Strategy – Page 23 – Silverton Consulting

DDN unchains Wolfcreek, unleashes IME and updates WOS

It’s not every day that we get a vendor claiming 2.5X the top SPC-1 IOPS (currently held by Hitachi G1000 VSP all flash array at ~2M IOPS) as DataDirect Networks (DDN) has claimed for an all-flash version of their new Wolfcreek hyper converged appliance. DDN says their new 4U appliance is capable of 60GB/sec of throughput and over 5M IOPS. (See their press release for more information.) Unclear if these are SPC-1 IOPS or not, but I haven’t seen any SPC-1 report on it yet.

In addition to the new Wolfcreek appliance, DDN announced their new Infinite Memory Engine™ (IME) flash caching software and WOS® 360 V2.0, an enhanced version of their object storage.

DDN if you haven’t heard of them has done well in the Web 2.0 environments and is a leading supplier to high performance computing (HPC) sites. They have object storage system (WOS), all flash block storage (SFA12KXi), hybrid (disk-SSD) block storage (SFA7700X™ & SFA12KX™), Lustre file appliance (EXAScaler), IBM GPFS™ NAS appliance (GRIDScaler), media server appliance (MEDIAScaler™) and software defined storage (Storage Fusion Accelerator [SFX™] flash caching software).

Wolfcreek hyper converged appliance

The converged solution comes in a 4U appliance using dual Haswell Intel microprocessors (with up to 18 cores each), includes a PCIe fabric which supports 48-NVMe flash cards or 72-SFF SSDs. With the NVMe or SSDs, Wolfcreek will be using their new IME software to accelerate IO activity.

Wolfcreek IME software supports either burst mode IO caching cluster or a storage cluster of nodes. I assume burst mode is a storage caching layer for backend file system stoorage. As a storage cluster I assume this would include some of their scale-out file system software on the nodes. Wolfcreek cluster interconnect is 40Gb Infiniband or 10/40Gb Ethernet and also will support Intel’s Omni-Path. The Wolfcreek appliance is compatible with HPC Lustre and IBM GPFS scale out file systems.

Wolfcreek appliance can be a great platform for OpenStack and Hadoop environments. But it also supports virtual machine hypervisors from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. DDN says that the Wolfcreek appliance can scale up to support 100K VMs. I’ve been told that IME will not be targeted to work with Hypervisors in the first release.

Recall that with a hyper converged appliance, some portion of the system resources (memory and CPU cores) must be devoted to server and VM application activities and the remainder to storage activity. How this is divided up and whether this split is dynamic (changes over time) or static (fixed over time) in the Wolfcreek appliance is not indicated.

The hyper converged field is getting crowded of late what with VMware EVO:RAIL, Nutanix, ScaleComputing, Simplivity and others coming out with solutions. But there aren’t many that support all-flash storage and it seems unusual that hyper converged customers would have need for that much IO performance. But I could be wrong, especially for HPC customers.

There’s much more to hyper convergence than just having storage and compute in the same node. The software that links it all together, manages, monitors and deploys these combined hypervisor, storage and server systems is almost as important as any of the hardware. There wasn’t much talk about the software that DDN is putting together for Wolfcreek but it’s still early yet. With their roots in HPC, it’s likely that any DDN hyper converged solution will target this market first and broaden out from there.

Infinite Memory Engine (IME)

IME is an outgrowth of DDN’s SFX software and seem to act as a caching layer for parallel file system IO. It makes use of NVMe or SSDs for its IO caching. And according to DDN can offer up to 1000X IO acceleration to storage or 100X file system acceleration.

It does this primarily by providing an application aware IO caching layer and supplying more effective IO to the file system layer using PCIe NVMe or SSD flash storage for hardware IO acceleration. According to the information provided by DDN, IME can provide 50 GB/sec bandwidth to a host compute cluster while only doing 4GB/sec of throughput to a backend file system, presumably by better caching of file IO.

WOS 360 V2.0

The new WOS 360 V2.0 object storage system features include

Higher density storage package with 98-8TB SATA drives or 768TB raw capacity in 4U) supporting 8B objects each and over 100B objects in a cluster.
Native SWIFT API support for OpenStack environments which includes gateway or embedded deployments, up to 5000 concurrent users and 5B objects/namespace.
Global ObjectAssure data encoding with lower storage overhead (1.5x or a 20% reduction from their previous encoding option) for highly durable and available object storage usiing a two level hierarchical erasure code for object storage.
Enhanced network security with SSL which provides end-to-end SSL network data transport between clients and WOS and betweenWOS storage nodes.
Simplified cluster installation, deployment and maintenance with can now deploy a WOS cluster in minutes, with a simple point and click GUI for installation and cluster deployment with automated non-disruptive software upgrade.
Performance improvements for better video streaming, content distribution and large file transfers with improved QoS for latency sensitive applications.

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Probably more going on with DDN than covered here but this hits the highlights. I wish there was more on their Wolfcreek appliance and its various configurations and performance benchmarks but there’s not.

Comments?

Photo Credits: wolf-63503+1920 by _Liquid

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

Commodity hardware loses again …

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Ray in PCIe, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

It seemed only a a couple of years back that everyone was touting how hardware engineering no longer mattered anymore.

What with Intel and others playing out Moore’s law, why invest in hardware engineering when the real smarts were all in software?

We said then that hardware engineered solutions still had a significant place to play but few believed me (see my posts: Commodity hardware always loses and Commodity hardware debate heats up ).

Well hardware’s back, …

A few examples;

EMC DSSD – at EMCWorld2015 a couple of weeks back, EMC demoed a new rack-scale flash storage system that was targeted at extremely high IOPS and very low latency. DSSD is a classic study on how proprietary hardware could enable new levels of performance. The solution connected to servers over a PCIe switched network, which didn’t really exist before and used hardware engineered, Flash Modules which were extremely dense, extremely fast and extremely reliable. (See my EMCWorld post on DSSD and our Greybeards on Storage (GBoS) podcast with Chad Sakac for more info on DSSD)
Diablo Memory Channel Storage (MCS) /SanDisk UltraDIMMs – Diablo’s MCS is coming out in SanDisk’s UltraDIMM NAND storage that plugs into DRAM slots and provides a memory paged access to NAND storage. The key is that the hardware logic provides overheads that are ~50 μsecs to access NAND storage. (We’ve wrote about MCS and UltraDIMMs here).
Hitachi VSP G1000 storage and their Hitachi Accelerated Flash (HAF) – recent SPC-1 results showed that a G1000 outfitted with HAF modules could generate over 2M IOPS and had very low latency (220 μsecs). (See our announcement summary on the Hitachi G1000 here).

Diablo ran into some legal problems but that’s all behind them now, so the way forward is clear of any extraneous hurdles.

There are other examples of proprietary hardware engineering from IBM FlashSystems, networking companies, PCIe flash vendors and others but these will suffice to make my point.

My point is if you want to gain orders of magnitude of better performance, you need to seriously consider engaging in some proprietary hardware engineering. Proprietary hardware may take longer than software-only solutions (although that’s somewhat of a function of the resources you throw at), but the performance gains are sometimes unobtainable any other way.

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Chad made an interesting point on our GBoS podcast, hardware innovation is somewhat cyclical. For a period of time, commodity hardware is much better than any storage solution really needs, so innovation swings to the software arena. But over time, software functionality comes up to speed and maxes out the hardware that’s available and then you need more hardware innovation to take performance to the next level. Then the cycle swings back to hardware engineering. And the cycle will swing back and forth again a lot more times before storage is ever through as an IT technology.

Today when it seems that there’s a new software defined storage solution coming out every month we seem very close to peak software innovation with little left for performance gains, but there’s still plenty left if we open our eyes to consider proprietary hardware.

Welcome to the start of the next hardware innovation cycle – take that commodity hardware.

Comments?

Free & frictionless and sometimes open sourced

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Ray in Clustered storage, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp

I was at EMCWorld2015 (see my posts on the day 1 news and day 2&3 news) and IBMEdge2015 this past month and there was a lot of news on software defined storage. And it turns out I was at an HP Storage Deep Dive the previous month and they also spoke on the topic.

One key aspect of software defined storage is how customers can consume the product. I’m not talking about licensing but rather about product trial-ability. One approach championed by HP, EMC, IBM and others is to offer their software defined storage in a new way.

Free & frictionless?

Howard Marks (@DeepStorageNet, DeepStorage.net) and I, had Chad Sakac (@sakacc, VirtualGeek) were on a recent GreyBeards on Storage podcast to discuss the news coming out of EMCWorld2015 and he used the term free & frictionless as a new approach to offering emerging technology software only storage solutions.

Frictionless refers to not having to encounter a sales person and not having to provide a lot of information to gain access to a software download. Frictionless is a matter of degree: at one extreme all you have is a direct link to a software download and it fires up without any registration requirements whatsoever; and at the other end, you have to fill out a couple of pages about your company and your plans for the product.
Free refers to the ability to use the product for free in limited situations (e.g., test & development) but requires a full paid for license and support contracts when used outside these limitations.

For example:

Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2012 is available for a free 180-day evaluation and can be directly download. I was able to download it without having to supply any information whatsoever. Unfortunately, I don’t have any Windows Server hardware floating around that I could use to see if there was any further registration requirements for it.
HP StoreVirtual VSA and StoreOnce VSA are both available for a 60-day, free trial offer, downloadable from the StoreVirtual VSA and StoreOnce VSA websites. StoreVirtual VSA is also available for an free, 1TB/3-year license. You have to register for this last option and all three options require an HP Passport account to download the software. Didn’t have an HP Passport account so don’t know what else was required.
VMware Virtual SAN is available for a 60-day, free trial offer (with no capacity or other use restrictions). You will need a 3-server vSphere cluster so you also get vSphere and vCenter server software for free at the download website. You will need a VMware account in order to download the software, beyond that, it’s unclear to me what’s required.
EMC ScaleIO will be available for free when used for test and development, by the end of this month. There is no limit on the time you can use the product, no limit on the amount of storage that can be defined and no limit on the number of servers it’s deployed on. Although the website for EMC’s ScaleIO download was up, there was no download link active on the page yet. So I can’t say what’s required to access the download.
IBM Spectrum Accelerate (software-only version of XIV) is going to be available for a 90-day, free trial offer. As far as I know you can do what you like with it for 90-days. I couldn’t find any links on their website for the download but it was just announced last week at IBMEdge2015.

I couldn’t find any information on an Hitachi or a NetApp software defined storage solution free trial offer but could have missed them in my searches.

There are plenty of other software defined storage solutions out there including Maxta, Nexenta, SpringPath, and probably a dozen others, many of which provide free trial offers. Not to mention software defined object/file systems such as Ceph, Gluster, Lustre, etc.

… And sometimes Open Source

One other item of interest out of EMCWorld2015 this month was that ViPR Controller is being open sourced as Project CoprHD (on GitHub). Its source code is scheduled to be loaded around June.

EMC, IBM, HDS, NetApp, VMware and others have all been very active in open source in the past, in areas such as storage support in Linux, OpenStack and other projects. But outside of Pivotal (an EMC Federation company), most of them have not open sourced a real product.

I believe it was Paul Maritz, CEO Pivotal who said on stage, that one reason to open source a project is to help to create an eco-system around it.

EMC open sourced ViPR Controller primarily to add even more development resources to enhance the solution. The other consideration was that customers adopting ViPR Controller in their data centers were concerned about vendor lock-in. Open sourcing ViPR Controller addresses both of these issues.

My understanding is that Project CoprHD will be under a Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0) as standalone project. Customers can now add any storage system support they want and anyone that’s afraid of lock-in can download the software and modify it themselves. MPL 2.0 supports a copyleft style of licensing, which essentially means anyone can modify the source code but any derivative work must be licensed under MPL as well.

My understanding is that ViPR Controller will still be available as a commercial product.

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From my perspective it all seems to make a lot of sense. Customers creating new applications that could use software defined storage want access to the product for free to try it out to see what it can and can’t do.

EMC’s taken a lead in offering their’s for free in test and dev situations, we’ll see if the others go along with them.

Comments?

EMCWorld2015 Day 2&3 news

Posted on May 6, 2015May 6, 2015 by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Clustered storage, Information economy, Object storage, PCIe, Storage, Storage architecture, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

Some additional news from EMCWorld2015 this week:

EMC announced directed availability for DSSD, their Rack scale shared Flash storage solution using a PCIe3 (switched) fabric with 36 dual ported, flash modules, which hold 512 NAND chips for 144TB NAND flash storage. On the stage floor they had a demonstration pitting a 40 node Hadoop cluster with DAS against a 15 node Hadoop cluster using the DSSD, both running HIVE and working on the same Query. By the time the 40node/DAS solution got to about 2% of the query completion the 15node/DSSD based cluster had finished the query without breaking a sweat. They then ran an even more complex query and it took no time at all.

They also simulated a copy of a 4TB file (~32K-128K IOs) from memory to memory and it took literally seconds, then copied it to SSD that took considerably longer (didn’t catch how long but much longer than memory), and then they showed the same file copy to DSSD and it only took seconds, almost looked exactly a smidgen slower than the memory to memory copy.

They said the PCIe fabric (no indication what the driver was) provided much more parallelism to the dual ported flash storage that the system was almost able to complete the 4TB copy at memory to memory speeds. It was all pretty impressive, albeit a simulation of the real thing.

EMC indicated that they designed the flash modules themselves and expect to double capacity of the DSSD to 288TB shortly. They showed the controller board that had a mezzanine board over a part of it, but together had 12 major chips on it which I assume had something to do with the PCIe fabric. They said there were two controllers in the system for high availability and the 144TB DSSD was deployed in 5U of space.

I can see how this would play well for real time analytics, high frequency trading and HPC environments but there’s more to shared storage than just speed. Cost wasn’t mentioned neither was the software driver but with the ease with which it worked on the Hive query, I can only assume at some lever it must look something like a DAS device but with memory access times… NVMe anyone?

Project CoprHD was announced which open sourced EMC’s ViPR Controller software. Many ViPR customers were asking for EMC to open source ViPR controller, apparently their listening. Hopefully this will enable some participation from non-EMC storage vendors to allow their storage to be brought under the management of ViPR Controller. I believe the intent is to have an EMC hardened/supported version of Project CoprHD or ViPR Controller to coexist with the open source project version which anyone can download and modify for themselves.

A Non-production, downloadable version of ScaleIO was also announced. The test-dev version is a free download with unlimited capacity, full functionality and available for an unlimited time but only for non-production use. Another of the demos onstage this morning was Chad configuring storage across a ScaleIO cluster and using its QoS services to limit the impact of a specific workload. There was talk that ScaleIO was available previously as a free download but it took a bunch of effort to find and download. They have removed all these prior hindrances and soon, if not today it’s freely available for anyone. ScaleIO runs on VMware and other hypervisors (maybe bare metal as well). So if you wanted to get your feet wet with software defined storage, this sounds like the perfect opportunity.

ECS is being added to EMC’s Data Lake foundation. Not exactly sure what are all the components in the data lake solution but previously the only Data Lake storage was Isilon based. This week EMC added Elastic Cloud Storage to the picture. Recall that Elastic Cloud Storage comes in either a software only or hardware appliance deployment and provides object storage.

I missed Project Liberty before but it’s a virtual VNX appliance, software only version. I assume this is intended for ROBO deployments or very low end business environments. Presumably it runs on VMware and has some sort of storage limitations. It seems, more and more of EMC products are coming out in virtual appliance versions.

Project Falcon was also announced which is a virtual Data Domain appliance, software only solution, targeted for ROBO environments and other small enterprises. The intent is to have an onramp for DataDomain backup storage. I assume runs under VMware.

Project Caspian – rolling out CloudScaling orchestration/automation for OpenStack deployments. On the big stage today, Chad and Jeremy demonstrated Project Caspian on a VCE VxRACK deploying racks of servers under OpenStack control. They were able within a couple of clicks define and deploy openstack on bare metal hardware and deploy applications to the OpenStack servers. They had a monitoring screen which showed the OpenStack server activity (transactions) in real time and showed an over commit of the rack and how easy it was to add a new rack with more servers. All this seemed to take but a few clicks. The intent is not to create another OpenStack distribution but to provide an orchestration/automation/monitoring layer of software on top of OpenStack to “industrialize OpenStack” for enterprise users. Looked pretty impressive to me.

I would have to say the DSSD box was most impressive. It would have been interesting to get an upclose look at the box with some more specifications but they didn’t have one on the Expo floor.

Interesting sessions at SNIA DSI Conference 2015

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Ray in Data retention, Optical storage, Strategic Inflection Points, Uncategorized

I attended the SNIA Data Storage Innovation (DSI) Conference in Santa Clara, CA last week and ran into a number of old friends and met a few new ones. While attending the conference, there were a few sessions that seemed to bring the conference to life for me.

Microsoft Software Defined Storage Journey

Jose Barreto, Principal Program Manager – Microsoft, spent a little time on what’s currently shipping with Scale-out File Service, Storage Spaces and other storage components of Windows software defined storage solutions. Essentially, what Microsoft is learning from Azure cloud deployments it is slowly but surely being implemented in Windows Server software and other solutions.

Microsoft ‘s vision is that customers can have their own private cloud storage with partner storage systems (SAN & NAS), with Microsoft SDS (Scale-out File Server with Storage Spaces), with hybrid cloud storage (StorSimple with Azure storage) and public cloud storage (Azure storage).

Jose also mentioned other recent innovations like the Cloud Platform System using Microsoft software, Dell compute, Force 10 networking and JBOD (PowerVault MD3060e) storage in a rack.

Some recent Microsoft SDS innovations include:

HDD and SSD storage tiering;
Shared volume storage;
System Center volume and unified storage management;
PowerShell integration;
Multi-layer redundancy across nodes, disk enclosures, and disk devices; and
Independent scale-out of compute or storage.

Probably a few more I’m missing here but these will suffice.

Then, Jose broke some news on what’s coming next in Windows Server storage offerings:

Quality of service (QoS) – Windows Server provides QoS capabilities which allows one to limit the IO activity and can be used to specify min and max IOPS or latency at a VM or VHD level. The scale-out storage service will balance the IO activity across the cluster to meet this QoS specification. Apparently the balancing algorithm came from Microsoft Research but Jose didn’t go into great detail on what it did differently other than being “fairer” applying QoS constraints.
Rolling upgrades – Windows Server now supports a cluster running different versions of software. Now one can take a cluster node down and update its software and re-activate it into the same cluster. Previously, code upgrades had to take a whole cluster down at a time.
Synchronous replication – Windows Server now supports synchronous Storage Replicast the volume level. Previously Storage Replicas were limited to asynch.
Higher VM storage resiliency – Windows will now pause a VM rather than terminate it during transient storage interruptions. This allows VMs to sustain operations across transient outages. VMs are in PausedCritical state until the storage comes back and then they are restarted automatically.
Shared-nothing Storage Spaces – Windows Storage Spaces can be configured across cluster nodes without shared storage. Previously, Storage Spaces required shared JBOD storage between cluster nodes. This feature removes this configuration constraint and allows JBOD storage to only be accessible fro a single node.

Jose did not name what this “Vnext” was going to be called and didn’t provide a specific time frame other than it’s coming out shortly.

Archival Disc Technology

Yasumori Hino from Panasonic and Jun Nakano from Sony presented information on a brand new removable media technology or Cold Storage. Previous to there session there was another one from HDS Federal Corporation on their BluRay jukebox but Yasumori’s and Jun’s session was more noteworthy.The new Archive Disc is the next iteration in optical storage beyond BlueRay and targeted at long term archive or “cold” storage.

As a prelude to the Archive Disc discussion Yasumori played a CD that was pressed in 1982 (52nd Street, Billy Joel album) on his current generation laptop to show the inherent downward compatibility in optical disc technology.

In 1980 IBM 3480 disk drives were refrigerator sized, multi $10K devices, and held 2.3GB. As far as I know there aren’t any of these still in operation. And IBM/STK tape was reel to reel and took up a whole rack. There may be a few of these devices still operating these days but not many. I still have a CD collection (but then I am a GreyBeard 🙂 that I still listen to occasionally.

The new Archive Disc includes:

More resilient media to high humidity, high temperature, salt water, and EMP and other magnetic disturbances. As proof, a BlueRay disk was submerged in sea water for 5 weeks and was still able to be read. Data on BlueRay and the new Archive disk is recorded without using electro magnetics and is recorded in a very stable oxide recording material layer. They project that the new Archive disc has a media life of 50 years at 50C and 1000 years at 25C under high humidity conditions.
Dual sided, triple layered which uses land and groove recording to provide 300GB of data storage. BlueRay also uses a land and groove disk format but only records on the land portion of the disc. Track pitch for BlueRay is 320nm whereas for the Archive disc it’s only 225nm.
Data transfer speeds of 90MB/sec with two optical heads, one per side. Each head can read/write data at 45MB/sec. They project double or quadrouple this data transfer rate by using more pairs of optical heads .

They also presented a roadmap for a 2nd gen 500GB and 3rd gen 1TB Archive disc using higher linear density changes and better signal processing technology.

Cold storage is starting to get some more interest these days what with all the power consumption going into today’s data centers and the never ending data tsunami. Archive and BluRay optical storage consume no power at rest and only consume power when mounting/dismounting and reading/writing/spinning. Also with optical discs imperviousness to high temp and humidity, optical storage could be stored outside of air conditioned data centers.

The Storage Revolution

The final presentation of interest to me was by Andrea Nelson from Intel. Intel has lately been focusing on helping partners and vendors provide more effective storage offerings. These aren’t storage solutions but rather storage hardware, components and software developed in collaboration with storage vendors and partners that make it easier for them to offer storage solutions using Intel hardware. One example of this collaboration is IBM hardware assist Real Time Compression available on new V7000 and FlashSystem V9000 storage hardware.

As the world turns to software defined storage, Intel wants those solutions to make use of their hardware. (Although, at the show I heard from one another new SDS vendor that was planning to use X86 as well as ARM servers).

Intel has:

QuickAssist Acceleration technology – such as hardware assist data compression,
Storage Acceleration software libraries – open source erasure coding and other low-level compute intensive functions, and
Cache Acceleration software – uses Intel SSDs as a data cache for storage applications.

There wasn’t of a technical description of these capabilities as in other DSI sessions but with the industry moving more and more to SDS, Intel’s got a vested interest in seeing it be implemented on their hardware.

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That’s about it. I sat in on quite a number of other sessions but nothing else stuck out as significant or interesting to me as these threes sessions.

Comments?

Transporter, a private Dropbox in a tower

Posted on April 4, 2015 by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, data access, Data security, Ethernet, File Storage, Storage, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Systems, WAN

Move over Dropbox, Box and all you synch&share wannabees, there’s a new synch and share in town.

At SFD7 last month, we were visiting with Connected Data where CEO, Geoff Barrell was telling us all about what was wrong with today’s cloud storage solutions. In front of all the participants was this strange, blue glowing device. As it turns out, Connected Data’s main product is the File Transporter, which is a private file synch and share solution.

All the participants were given a new, 1TB Transporter system to take home. It was an interesting sight to see a dozen of these Transporter towers sitting in front of all the bloggers.

I was quickly, established a new account, installed the software, and activated the client service. I must admit, I took it upon myself to “claim” just about all of the Transporter towers as the other bloggers were still paying attention to the presentation. Sigh, they later made me give back (unclaim) all but mine, but for a minute there I had about 10TB of synch and share space at my disposal.

Transporters rule

So what is it. The Transporter is both a device and an Internet service, where you own the storage and networking hardware.

The home-office version comes as a 1 or 2TB 2.5” hard drive, in a tower configuration that plugs into a base module. The base module runs a secured version of Linux and their synch and share control software.

As tower power on, it connects to the Internet and invokes the Transporter control service. This service identifies the node, who owns it, and provides access to the storage on the Transporter to all desktops, laptops, and mobile applications that have access to it.

At initiation of the client service on a desktop/laptop it creates (by default) a new Transporter directory (folder). Files that are placed in this directory are automatically synched to the Transporter tower and then synchronized to any and all online client devices that have claimed the tower.

Apparently you can have multiple towers that are claimed to the same account. I personally tested up to 10 ;/ and it didn’t appear as if there was any substantive limit beyond that but I’m sure there’s some maximum count somewhere.

A couple of nice things about the tower. It’s your’s so you can move it to any location you want. That means, you could take it with you to your hotel or other remote offices and have a local synch point.

Also, initial synchronization can take place over your local network so it can occur as fast as your LAN can handle it. I remember the first time I up-synched 40GB to DropBox, it seemed to take weeks to complete and then took less time to down-synch for my laptop but still days of time. With the tower on my local network, I can synch my data much faster and then take the tower with me to my other office location and have a local synch datastore. (I may have to start taking mine to conferences. Howard (@deepstorage.net, co-host on our GreyBeards on Storage podcast) had his operating in all the subsequent SFD7 sessions.

The Transporter also allows sharing of data. Steve immediately started sharing all the presentations on his Transporter service so the bloggers could access the data in real time.

They call the Transporter a private cloud but in my view, it’s more a private synch and share service.

Transporter heritage

The Transporter people were all familiar to the SFD crowd as they were formerly with Drobo which was at a previous SFD sessions (see SFD1). And like Drobo, you can install any 2.5″ disk drive in your Transporter and it will work.

There’s workgroup and business class versions of the Transporter storage system. The workgroup versions are desktop configurations (looks very much like a Drobo box) that support up to 8TB or 12TB supporting 15 or 30 users respectively. The also have two business class, rack mounted appliances that have up to 12TB or 24TB each and support 75 or 150 users each. The business class solution has onboard SSDs for meta-data acceleration. Similar to the Transporter tower, the workgroup and business class appliances are bring your own disk drives.

Connected Data’s presentation

Geoff’s discussion (see SFD7 video) was a tour of the cloud storage business model. His view was that most of these companies are losing money. In fact, even Amazon S3/Glacier appears to be bleeding money, although this may not stop Amazon. Of course, DropBox and other synch and share services all depend on cloud storage for their datastores. So, the lack of a viable, profitable business model threatens all of these services in the long run.

But the business model is different when a customer owns the storage. Here the customer owns the actual storage cost. The only thing that Connected Data provides is the client software and the internet service that runs it. Pricing for the 1TB and 2TB transporters with disk drives are $150 and $240.

Having a Transporter

One thing I don’t like is the lack of data-at-rest encryption. They use TLS for data transfers across your LAN and the Internet. But the nice thing about having possession of the actual storage is that you can move it around. But the downside is that you may move it to less secure environments (like conference hotel rooms). And as with the any disk storage, someone can come up to the device and steel the disk. Whether the data would be easily recognizable is another question but having it be encrypted would put that question to rest. There’s some indication on the Transporter support site that encryption may be coming for the business class solution. But nothing was said about the Transporter tower.

On the Mac, the Transporter folder has the shared folders as direct links (real sub-folders) but the local data is under a Transporter Library soft link. It turns out to be a hidden file (“.Transporter Library”) under the Transporter folder. When you Control click on this file your are given the option to view deleted files. You can also do this with shared files as well.

One problem with synch and share services is once someone in your collaboration group deletes some shared files they are gone (over time) from all other group users. Even if some of them wanted them. Transporter makes it a bit easier to view these files and save them elsewhere. But I assume at some point they have to be purged to free up space.

When I first installed the Transporter, it showed up as a network node on my finder shared servers. But the latest desktop version (3.1.17) has removed this.

Also some of the bloggers complained about files seeing files “in flux” or duplicates of the shared files but with unusual file suffixes appended to them, such as ” filename124224_f367b3b1-63fa-4d29-8d7b-a534e0323389.jpg”. Enrico (@ESignoretti) opened up a support ticket on this and it’s supposedly been fixed in the latest desktop and was a temporary filename used only during upload and should have been deleted-renamed after the upload was completed. I just uploaded 22MB with about 40 files and didn’t see any of this.

I really want encryption as I wanted one transporter in a remote office and another in the home office with everything synched locally and then I would hand carry the remote one to the other location. But without encryption this isn’t going to work for me. So I guess I will limit myself to just one and move it around to wherever I want to my data to go.

Here are some of the other blog posts by SFD7 participants on Transporter:

Storage field day 7 – day 2 – Connected Data by Dan Firth (@PenguinPunk)

File Transporter, private Synch&Share made easy by Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti)

Transporter – Storage Field Day 7 preview by Keith Townsend (@VirtualizedGeek)

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