPS results to a whole different level, almost doubling the nearest competitor in this category (Oracle ZFS ZS3-4).

Ok, Howard Marks (deepstorage.net), my GreyBeardsOnStorage podcast co-host and long-time friend, had warned me that SSDs had the throughput to be winners at SPC-2, but they would probably cost to much to be viable. I didn’t believe him at the time — how wrong could I be.

As for cost, both Howard and I misjudged this one. The K2 came in at just under a $1M USD, whereas the #2, Oracle system was under $400K. But there were five other top 10 SPC-2 MPBS systems over $1M so the K2, all-flash system price was about average for the top 10.

Ok, if cost and high throughput aren’t the problem why haven’t we seen more all-flash systems SPC-2 benchmarks. I tend to think that most flash systems are optimized for OLTP like update activity and not sequential throughput. The K2 is obviously one exception. But I think we need to go a little deeper into the numbers to understand just what it was doing so well.

The details

The LFP (large file processing) reported MBPS metric is the average of 1MB and 256KB data transfer sizes, streaming activity with 100% write, 100% read and 50%:50% read-write. In K2’s detailed SPC-2 report, one can see that for 100% write workload the K2 was averaging ~26GB/sec. while for the 100% read workload the K2 was averaging ~38GB/sec. and for the 50:50 read:write workload ~32GB/sec.

On the other hand the LDQ workload appears to be entirely sequential read-only but the report shows that this is made up of two workloads one using 1MB data transfers and the other using 64KB data transfers, with various numbers of streams fired up to generate stress. The surprising item for K2’s LDQ run is that it did much better on the 64KB data streams than the 1MB data streams, an average of 41GB/sec vs. 32GB/sec.. This probably says something about an internal flash data transfer bottleneck at large data transfers someplace in the architecture.

The VOD workload also appears to be sequential, read-only and the report doesn’t indicate a data transfer size but given K2’s actual results, averaging ~31GB/sec it would seem to indicate it was on the order of 1MB.

So what we can tell is that K2’s SSD write throughput is worse than reads (~1/3rd worse) and relatively smaller sequential reads are better than relatively larger sequential reads (~1/4 better). But I must add that even at the relatively “slower write throughput”, the K2 would still have beaten the next best disk-only storage system by ~10GB/sec.

Where’s the other all-flash SPC-2 benchmarks?

Prior to K2 there was only one other all-flash system (TMS RamSan-630) submission for SPC-2. I suspect that writing 26 GB/sec. to an all-flash system would be hazardous to its health and maybe other all-flash storage system vendors don’t want to encourage this type of activity.

Just for the record the K2 SPC-2 result has been submitted for “review” (as of 18Mar2014) and may be modified before finally “accepted”. However, the review process typically doesn’t impact performance results as much as other report items. So, officially, we will need to await for final acceptance before we can truly believe these numbers.

Comments?

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The complete SPC performance report went out in SCI’s February 2014 newsletter. But a copy of the report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime next quarter (if all goes well). However, you can get the latest storage performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just using the signup form above right.

Even more performance information and OLTP, Email and Throuphput ChampionCharts for Enterprise, Mid-range and SMB class storage systems are also available in SCI’s SAN Buying Guide, available for purchase from website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our SPC performance reports or any of our other storage performance analyses.

Who’s the next winner in data storage?

Posted on August 15, 2013August 15, 2013 by Ray in CIFS/SMB, Cloud services, Cloud storage, data access, Data availability, data services, Distributed computing, FC, FCoE, NFS, Object storage, Storage, Storage availability, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Visionary organizations

Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

“The future is already here – just not evenly distributed”, W. Gibson

It starts as it always does outside the enterprise data center. In the line of businesses, in the development teams, in the small business organizations that don’t know any better but still have an unquenchable need for data storage.

It’s essentially an Innovator’s Dillemma situation. The upstarts are coming into the market at the lower end, lower margin side of the business that the major vendors don’t seem to care about, don’t service very well and are ignoring to their peril.

Yes, it doesn’t offer all the data services that the big guns (EMC, Dell, HDS, IBM, and NetApp) have. It doesn’t offer the data availability and reliability that enterprise data centers have come to demand from their storage. require. And it doesn’t have the performance of major enterprise data storage systems.

But what it does offer, is lower CapEx, unlimited scaleability, and much easier to manage and adopt data storage, albeit using a new protocol. It does have some inherent, hard to get around problems not the least of which is speed of data ingest/egress, highly variable latency and eventual consistency. There are other problems which are more easily solvable, with work, but the three listed above are intrinsic to the solution and need to be dealt with systematically.

And the winner is …

It has to be cloud storage providers and the big elephant in the room has to be Amazon. I know there’s a lot of hype surrounding AWS S3 and EC2 but you must admit that they are growing, doubling year over year. Yes it is starting from a much lower capacity point and yes, they are essentially providing “rentable” data storage space with limited or even non-existant storage services. But they are opening up whole new ways to consume storage that never existed before. And therein lies their advantage and threat to the major storage players today, unless they act to counter this upstart.

On AWS’s EC2 website there must be 4 dozen different applications that can be fired up in the matter of a click or two. When I checked out S3 you only need to signup and identify a bucket name to start depositing data (files, objects). After that, you are charged for the storage used, data transfer out (data in is free), and the number of HTTP GETs, PUTs, and other requests that are done on a per month basis. The first 5GB is free and comes with a judicious amount of gets, puts, and out data transfer bandwidth.

… but how can they attack the enterprise?

Aside from the three systemic weaknesses identified above, for enterprise customers they seem to lack enterprise security, advanced data services and high availability storage. Yes, NetApp’s Amazon Direct addresses some of the issues by placing enterprise owned, secured and highly available storage to be accessed by EC2 applications. But to really take over and make a dent in enterprise storage sales, Amazon needs something with enterprise class data services, availability and security with an on premises storage gateway that uses and consumes cloud storage, i.e., a cloud storage gateway. That way they can meet or exceed enterprise latency and services requirements at something that approximates S3 storage costs.

We have talked about cloud storage gateways before but none offer this level of storage service. An enterprise class S3 gateway would need to support all storage protocols, especially block (FC, FCoE, & iSCSI) and file (NFS & CIFS/SMB). It would need enterprise data services, such as read-writeable snapshots, thin provisioning, data deduplication/compression, and data mirroring/replication (synch and asynch). It would need to support standard management configuration capabilities, like VMware vCenter, Microsoft System Center, and SMI-S. It would need to mask the inherent variable latency of cloud storage through memory, SSD and hard disk data caching/tiering.. It would need to conceal the eventual consistency nature of cloud storage (see link above). And it would need to provide iron-clad, data security for cloud storage.

It would also need to be enterprise hardened, highly available and highly reliable. That means dually redundant, highly serviceable hardware FRUs, concurrent code load, multiple controllers with multiple, independent, high speed links to the internet. Todays, highly-available data storage requires multi-path storage networks, multiple-independent power sources and resilient cooling so adding multiple-independent, high-speed internet links to use Amazon S3 in the enterprise is not out of the question. In addition to the highly available and serviceable storage gateway capabilities described above it would need to supply high data integrity and reliability.

Who could build such a gateway?

I would say any of the major and some of the minor data storage players could easily do an S3 gateway if they desired. There are a couple of gateway startups (see link above) that have made a stab at it but none have it quite down pat or to the extent needed by the enterprise.

However, the problem with standalone gateways from other, non-Amazon vendors is that they could easily support other cloud storage platforms and most do. This is great for gateway suppliers but bad for Amazon’s market share.

So, I believe Amazon has to invest in it’s own storage gateway if they want to go after the enterprise. Of course, when they create an enterprise cloud storage gateway they will piss off all the other gateway providers and will signal their intention to target the enterprise storage market.

So who is the next winner in data storage – I have to believe its going to be and already is Amazon. Even if they don’t go after the enterprise which I feel is the major prize, they have already carved out an unbreachable market share in a new way to implement and use storage. But when (not if) they go after the enterprise, they will threaten every major storage player.

Yes but what about others?

Arguably, Microsoft Azure is in a better position than Amazon to go after the enterprise. Since their acquisition of StorSimple last year, they already have a gateway that with help, could be just what they need to provide enterprise class storage services using Azure. And they already have access to the enterprise, already have the services, distribution and goto market capabilities that addresses enterprise needs and requirements. Maybe they have it all but they are not yet at the scale of Amazon. Could they go after this – certainly, but will they?

Google is the other major unknown. They certainly have the capability to go after enterprise cloud storage if they want. They already have Google Cloud Storage, which is priced under Amazon’s S3 and provides similar services as far as I can tell. But they have even farther to go to get to the scale of Amazon. And they have less of the marketing, selling and service capabilities that are required to be an enterprise player. So I think they are the least likely of the big three cloud providers to be successful here.

There are many other players in cloud services that could make a play for enterprise cloud storage and emerge out of the pack, namely Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and others. I suppose DropBox, Box and the other file sharing/collaboration providers might also be able to take a shot at it, if they wanted. But I am not sure any of them have enterprise storage on their radar just yet.

And I wouldn’t leave out the current major storage, networking and server players as they all could potentially go after enterprise cloud storage if they wanted to. And some are partly there already.

Comments?

SNWUSA Spring 2013 summary

Posted on April 4, 2013June 4, 2013 by Ray in Block Storage, DAS, Disk storage, Ethernet, FC, File Storage, iSCSI, Networking, R&D measures, SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance

For starters the parties were a bit more subdued this year although I heard Wayne’s suite was hopping to 4am last night (not that I would ever be there that late).

And a trend seen the past couple of years was even more evident this year, many large vendors and vendor spokespeople went missing. I heard that there were a lot more analyst presentations this SNW than prior ones although it was hard to quantify. But it did seem that the analyst community was pulling double duty in presentations.

I would say that SNW still provides a good venue for storage marketing across all verticals. But these days many large vendors find success elsewhere, leaving SNW Expo mostly to smaller vendors and niche products. Nonetheless, there were a\ a few big vendors (Dell, Oracle and HP) still in evidence. But EMC, HDS, IBM and NetApp were not showing on the floor.

I would have to say the theme for this years SNW was hybrid storage. It seemed last fall the products that impressed me were either cloud storage gateways or all flash arrays but this year there weren’t as many of these at the show but hybrid storage certainly has arrived.

Best hybrid storage array of the show

It’s hard to pick just one hybrid storage vendor as my top pick, especially since there were at least 3 others talking to me under NDA, but from my perspective the Hybrid vendor of the show had to be Tegile (pronounced I think, as te’-jile). They seemed to have a fully functional system with snapshot, thin provisioning, deduplication and pretty good VMware support (only time I have heard a vendor talk about VASA “stun” support for thin provisioned volumes).

They made the statement that SSD in their system is used as a cache, not a tier. This use is similar to NetApp’s FlashCache and has proven to be a particularly well performing approach to use of hybrid storage. (For more information on that take a look at some of my NFS and recent SPC-1 benchmark review dispatches. How well this is integrated with their home grown dedupe logic is another question.

On the negative side, they seem to be lacking a true HA/dual controller version but could use two separate systems with synch (I think) replication between them to cover this ground?? They also claimed their dedupe had no performance penalty, a pretty bold claim that cries out for some serious lab validation and/or benchmarking to prove. They also offer an all flash version of their storage (but then how can it be used as a cache?).

The marketing team seemed pretty knowledgeable about the market space and they seem to be going after mid-range storage space.

The product supports file (NFS and CIFS/SMB), iSCSI and FC with GigE, 10GbE and 8Gbps FC. They quote “effective” capacities with dedupe enabled but it can be disabled on a volume basis.

Overall, I was impressed by their marketing and the product (what little I saw).

Best storage tool of the show

Moving onto other product categories, it was hard to see anything that caught my eye. Perhaps I have just been to too many storage conferences but I did get somewhat excited when I looked at SwiftTest. Essentially they offer a application profiling, storage modeling, workload generating tool set.

The team seems to be branching out of their traditional vendor market focus and going after large service providers and F100 companies with large storage requirements.

Way back, when I was in Engineering, we were always looking for some information as to how customers actually used storage products. Well what SwiftTest has, is an appliance to instrument your application environment (through network taps/hardware port connections) to monitor your storage IO and create a statistical operational profile of your I/O environment. Then take that profile and play it against a storage configuration model to show how well it’s likely to perform. And if that’s not enough the same appliance can be used to drive a simulated version of the operational profile back onto a storage system.

It offers NFS (v2,v3, v4) CIFS/SMB (SMB1, SMB2, SMB3) FC, iSCSI, and HTTP/REST (what no FCoe?). They mentioned an $8oK price tag for the base appliance (one protocol?) but grows up pretty fast, if you want all of them. They also seem to have three levels of appliances (my guess more performance and more protocols come with the bigger boxes).

Not sure where they top out but simulating an operational profile can be quite complex especially when you have to be able to control data patterns to match deduplication potential in customer data, drive markov chains with probability representations of operational profiles, and actually execute IO operations. They said something about their ports have dedicated CPU cores to insure adequate performance or something similar but still it seems to little to hit high IO workloads.

Like I said, when I was in engineering were searching for this type of solution back in the late 90s and we would have probably bought it in a moment, if it was available.

GoDaddy.com, the domain/web site services provider was one of their customers that used the appliance to test storage configurations. They presented at SNW on some of their results but I missed their session (the case study is available on SwiftTests website).

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In short, SNW had a diverse mixture of end user customers but lacked a full complement of vendors to show off to them. The ratio of vendors to customers has definitely shifted to end-users the last couple of years and if anything has gotten more skewed to end-users, (which paradoxically should appeal to more storage vendors?!).

I talked with lots of end-users, from companies like FedEx, Northrop Grumman and AOL to name just a few big ones. But there were plenty of smaller ones as well.

The show lasted three days and had sessions scheduled all the way to the end. I was surprised at the length and the fact that it started on Tuesday rather than Monday as in years past. Apparently, SNIA and Computerworld are still tweaking the formula.

It seemed to me there were more cancelled sessions than in years past but again this was hard to quantify.

Some of the customers I talked with thought SNW should go to a once a year and can’t understand why it’s still twice a year. Many mentioned VMworld as having taken the place of SNW in being a showplace for storage vendors of all sizes and styles. That and the vendor specific shows from EMC, IBM, Dell and others.

The fall show is moving to Long Beach, CA. Probably, a further experiment to find a formula that works. Let’s hope they succeed.

Comments?

New deduplication solutions from Sepaton and NEC

Posted on March 20, 2013March 25, 2013 by Ray in Data compression, Data security, Disk storage, Ethernet, FC

In the last few weeks both Sepaton and NEC have announced new data deduplication appliance hardware and for Sepaton at least, new functionality. Both of these vendors compete against solutions from EMC Data Domain, IBM ProtectTier, HP StoreOnce and others.

Sepaton v7.0 Enterprise Data Protection

From Sepaton’s point of view data growth is exploding, with little increase in organizational budgets and system environments are becoming more complex with data risks expanding, not shrinking. In order to address these challenges Sepaton has introduced a new version of their hardware appliance with new functionality to help address the rising data risks.

Their new S2100-ES3 Series 2925 Enterprise Data Protection Platform with latest Sepaton software now supports up to 80 TB/hour of cluster data ingest (presumably with Symantec OST) and up to 2.0 PB of raw storage in an 8-node cluster. The new appliances support 4-8Gbps FC and 2-10GbE host ports per node, based on HP DL380p Gen8 servers with Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors, 8 core, dual 2.9Ghz CPU, 128 GB DRAM and a new high performance compression card from EXAR. With the bigger capacity and faster throughput, enterprise customers can now support large backup data streams with fewer appliances, reducing complexity and maintenance/licensing fees. S2100-ES3 Platforms can scale from 2 to 8 nodes in a single cluster.

The new appliance supports data-at-rest encryption for customer data security as well as data compression, both of which are hardware based, so there is no performance penalty. Also, data encryption is an optional licensed feature and uses OASIS KMIP 1.0/1.1 to integrate with RSA, Thales and other KMIP compliant, enterprise key management solutions.

NEC HYDRAstor Gen 4

With Gen4 HYDRAstor introduces a new Hybrid Node which contains both the logic for accelerator nodes and capacity for storage nodes, in one 2U rackmounted server. Before the hybrid node similar capacity and accessibility would have required 4U of rack space, 2U for the accelerator node and another 2U for the storage node.

The HS8-4000 HN supports 4.9TB/hr standard or 5.6TB/hr per node with NetBackup OST IO express ingest rates and 12-4TB, 3.5in SATA drives, with up to 48TB of raw capacity. They have also introduced an HS8-4000 SN which just consists of the 48TB of additional storage capacity. Gen4 is the first use of 4TB drives we have seen anywhere and quadruples raw capacity per node over the Gen3 storage nodes. HYDRAstor clusters can scale from 2- to 165-nodes and performance scales linearly with the number of cluster nodes.

With the new HS8-4000 systems, maximum capacity for a 165 node cluster is now 7.9PB raw and supports up to 920.7 TB/hr (almost a PB/hr, need to recalibrate my units) with an all 165-HS8-4000 HN node cluster. Of course, how many customers need a PB/hr of backup ingest is another question. Let alone, 7.9PB of raw storage which of course gets deduplicated to an effective capacity of over 100PBs of backup data (or 0.1EB, units change again).

NEC has also introduced a new low end appliance the HS3-410 for remote/branch office environments that has a 3.2TB/hr ingest with up to 24TB of raw storage. This is only available as a single node system.

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Maybe Facebook could use a 0.1EB backup repository?

Image: Intel Team Inside Facebook Data Center by IntelFreePress

SPC-2 performance results MBPS/drive – chart of the month

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Ray in Block Storage, Disk storage, FC, MPBS, Networking, Scenario planning, SPC-2, Storage, Storage performance, Storage Performance Council, System effectiveness, Systems

(SCISPC121029-005B) (c) 2013 Silverton Consulting, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The above chart is from our October newsletter and is one of 5 charts we discussed in the Storage Performance Council benchmarks analysis. There’s something intriguing about the above chart. Specifically, the band of results in numbers 2 through 10 range from a high of 45.7 to a low of 41.5 MBPS/drive. The lone outlier is the SGI InfiniteStorage system which managed to achieve 67.7 MBPS/drive.

It turns out that the SGI system is actually a NetApp E5460 (from their LSI acquisition) with 60-146GB disk drives in a RAID 6 configuration. Considering that the configuration ASU (storage capacity used during the test) was 7TB and the full capacity was 8TB, it seemed to use all the drives to the fullest extent possible. The only other interesting tidbit about the SGI/NetApp system was the 16GB of system memory (which I assume was mostly used for caching). Other than that it just seemed to be a screamer of a system from a throughput perspective.

Earlier this year I was at an analyst session with NetApp where they were discussing there thoughts on where E-series was going to focus on. One of the items was going to be high throughput intensive applications. From what we see here, they seem to have the right machine to go after this market.

The only storage to come close was an older Oracle J4200 series system which had no RAID protection, which we would not recommend for any data application. Not sure what the IBM DS5300 series storage is OEMed from but it might be another older E-Series system.

A couple of caveats are in order for our MBPS/drive charts:

These are disk-only systems, any system using SSDs or FlashCache are excluded from this analysis
These systems all use 140GB disks or larger. (Some earlier SPC benchmarks used 36GB drives).

Also, please note the MBPS SPC-2 metric is a composite (average) of Video-on-demand, Large database query and Large file processing workload.

More information on SPC-2 performance as well as our SPC-1, SPC-2 and ESRP ChampionsCharts for block storage systems can be found in our SAN Storage Buying Guide available for purchase on our web site).

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The complete SPC-1 and SPC-2 performance report went out in SCI’s October newsletter. But a copy of the report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime this month (if all goes well). However, you can get the latest storage performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just using the signup form above right.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our SPC performance reports or any of our other storage performance analyses.