For data that never rests, NetApp NDAS

NetApp co-founder, Dave Hitz announced he was becoming a NetApp Founder Emeritus at the Storage Field Day (SFD18) show. He gave a great session about what he and his Hitz foundation’s been doing (for one example see our Archeology meets big data, post). He also discussed at length where he felt the storage world (and NetApp) must do to address the opportunities of the new cloud world. But this post isn’t about Dave, it’s about NetApp Data Availability Service, NDAS.

NetApp NDAS, currently in Beta but GAing (hopefully) later this year, is an AWS marketplace data orchestration solution that manages primary to secondary to S3 movement for ONTAP data. Essentially, NetApp Data Availability Services extends ONTAP data lifecycle management to AWS cloud. But it’s more than just a way to archive ONTAP data.

NDAS orchestrates Snapmirror services across ONTAP systems and AWS. But once your ONTAP data is in S3 it supplies access to that data for authorized AWS applications and services. That way one can use their ONTAP data to provide data analytics, train AI models, and do just about anything you can do with AWS applications today. By using NDAS, customers can extract more value from their ONTAP data.

NDAS is not just copying data to S3 but is also copying ONTAP metadata, catalogues and other information that provides context for that data. By copying ONTAP catalog information, customers and authorized end users can have file level access to ONTAP data residing in S3 objects.

NDAS today, only supports copying data from secondary ONTAP systems to S3. But a future enhancement will expand this to copy primary ONTAP data to S3.

How does NDAS work

NDAS provisions (your) EC2 instances, and middleware to read the data from the secondary systems and copy it to S3 buckets which you provide. NDAS after initial configuration to point to your ONTAP secondary storage systems, will autodiscover all the data available that can be copied to the cloud.

NDAS will start cataloguing your ONTAP data. NDAS EC2 instances support the NDAS copy, view and a Google-like search processes.

NDAS search presents a simplified file system view into your ONTAP data copied to S3. That way customers can identify data that could be used for AI training or data analytics that run in the cloud to access the data.

There’s extensive security to insure that NDAS is properly authorized to access your ONTAP data. Normal S3 security options also apply such as to have the data be encrypted on S3. NDAS data is automatically encrypted in flight.

Moreover, NDAS S3 bucket data can be replicated across AWS regions . Also serverless/lambda funationality are fully supported from or NDAS S3 buckets. .

What can it do with the data

AWS applications can access the data directly through NDAS APIs. Or customers can manually extract data they want to further process using the NDAS GUI to identify and copy data of interests. NDAS essentially creates a small app layer that allows users to view and access the ONTAP data in S3 as a file system.

One can have different NDAS AMIs operating in different regions for faster access or to support GDPR compliance requirements. Alternatively, a customer could have one NDAS AMI accessing all their secondary ONTAP instances.

NDAS is intended to provide a data analyst or IT generalist access to ONTAP data. This way AI training and big data analytics applications which run easily in the cloud, can have access to ONTAP data. In this way, customers can more effectively utilize data that IT has been storing and maintaining, since time began.

One NDAS beta customer is a MLB team. They have over time instrumented their stadiums to generate lot’s of data about pitch speed, rotation, ball location as it crosses the plate, etc.   The problem with all this data is siloed in onprem or IOT systems that generated it. But the customer wants to use the data to improve players, coaches and the viewer experience. And all that needs tools, applications and software that’s just not available to run in the data center. But with NDAS all this data is now available to cloud applications.

NDAS is supported by any ONTAP 9.5 or later (FAS, AFF, Cloud ONTAP, ONTAPselect) secondary storage system. ONTAP 9.5 software contains all the services required to support NDAS. This includes the copy-to-cloud APIs, as well as the NDAS proxy, which supplies the secure interface to NDAS operating in the cloud.

NetApp’s NDAS sessions are pretty informative. Anyone interested in finding out more should checkout the videos available on TechFieldDay website and Dave’s session is also worth a view.

For more information on Dave’s session and NDAS check out:

NetApp, Cloudier than ever by Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti)

NetApp and the space in between by Dan Frith (@PenguinPunk)

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Disaster recovery from VMware to AWS using Dell EMC Avamar & Data Domain

avI was at Dell EMC World2017 last week and although most of the news was on Dell’s new 14th generation server and Dell-EMC integration progress, Wednesday’s keynote was devoted to storage and non-server infrastructure news.

There was plenty of non-server news but one item that caught my attention was new functionality from Dell EMC Data Protection Division that used Avamar and Data Domain to provide disaster recovery for VMware VMs directly to AWS.

Data Domain (AWS) Cloud DR

Dell EMC Data Domain Cloud DR (DDCDR) is  a new capability that enables DD to backup to AWS S3 object storage and when needed restart the virtual machines within AWS.

DDCDR requires that a customer with Avamar backup and Data Domain (DD) storage install an OVA which deploys an “add-on” to their on-prem Avamar/DD system and install a lightweight VM (Cloud DR server) utility in their AWS domain.

Once the OVA is installed, it will read the changed data and will segment, encrypt, and compress the backup data and then send this and the backup metadata to AWS S3 objects. Avamar/DD policies can be established to control how many daily backup copies are to be saved to S3 object storage. There’s no need for Data Domain or Avamar to run in AWS.

When there’s a problem at the primary data center, an admin can click on a Avamar GUI button and have the Cloud DR server, uncompress, decrypt, rehydrate and restore the backup data into EBS volumes, translate the VMware VM image to an AMI image and then restarts the AMI on an AWS virtual server (EC2) with its data on EBS volume storage. The Cloud DR server will use the backup metadata to select the AWS EC2 instance with the proper CPU and RAM needed to run the application. Once this completes, the VM is running standalone, in an AWS EC2 instance. Presumably, you have to have EC2 and EBS storage volumes resources available under your AWS domain to be able to install the application and restore its data.

For simplicity purposes, the user can control almost all of the required functionality for DDCDR from the Avamar GUI alone. But in case of a site outage, the user can initiate the application DR from a portal supplied by the Cloud DR server utility.

There you have it, simplified, easy to use (AWS) Cloud DR for your VM applications all through Dell EMC Avamar, Data Domain storage and DDCDR. At the moment, it only works with AWS cloud but it’s likely to be available for other public clouds in the near future.

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There was much more infrastructure news at Dell EMC World2017. I’ll discuss more details on their new storage offerings in my upcoming Storage Intelligence newsletter, due out the end of this month. If your interested in receiving your own copy of my newsletter, checkout the signup button in the upper right of this page.

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[Edits were made for readability and technical accuracy after this post was published. Ed]

Scality’s Open Source S3 Driver

img_6931
The view from Scality’s conference room

We were at Scality last week for Cloud Field Day 1 (CFD1) and one of the items they discussed was their open source S3 driver. (Videos available here).

Scality was on the 25th floor of a downtown San Francisco office tower. And the view outside the conference room was great. Giorgio Regni, CTO, Scality, said on the two days a year it wasn’t foggy out, you could even see Golden Gate Bridge from their conference room.

Scality

img_6912As you may recall, Scality is an object storage solution that came out of the telecom, consumer networking industry to provide Google/Facebook like storage services to other customers.

Scality RING is a software defined object storage that supports a full complement of interface legacy and advanced protocols including, NFS, CIGS/SMB, Linux FUSE, RESTful native, SWIFT, CDMI and Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3. Scality also supports replication and erasure coding based on object size.

RING 6.0 brings AWS IAM style authentication to Scality object storage. Scality pricing is based on usable storage and you bring your own hardware.

Giorgio also gave a session on the RING’s durability (reliability) which showed they support 13-9’s data availability. He flashed up the math on this but it was too fast for me to take down:)

Scality has been on the market since 2010 and has been having a lot of success lately, having grown 150% in revenue this past year. In the media and entertainment space, Scality has won a lot of business with their S3 support. But their other interface protocols are also very popular.

Why S3?

It looks as if AWS S3 is becoming the defacto standard for object storage. AWS S3 is the largest current repository of objects. As such, other vendors and solution providers now offer support for S3 services whenever they need an object/bulk storage tier behind their appliances/applications/solutions.

This has driven every object storage vendor to also offer S3 “compatible” services to entice these users to move to their object storage solution. In essence, the object storage industry, like it or not, is standardizing on S3 because everyone is using it.

But how can you tell if a vendor’s S3 solution is any good. You could always try it out to see if it worked properly with your S3 application, but that involves a lot of heavy lifting.

However, there is another way. Take an S3 Driver and run your application against that. Assuming your vendor supports all the functionality used in the S3 Driver, it should all work with the real object storage solution.

Open source S3 driver

img_6916Scality open sourced their S3 driver just to make this process easier. Now, one could just download their S3server driver (available from Scality’s GitHub) and start it up.

Scality’s S3 driver runs ontop of a Docker Engine so to run it on your desktop you would need to install Docker Toolbox for older Mac or Windows systems or run Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows for newer systems. (We also talked with Docker at CFD1).

img_6933Firing up the S3server on my Mac

I used Docker for Mac but I assume the terminal CLI is the same for both.Downloading and installing Docker for Mac was pretty straightforward.  Starting it up took just a double click on the Docker application, which generates a toolbar Docker icon. You do need to enter your login password to run Docker for Mac but once that was done, you have Docker running on your Mac.

Open up a terminal window and you have the full Docker CLI at your disposal. You can download the latest S3 Server from Scality’s Docker hub by executing  a pull command (docker pull scality/s3server), to fire it up, you need to define a new container (docker run -d –name s3server -p 8000:8000 scality/s3server) and then start it (docker start s3server).

It’s that simple to have a S3server running on your Mac. The toolbox approach for older Mac’s and PC’S is a bit more complicated but seems simple enough.

The data is stored in the container and persists until you stop/delete the container. However, there’s an option to store the data elsewhere as well.

I tried to use CyberDuck to load some objects into my Mac’s S3server but couldn’t get it to connect properly. I wrote up a ticket to the S3server community. It seemed to be talking to the right port, but maybe I needed to do an S3cmd to initialize the bucket first – I think.

[Update 2016Sep19: Turns out the S3 server getting started doc said you should download an S3 profile for Cyberduck. I didn’t do that originally because I had already been using S3 with Cyberduck. But did that just now and it now works just like it’s supposed to. My mistake]

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Anyways, it all seemed pretty straight forward to run S3server on my Mac. If I was an application developer, it would make a lot of sense to try S3 this way before I did anything on the real AWS S3. And some day, when I grew tired of paying AWS, I could always migrate to Scality RING S3 object storage – or at least that’s the idea.

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NetApp updates their StorageGRID Webscale solution

grid001NetApp announced a new version of their object storage solution, the StorageGRID WebScale 10.3.

At a former employer, I first talked with StorageGRID (Bycast at the time) a decade or so ago. At that time, they were focused on medical and healthcare verticals and had a RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) storage solution.  It has come a long way.

StorageGRID Business is booming

On the call, NetApp announced they sold 50PB of StorageGRID in FY’16 with 20PB of that in the last quarter and also reported 270% Y/Y revenue growth, which means they are starting to gain some traction in the marketplace. Are we seeing an acceleration of object storage adoption?

As you may recall, StorageGRID comes in a software only solution that runs on just about any white box server with DAS or as two hardware appliances: the SG5612 (12 drive); and the SG5660 (60 drive) nodes. You can mix and match any appliance with any white box software only solution, they don’t have to have the same capacity or performance. But all nodes need network and controller/admin node(s) access.

StorageGRID past

grid002Somewhere during Bycast’s journey they developed support for tape archives and information lifecycle management (ILM) for objects. The previous generation, StorageGrid 10.2 had a number of features, including:

  • S3 cloud archive support that allowed objects to be migrated to AWS S3 as they were no longer actively accessed
  • NAS bridge support that allowed CIFS/SMB or NFS access to StorageGRID objects, which could also be read as S3 objects for easier migration to/from object storage;
  • Hierarchical erasure coding option that was optimized for efficiently storing large objects;
  • Node level erasure coding support that can be used to rebuild data for node drive failures, without having to go outside the node data retrieval;
  • Object byte-granular range read support that allowed users to read an object at any byte offset without requiring rebuild;
  • Support for OpenStack Swift API that made StorageGRID objects natively available to any OpenStack service; and
  • Software support for running as Docker containers or as a VM under VMware ESX, or OpenStack KVM that allowed StorageGRID software to run just about anywhere.

StorageGRID present and future

grid003But customers complained StorageGRID was too complex to install and update which required too much hand holding by NetApp professional services. StorageGRID Webscale 10.3 was targeted to address these deficiencies. Some of the features in StorageGrid 10.3, include:

  • Radically simplified, more modern UI, new dashboard and policy wizard/editor, so that it’s a lot easier to manage the StorageGRID. All features of the UI are also available via RESTfull API access and the UI is the same for white box, software only implementations as well as appliance configurations.
  • Simplified automated installation scripts, so that installations that used to take multiple steps, separate software installs and required professional services support, now use a full-solution software stack install, take only minutes and can be done by the customers alone;
  • S3 object versioning support, so that objects can have multiple versions, limited via the UI, if needed, but provide a snapshot-like capability for S3 data that protects against object accidental deletion.
  • grid004ILM policy change predictions/modeling, so that admins can now see how changes to ILM policies will impact StorageGRID.
  • Even more flexibility in DAS storage, so that future StorageGRID configurations can support 10TB drives and 6TB FIPS-140 drive encryption support, which adds to the current drive capacity and data security options already available in StorageGRID.

To top it all off, StorageGRID 10.3 improves performance for both small (30KB) and large (300MB) object get/puts.

  • Small S3 Load Data Router (LDR, 1-thread) object performance has improved ~4X for both PUTs and GETs; and
  • Large S3 LDR (1-thread) object performance has improved ~2X for PUTs and ~4X for GETs.

Object storage market heating up

grid005Apparently, service providers are adopting object storage to  provide competition to AWS, Azure and Google cloud storage for backup and storage archives as well as for DR as a service. Also, many media and other customers managing massive data repositories are turning to object storage to support their multi-site, very large file libraries.  And as more solution vendors support S3 object protocols for data access and archive, something like StorageGRID can become their onsite-offsite storage alternative.

And Amazon, Azure and Google are starting to realize that most enterprise customers are not going to leap to the cloud for everything they do. So, some sort of hybrid solution is needed for the long term. Having an on premises and off premises object storage solution that can also archive/migrate data to the cloud is a great hybrid alternative that takes enterprises one step closer to the cloud.

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A tale of two AFAs: EMC DSSD D5 & Pure Storage FlashBlade

There’s been an ongoing debate in the analyst community about the advantages of software only innovation vs. hardware-software innovation (see Commodity hardware loses again and Commodity hardware always loses posts). Here is another example where two separate companies have turned to hardware innovation to take storage innovation to the next level.

DSSD D5 and FlashBlade

DSSD-d5Within the last couple of weeks, two radically different AFAs were introduced. One by perennial heavyweight EMC with their new DSSD D5 rack scale flash system and the other by relatively new comer Pure Storage with their new FlashBlade storage system.FB

These two arrays seem to be going after opposite ends of the storage market: the 5U DSSD D5 is going after both structured and unstructured data that needs ultra high speed IO access (<100µsec) times and the 4U FlashBlade going after more general purpose unstructured data. And yet the two have have many similarities at least superficially.
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