Microsoft Azure uses a different style of erasure coding for their cloud storage than what I have encountered in the past. Their erasure coding technique was documented in a paper presented at USENIX ATC’12 (for more info check out their Erasure coding in Windows Azure Storage paper).
The Night Lights of Europe (as seen from space) by woodleywonderworks (cc) (from flickr)
Yesterday, twitterland was buzzing about EMC’s latest enhancement to their Atmos Cloud Storage platform called GeoProtect. This new capability improves cloud data protection by supporting erasure code data protection rather than just pure object replication.
Erasure coding has been used for over a decade in storage and some of the common algorithms are Reed-Solomon, Cauchy Reed-Soloman, EVENODD coding, etc. All these algorithms provide a way for splitting up customer data into data instances and parity (encoding) to allow some number of data or parity instances to be erased (or lost) while still providing customer data. For example, a R-S encoding scheme we used in the past (called RAID 6+) had 13 data fragments and 2 parity fragments. Such an encoding scheme supported the simultaneous failure of any two drives and could still supply (reconstruct) customer data.
But how does RAID differ from something like GeoProtect.
RAID is typically within a storage array and not across storage arrays
RAID is typically limited to a small number of alternative configurations of data disks and parity disks which cannot be altered in the field, and
Currently, RAID typically doesn’t support more than two disk failures while still being able to recover customer data (see Are RAIDs days numbered?)
As I understand it GeoProtect currently supports only two different encoding schemes which can provide for different levels of data instance failures while still protecting customer data. And with GeoProtect you are protecting data across Atmos nodes and potentially across different geographic locations not just within storage arrays. Also, with Atmos this is all policy driven and data that comes into the system can use any object replication policy or either of the two GeoProtect policies supported today.
Although the nice thing about R-S encoding is that it doesn’t have to be fixed to two different encoding schemes. And as it’s all software, new coding schemes could easily be released over time, possibly someday being entirely something a user could dial up or down at their whim.
But this would seem much more like what Cleversafe has been offering in their SliceStor product. With Cleversafe the user can specify exactly how much redundancy they want to support and the system takes care of everything else. In addition, Cleversafe has implemented a more fine grained approach (with many more fragments) and data and parity are intermingled in each stored fragment.
It’s not a big stretch for Atmos to go from two GeoProtect configurations to four or more. Unclear to me what the right number would be but once you get past 3 or so, it might be easier to just code a generic R-S routine that can handle any configuration the customer wants but I may be oversimplifying the mathematics here.
Nonetheless, in future versions of Atmos I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s possible that through policy management the way data is protected could change over time. Specifically, while data is being frequently accessed, one could use object replication or less compressed encoding to speed up access but once access frequency diminishes (or time passes), data can then protected with more storage efficient encoding schemes which would reduce the data footprint in the cloud while still offering similar resiliency to data loss.
Full disclosure I have worked for Cleversafe in the past and although I am currently working with EMC, I have had no work from EMC’s Atmos team.
In a previous post I discussed what it would take to store 1YB of data in 2015 for the National Security Agency (NSA). Due to length, that post did not discuss many other aspects of the 1YB archive such as ingest, index, data protection, etc. Thus, I will attempt to cover each of these in turn and as such, this post will cover some of the data protection aspects of the 1YB archive and its catalog/index.
RAID protecting 1YB of data
Protecting the 1YB archive will require some sort of parity protection. RAID data protection could certainly be used and may need to be extended to removable media (RAID for tape), but that would require somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20% additional storage (RAID5 across 10 to 5 tape drives). It’s possible with Reed-Solomon encoding and using RAID6 that we could take this down to 5-10% of additional storage (RAID 6 for a 40 to a 20 wide tape drive stripe). Possibly other forms of ECC (such as turbo codes) might be usable in a RAID like configuration which would give even better reliability with less additional storage.
But RAID like protection also applies to the data catalog and indexes required to access the 1YB archive of data. Ditto for the online data itself while it’s being ingested, indexed, or readback. For the remainder of this post I ignore the RAID overhead but suffice it to say with today’s an additional 10% storage for parity will not change this discussion much.
Also in the original post I envisioned a multi-tier storage hierarchy but the lowest tier always held a copy of any files residing in the upper tiers. This would provide some RAID1 like redundancy for any online data. This might be pretty usefull, i.e., if a file is of high interest, it could have been accessed recently and therefore resides in upper storage tiers. As such, multiple copies of interesting files could exist.
Catalog and indexes backups for 1YB archive
IMHO, RAID or other parity protection is different than data backup. Data backup is generally used as a last line of defense for hardware failure, software failure or user error (deleting the wrong data). It’s certainly possible that the lowest tier data is stored on some sort of WORM (write once read many times) media meaning it cannot be overwritten, eliminating one class of user error.
But this presumes the catalog is available and the media is locatable. Which means the catalog has to be preserved/protected from user error, HW and SW failures. I wrote about whether cloud storage needs backup in a prior post and feel strongly that the 1YB archive would also require backups as well.
In general, backup today is done by copying the data to some other storage and keeping that storage offsite from the original data center. At this amount of data, most likely the 2.1×10**21 of catalog (see original post) and index data would be copied to some form of removable media. The catalog is most important as the other two indexes could potentially be rebuilt from the catalog and original data. Assuming we are unwilling to reindex the data, with LTO-6 tape cartridges, the catalog and index backups would take 1.3×10**9 LTO-6 cartridges (at 1.6×10**12 bytes/cartridge).
To back up this amount of data once per month would take a gaggle of tape drives. There are ~2.6×10**6 seconds/month and each LTO-6 drive can transfer 5.4×10**8 bytes/sec or 1.4X10**15 bytes/drive-month but we need to backup 2.1×10**21 bytes of data so we need ~1.5×10**6 tape transports. Now tapes do not operate 100% of the time because when a cartridge becomes full it has to be changed out with an empty one, but this amounts to a rounding error at these numbers.
To figure out the tape robotics needed to service 1.5×10**6 transports we could use the latest T-finity tape library just announced by Spectra Logic . The T-Finity supports 500 tape drives and 122,000 tape cartridges, so we would need 3.0×10**3 libraries to handle the drive workload and about 1.1×10**4 libraries to store the cartridge set required, so 11,000 T-finity libraries would suffice. Presumably, using LTO-7 these numbers could be cut in half ~5,500 libraries, ~7.5×10**5 transports, and 6.6×10**8 cartridges.
Other removable media exist, most notably the Prostor RDX. However RDX roadmap info out to the next generation are not readily available and high-end robotics are do not currently support RDX. So for the moment tape seems the only viable removable backup for the catalog and index for the 1YB archive.
Mirroring the data
Another approach to protecting the data is to mirror the catalog and index data. This involves taking the data and copying it to another online storage repository. This doubles the storage required (to 4.2×10**21 bytes of storage). Replication doesn’t easily protect from user error but is an option worthy of consideration.
Networking infrastructure needed
Whether mirroring or backing up to tape, moving this amount of data will require substantial networking infrastructure. If we assume that in 2105 we have 32GFC (32 gb/sec fibre channel interfaces). Each interface could potentially transfer 3.2GB/s or 3.2×10**9 bytes/sec. Mirroring or backing up 2.1×10**21 bytes over one month will take ~2.5×10**6 32GFC interfaces. Probably should have twice this amount of networking just to not have any one be a bottleneck so 5×10**6 32GFC interfaces should work.
As for switches, the current Brocade DCX supports 768 8GFC ports and presumably similar port counts will be available in 2015 to support 32GFC. In addition if we assume at least 2 ports per link, we will need ~6,500 fully populated DCX switches. This doesn’t account for multi-layer switches and other sophisticated switch topologies but could be accommodated with another factor of 2 or ~13,000 switches.
Hot backups require journals
This all assumes we can do catalog and index backups once per month and take the whole month to do them. Now storage today normally has to be taken offline (via snapshot or some other mechanism) to be backed up in a consistent state. While it’s not impossible to backup data that is concurrently being updated it is more difficult. In this case, one needs to maintain a journal file of the updates going on while the data is being backed up and be able to apply the journaled changes to the data backed up.
For the moment I am not going to determine the storage requirements for the journal file required to cover the catalog transactions for a month, but this is dependent on the change rate of the catalog data. So it will necessarily be a function of the index or ingest rate of the 1YB archive to be covered in a future post.
Stay tuned, I am just having too much fun to stop.
