Tag: NetApp

For data that never rests, NetApp NDAS

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, Data, data access, data mobility, File Storage, Information economy, Strategic Inflection Points

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

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Clustered storage, FC, File Storage, NVMe, SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points

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 datasheet 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.

NetApp updates their StorageGRID Webscale solution

Posted on by Ray in Cloud storage, data mobility, Data security, Object storage, Storage performance

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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New SPECsfs2008 CIFS/SMB vs. NFS (again) – chart of the month

Posted on by Ray in CIFS/SMB, CIFS/SMB throughput, File Storage, NFS, NFS throughput, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Storage performance

SPECsfs2008 benchmark results for CIFS/SMB vs. NFS protocol performance
SCISFS140326-001 (c) 2014 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The above chart represents another in a long line of charts on the relative performance of CIFS[/SMB] versus NFS file interface protocols. The information on the chart are taken from vendor submissions that used the same exact hardware configurations for both NFS and CIFS/SMB protocol SPECsfs2008 benchmark submissions.

There are generally two charts I show in our CIFS/SMB vs. NFS analysis, the one above and another that shows a ops/sec per spindle count analysis for all NFS and CIFS/SMB submissions.  Both have historically indicated that CIFS/SMB had an advantage. The one above shows the total number of NFS or CIFS/SMB operations per second on the two separate axes and provides a linear regression across the data. The above shows that, on average, the CIFS/SMB protocol provides about 40% more (~36.9%) operations per second than NFS protocol does with the same hardware configuration.

However, there are a few caveats about this and my other CIFS/SMB vs. NFS comparison charts:

  • The SPECsfs2008 organization has informed me (and posted on their website) that  CIFS[/SMB] and NFS are not comparable.  CIFS/SMB is a stateful protocol and NFS is stateless and the corresponding commands act accordingly. My response to them and my readers is that they both provide file access, to a comparable set of file data (we assume, see my previous post on What’s wrong with SPECsfs2008) and in many cases today, can provide access to the exact same file, using both protocols on the same storage system.
  • The SPECsfs2008 CIFS/SMB benchmark does slightly more read and slightly less write data operations than their corresponding NFS workloads. Specifically, their CIFS/SMB workload does 20.5% and 8.6% READ_ANDX and WRITE_ANDX respectively CIFS commands vs. 18% and 9% READ and WRITE respectively NFS commands.
  • There are fewer CIFS/SMB benchmark submissions than NFS and even fewer with the same exact hardware (only 13). So the statistics comparing the two in this way must be considered preliminary, even though the above linear regression is very good (R**2 at ~0.98).
  • Many of the submissions on the above chart are for smaller systems. In fact 5 of the 13 submissions were for storage systems that delivered less than 20K NFS ops/sec which may be skewing the results and most of which can be seen above bunched up around the origin of the graph.

And all of this would all be wonderfully consistent if not for a recent benchmark submission by NetApp on their FAS8020 storage subsystem.  For once NetApp submitted the exact same hardware for both a NFS and a CIFS/SMB submission and lo and behold they performed better on NFS (110.3K NFS ops/sec) than they did on CIFS/SMB (105.1K CIFS ops/sec) or just under ~5% better on NFS.

Luckily for the chart above this was a rare event and most others that submitted both did better on CIFS/SMB. But I have been proven wrong before and will no doubt be proven wrong again. So I plan to update this chart whenever we get more submissions for both CIFS/SMB and NFS with the exact same hardware so we can see a truer picture over time.

For those with an eagle eye, you can see NetApp’s FAS8020 submission as the one below the line in the first box above the origin which indicates they did better on NFS than CIFS/SMB.

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The complete SPECsfs2008  performance report went out in SCI’s March 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 on NFS and CIFS/SMB protocols, including our ChampionCharts™ for file storage can be found in  SCI’s recently (March 2014) updated NAS Buying Guide, on sale from our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our SPECsfs2008 performance reports or any of our other storage performance analyses.

Has latency become the key metric? SPC-1 LRT results – chart of the month

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Disk storage, LRT, SPC-1, SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance, Storage Performance Council

I was at EMCworld a couple of months back and they were showing off a preview of the next version VNX storage, which was trying to achieve a million IOPS with under a millisecond latency.  Then I attended NetApp’s analyst summit and the discussion at their Flash seminar was how latency was changing the landscape of data storage and how flash latencies were going to enable totally new applications.

One executive at NetApp mentioned that IOPS was never the real problem. As an example, he mentioned one large oil & gas firm that had a peak IOPS of 35K.

Also, there was some discussion at NetApp of trying to come up with a way of segmenting customer applications by latency requirements.  Aside from high frequency trading applications, online payment processing and a few other high-performance database activities, there wasn’t a lot that could easily be identified/quantified today.

IO latencies have been coming down for years now. Sophisticated disk only storage systems have been lowering latencies for over a decade or more.   But since the introduction of SSDs it’s been a whole new ballgame.  For proof all one has to do is examine the top 10 SPC-1 LRT (least response time, measured with workloads@10% of peak activity) results.

Top 10 SPC-1 LRT results, SSD system response times

 

In looking over the top 10 SPC-1 LRT benchmarks (see Figure above) one can see a general pattern.  These systems mostly use SSD or flash storage except for TMS-400, TMS 320 (IBM FlashSystems) and Kaminario’s K2-D which primarily use DRAM storage and backup storage.

Hybrid disk-flash systems seem to start with an LRT of around 0.9 msec (not on the chart above).  These can be found with DotHill, NetApp, and IBM.

Similarly, you almost have to get to as “slow” as 0.93 msec. before you can find any disk only storage systems. But most disk only storage comes with a latency at 1msec or more. Between 1 and 2msec. LRT we see storage from EMC, HDS, HP, Fujitsu, IBM NetApp and others.

There was a time when the storage world was convinced that to get really good response times you had to have a purpose built storage system like TMS or Kaminario or stripped down functionality like IBM’s Power 595.  But it seems that the general purpose HDS HUS, IBM Storwize, and even Huawei OceanStore are all capable of providing excellent latencies with all SSD storage behind them. And all seem to do at least in the same ballpark as the purpose built, TMS RAMSAN-620 SSD storage system.  These general purpose storage systems have just about every advanced feature imaginable with the exception of mainframe attach.

It seems nowadays that there is a trifurcation of latency results going on, based on underlying storage:

  • DRAM only systems at 0.4 msec to ~0.1 msec.
  • SSD/flash only storage at 0.7 down to 0.2msec
  • Disk only storage at 0.93msec and above.

The hybrid storage systems are attempting to mix the economics of disk with the speed of flash storage and seem to be contending with all these single technology, storage solutions. 

It’s a new IO latency world today.  SSD only storage systems are now available from every major storage vendor and many of them are showing pretty impressive latencies.  Now with fully functional storage latency below 0.5msec., what’s the next hurdle for IT.

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Image: EAB 2006 by TMWolf

 

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Peak server, the cloud & NetApp storage for AWS

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, DAS, Data, data protection, Networking, Server virtualization, Software Defined Network, SSD storage, Storage, Storage Features, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Systems

I was at a conference a month or so ago and one speaker mentioned that the number of x86 servers being sold has peaked and is dropping. I can imagine a number of reasons for this and the main one being server virtualization. But this speaker had a different view and it seemed to be the cloud.

Peak server is here.

He said that three companies were purchasing over 1/2 the x86 servers these days. I feel that there should be at least four Google, Facebook, Amazon & Microsoft and maybe five, if you add in Apple.

Something has happened over the past year or so. Enterprise IT has continued along its merry way but the adoption of cloud services is starting to take off.

I have seen this before, with mainframes, then mini-computers, and now client-server. Minicomputers came out and were so easy to use and develop/deploy applications on, that people stopped creating new apps on the mainframe. Mainframes never died out, and probably have never really stopped shipping increasing MIPS every year. But the share of WW MIP installations for mainframes has been shrinking for decades and have never got going again.

Ultimately, the proprietary minicomputer was just a passing fad and only lasted about 25 years or so. It was wounded by the PC, and then killed off by proprietary Unix workstations.

Then it happened again, the new upstart this time was Windows Server and Linux. Once again it was just easier to build apps on these new and cheaper servers, than any of the older Unix servers. Of course there’s still plenty of business in proprietary Unix servers, but again I would venture to say that their share of WW installed MIPS has been shrinking for a long time.

Nowadays, the cloud is mortally wounding the server market. Server virtualization is helping a lot but it’s also enabling the cloud to eliminate many physical server sales. This is because new applications, new IT environments are being ported/moved/deployed onto the cloud.

Peak server means less enterprise networking, storage and server hardware

In this new, cloud world, customers need less servers, less networking and less enterprise class storage. Yes not every application is suitable to cloud deployment but that’s why there’s still mainframes, still Unix servers, and a continuing need for standalone, physical or virtual x86 servers in the enterprise. But their share of MIPs will start shrinking soon if it hasn’t already.

Ok, so enterprise data center share of MIPs will start shrinking vis a vis cloud data centers. But what happens to networking and storage. My view is that networking becomes software defined and there’s a component of that which operates on special purpose hardware. This will increase in shipments but the more complex, enterprise class networking equipment will flatline and never see any more substantial growth.

And up until yesterday I felt much the same about enterprise class storage. Software defined storage in my future, DAS and SSDs for the capacity and the smarts exist in software if at all. Today, most of the cloud and many service providers have been moving off enterprise class storage and onto DAS.

NetApp’s new enterprise storage in AWS

But yesterday I heard about NetApp private storage for the cloud. This is a configuration of NetApp storage installed in a CoLo facility with a “direct connection” to Amazon compute cloud. In this way, enterprise customers can maintain data stewardship/ownership/governance over their data while at the same time deploying applications onto AWS compute cloud.

This seems to be one of the sticking points to enterprise customers adopting the cloud. By having (data) storage owned lock/stock&barrel by the enterprise it seems much easier and less risky to deploy new and old applications to the cloud.

Whether this pans out and can provide enough value to cover the added expense of the enterprise class storage, only the market can decide. But this is the first time I can remember, where any vendor has articulated a role for enterprise class storage in the cloud. Let’s hope it works.

Image: PDP8/s by ajmexico

Enterprise file synch

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, data access, Disaster Recovery, File Storage, Information economy, Mobile computing, Storage, Strategy, Systems

Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)
Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

Last fall at SNW in San Jose there were a few vendors touting enterprise file synchronization services each having a slightly different version of the requirements.   The one that comes most readily to mind was Egnyte which supported file synchronization across a hybrid cloud (public cloud and network storage) which we discussed in our Fall SNWUSA wrap up post last year.

The problem with BYOD

With bring your own devices (BYOD) corporate end users are quickly abandoning any pretense of IT control and turning consumer class file synchronization services to help  synch files across desktop, laptop and all mobile devices they haul around.   But the problem with these solutions such as DropBox, Box, OxygenCloud and others are that they are really outside of IT’s control.

Which is why there’s a real need today for enterprise class file synchronization solutions that exhibit the ease of use and set up available from consumer file synch systems but  offer IT security, compliance and control over the data that’s being moved into the cloud and across corporate and end user devices.

EMC Syncplicity and EMC on premises storage

Last week EMC announced an enterprise version of their recently acquired Syncplicity software that supports on-premises Isilon or Atmos storage, EMC’s own cloud storage offering.

In previous versions of Syncplicity storage was based in the cloud and used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud orchestration and AWS S3 for cloud storage. With the latest release, EMC adds on premises storage to host user file synchronization services that can span mobile devices, laptops and end user desktops.

New Syncplicity users must download desktop client software to support file synchronization or mobile apps for mobile device synchronization.  After that it’s a simple matter of identifying which if any directories and/or files are to be synchronized with the cloud and/or shared with others.

However, with the Business (read enterprise) edition one also gets the Security and Compliance console which supports access control to define users and devices that can synchronize or share data, enforce data retention policies, remote wipe corporate data,  and native support for single sign services. In addition, one also gets centralized user and group management services to grant, change, revoke user and group access to data.  Also, one now obtains enterprise security with AES-256 data-at-rest encryption, separate key manager data centers and data storage data centers, quadruple replication of data for high disaster fault tolerance and SAS70 Type II compliant data centers.

If the client wants to use on premises storage, they would also need to deploy a VM virtual appliance somewhere in the data center to act as the gateway to file synchronization service requests. The file synch server would also presumably need access to the on premises storage and it’s unclear if the virtual appliance is in-band or out-of-band (see discussion on Egnyte’s solution options below).

Egnyte’s solution

Egnyte comes as a software only solution building a file server in the cloud for end user  storage. It also includes an Egnyte app for mobile hardware and the ever present web file browser.  Desktop file access is provided via mapped drives which access the Egnyte cloud file server gateway running as a virtual appliance.

One major difference between Syncplicity and Egnyte is that Egnyte offers a combination of both cloud and on premises storage but you cannot have just on premises storage. Syncplicity only offers one or the other storage for file data, i.e., file synchronization data can only be in the cloud or on local on premises storage but cannot be in both locations.

The other major difference is that Egnyte operates with just about anybody’s NAS storage such as EMC, IBM, and HDS for the on premises file storage.  It operates as an in-band, software appliance solution that traps file activity going to your on premises storage. In this case, one would need to start using a new location or directory for data to be synchronized or shared.

But for NetApp storage only (today), they utilize ONTAP APIs to offer out-of-band file synchronization solutions.  This means that you can keep NetApp data where it resides and just enable synchronization/shareability services for the NetApp file data in current directory locations.

Egnyte promises enterprise class data security with AD, LDAP and/or SSO user authentication, AES-256 data encryption and their own secure data centers.  No mention of separate key security in their literature.

As for cloud backend storage, Egnyte has it’s own public cloud or supports other cloud storage providers such as AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, NetApp Storage Grid and HP Public Cloud.

There’s more to Egnyte’s solution than just file synchronization and sharing but that’s the subject of today’s post. Perhaps we can cover them at more length in a future post if their interest.

File synchronization, cloud storage’s killer app?

The nice thing about these capabilities is that now IT staff can re-gain control over what is and isn’t synched and shared across multiple devices.  Up until now all this was happening outside the data center and external to IT control.

From Egnyte’s perspective, they are seeing more and more enterprises wanting data both on premises for performance and compliance as well as in the cloud storage for ubiquitous access.  They feel its both a sharability demand between an enterprise’s far flung team members and potentially client/customer personnel as well as a need to access, edit and propagate silo’d corporate information using new mobile devices that everyone has these days.

In any event, Enterprise file synchronization and sharing is emerging as one of the killer apps for cloud storage.  Up to this point cloud gateways made sense for SME backup or disaster recovery solutions but IMO, didn’t really take off beyond that space.  But if you can package a robust and secure file sharing and synchronization solution around cloud storage then you just might have something that enterprise customers are clamoring for.

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NFS ChampionsChart™ – chart-of-the-month

Posted on by Ray in NFS throughput, ORT, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, Storage performance

SCISFS120926-001, Q4-2012 NFS ChampionsChart(tm) (c) 2012 Silverton Consulting, Inc., All Rights Reserved
SCISFS120926-001, Q4-2012 NFS ChampionsChart(tm) (c) 2012 Silverton Consulting, Inc., All Rights Reserved

We had no new performance data to report on in our September StorInt™ newsletter so we decided to publish our NAS Buying Guide ChampionsCharts™.   The chart above is our Q4-2102 NFS ChampionsChart which shows the top performing NFS storage systems from published SPECsfs2008 benchmark results available at the time.

We split up all of our NAS and SAN ChampionsCharts into four quadrants: Champions, Sprinters, Marathoners and Slowpokes.  We feel that storage Champions represent the best overall performers,  Sprinters have great response time but lack in transaction throughput as compared to storage Champions, Marathoners have good transaction throughput but are defficient in responsiveness and Slowpokes need to go back to the drawing board because they suffer both poor transaction throughput and responsiveness.

You may notice that there are two categories of systems identified in the NFS Champions Quadrant above.  These represent the more “normal” NAS systems (numbered 1-7) such as integrated systems and NAS gateways with SAN storage behind them vs. the more caching oriented, NAS systems (denoted with letters A-E) which have standalone NAS systems behind them.

In our Dispatch we discuss the top 3 NAS Champions in the integrated and gateway category which include:

  1. NetApp FAS6080 – although a couple of generations back, the FAS6080 did remarkably well for its complement of hardware.
  2. Huawei Symantec Oceanspace N8500 Clustered NAS – this product did especially well for its assortment of hardware in response time and not necessarily that great in NFS throughput but still respectable.
  3. EMC Celerra VG8, 2 DM and VMAX hardware – similar to number one above, a relatively modest amount of cache and disks but seemed to perform relatively well.

One negative to all our ChampionsCharts is that they depend on audited, published performance data which typically lag behind recent product introductions.  As evidence of this the FAS6080 and Celerra VG8 listed above are at least a generation or two behind current selling systems.  I am not as familiar with the Huawei systems but it may very well be a generation or two behind current selling products.

As for our rankings, this is purely subjective but our feeling is that transaction performance comes first with responsiveness a close second. For example in the above ranking Huawei’s system had the best overall responsiveness but relatively poorer transaction performance than any of the other Champions.  Nonetheless as the best in responsiveness, we felt it deserved a number two in our Champions list.

The full Champions quadrants for the NFS and CIFS/SMB ChampionsCharts are detailed in our NAS Buying Guide available for purchase on our website (please see NAS buying guide page).  The dispatch that went out with our September newsletter also detailed the top 3 CIFS/SMB Champions.

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The complete SPECsfs2008 performance report with both NFS and CIFS/SMB ChampionsCharts went out in SCI’s September 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 SPECsfs2008 performance analysis or any of our other storage performance analyses.