Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

atlantis

ScaleIO in the ESXi Kernel, what about the rest of the ecosystem?

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Before reading my take on this, please read this great article by Vijay Ramachandran as he explains the difference between ScaleIO and VSAN in the kernel. And before I say anything, let me reinforce that this is my opinion and not VMware’s necessarily. I’ve seen some negative comments around Scale IO / VMware / EMC, most of them are around the availability of a second storage solution in the ESXi kernel next to VMware’s own Virtual SAN. The big complaint typically is: Why is EMC allowed and the rest of the ecosystem isn’t? The question though is if VMware is really not allowing other partners to do the same? While flying to Palo Alto I read an article by Itzik which stated the following:

ScaleIO 1.31 introduces several changes in the VMware environment. First, it provides the option to install the SDC natively in the ESX kernel instead of using the SVM to host the SDC component. The V1.31 SDC driver for ESX is VMware PVSP certified, and requires a host acceptance level of “PartnerSupported” or lower in the ESX hosts.

Let me point out here that the solution that EMC developed is under PVSP support. What strikes me is the fact that many seem to think that what ScaleIO achieved is a unique thing despite the “partner support” statement. Although I admit that there aren’t many storage solutions that sit within the hypervisor, and this is great innovation, it is not unique for a solution to sit within the hypervisor.

If you look at flash caching solutions for instance you will see that some sit in the hypervisor (PernixData, SanDisk’s Flashsoft) and some sit on top (Atlantis, Infinio). It is not like VMware favours one over the other in case of these partners. It was their design, it was their way to get around a problem they had… Some managed to develop a solution that sits in the hypervisor, others did not focus on that. Some probably felt that optimizing the data path first was most important, and maybe even more important they had the expertise to do so.

Believe me when I say that it isn’t easy to create these types of solutions. There is no standard framework for this today, hence they end up being partner supported as they leverage existing APIs and frameworks in an innovative way. Until there is you will see some partners sitting on top and others within the hypervisor, depending on what they want to invest in and what skill set they have… (Yes a framework is being explored as talked about in this video by one of our partners, I don’t know when or if this will be release however!)

What ScaleIO did is innovative for sure, but there are others who have done something similar and I expect more will follow in the near future. It is just a matter of time.

Looking back: Software Defined Storage…

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Over a year ago I wrote an article (multiple actually) about Software Defined Storage, VSAs and different types of solutions and how flash impacts the world. One of the articles contained a diagram and I would like to pull that up for this article. The diagram below is what I used to explain how I see a potential software defined storage solution. Of course I am severely biased as a VMware employee, and I fully understand there are various scenarios here.

As I explained the type of storage connected to this layer could be anything DAS/NFS/iSCSI/Block who cares… The key thing here is that there is a platform sitting in between your storage devices and your workloads. All your storage resources would be aggregated in to a large pool and the layer should sort things out for you based on the policies defined for the workloads running there. Now I drew this layer coupled with the “hypervisor”, but thats just because that is the world I live in.

Looking back at this article and looking at the state of the industry today, a couple of things stood out. First and foremost, the term “Software Defined Storage” has been abused by everyone and doesn’t mean much to me personally anymore. If someone says during a bloggers briefing “we have a software defined storage solution” I typically will ask them to define it, or explain what it means to them. Anyway, why did I show that diagram, well mainly because I realised over the last couple of weeks that a couple of companies/products are heading down this path.

If you look at the diagram and for instance think about VMware’s own Virtual SAN product than you can see what would be possible. I would even argue that technically a lot of it would be possible today, however the product is also lacking in some of these spaces (data services) but I expect this to be a matter of time. Virtual SAN sits right in the middle of the hypervisor, the API and Policy Engine is provided by the vSphere layer, it has its own caching service… For now it isn’t supported to connect SAN storage, but if I want to I could even today simply by tagging “LUNs” as local disks.

Another product which comes to mind when looking at the diagram is Pernix Data’s FVP. Pernix managed to build a framework that sits in the hypervisor, in the data path of the VMs. They provide a highly resilient caching layer, and will be able do both flash as well as memory caching in the near future. They support different types of storage connected with the upcoming release… If you ask me, they should be in the right position to slap additional data services like deduplication / compression / encryption / replication on top of it. I am just speculating here, and I don’t know the PernixData roadmap so who knows…

Something completely different is EMC’s ViPR (read Chad’s excellent post on ViPR) and although they may not entirely fit the picture I drew today they are aiming to be that layer in between you and your storage devices and abstract it all for you and allow for a single API to ease automation and do this “end to end” including the storage networks in between. If they would extend this to allow for certain data services to sit in a different layer then they would pretty much be there.

Last but not least Atlantis USX. Although Atlantis is a virtual appliance and as such a different implementation than Virtual San and FVP, they did manage to build a platform that basically does everything I mentioned in my original article. One thing it doesn’t directly solve is the management of the physical storage devices, but today neither does FVP or Virtual SAN (well to a certain extend VSAN does…) But I am confident that this will change when Virtual Volumes is introduced as Atlantis should be able to leverage Virtual Volumes for those purposes.

Some may say, well what about VMware’s Virsto? Indeed, Virsto would also fit the picture but the end of availability was announced not too long ago. However, it has been hinted at multiple times that Virsto technology will be integrated in to other products over time.

Although by now “Software Defined Storage” is seen as a marketing bingo buzzword the world of storage is definitely changing. The question now is I guess, are you ready to change as well?

Startup News Flash part 13

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Edition 13 of the Startup News Flash already. This week is VMware Partner Exchange 2014 so I expected some announcements to be made. There were a couple of announcements the last week(s) which I felt were worth highlighting. There is one that is not really a startup, but I figured should at least be included in the article and that is the fact that Scale.IO and SuperMicro / LSI / Mellanox / VMware showed an appliance at PEX that was optimized for View deployments. I found it an interesting move, and appealing solution. Chris Mellor wrote an article about it here for the Register.

DataGravity announced their Partner Early Access Program this week. They haven’t revealed what they are building, but judging by the quotes in the announcement publication they are aiming to bring a simple cost-effictive solution to enable analysis of unstructured data. Definitely interesting, and something I will look more closer in to at some point in time.

Atlantis ILIO USX was announced this week. I already mentioned it in my VSAN update. Atlantis ILIO USX is an in-memory storage solution. They added the ability to pool and optimize any class of storage including SAN, NAS, RAM or any type of DAS (SSD, Flash, SAS, SATA) to create a hybrid solution. A change of direction for Atlantis as there primary focus was caching so far, but it makes a lot of sense to me especially as they already have many of the data services for their caching platform.

PernixData announced their Beta program for FVP 1.5. They added support for vSphere 5.5, the vSphere Web Client and also in this version allow you to use a different VMkernel interface other than the vMotion interface which their product uses by default. If you want to know more, Chris Wahl wrote a nice article on his experience with FVP 1.5.

Tintri announced it has closed a $75 million Series E funding round led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture, Menlo Ventures and NEA. Good to see Tintri getting another boost, and will be interesting to see how they move forward. I have been following them from the very start and have always been impressed with the ease of the solution they have built.

Startup News Flash part 6

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There we are again and just a short one this time, Startup News Flash part 6. VMworld Europe is around the corner so I expect a bit more news next week, I know of at least 1 company revealing what they have been working on… So what happened in the world of flash/startups the last three weeks?

Fresh:

My buddies over at Tintri just announced two new products. The first one being the Tintri VMstore T600 series, with the T620 providing 13.5 TB of usable capacity and the T650 providing 33.5 TB of usable capacity, allowing you to run up to 2000 VMs(T650, the T620 goes up to 500 VMs) on these storage systems. What is unique about Tintri is how they designed their system, FlashFirst and VM-aware as they call it. Allowing for sub-millisecond latencies with over 99% IO coming out of flash, and of course VM-granular quality of service and data management (snapshots, cloning, and replication). Second announcement is all about management: Tintri Global Center. Let me take a quote from their blog, as it says it all: “The first release of Tintri Global Center can administer up to 32 VMstore systems and their resident VMs. Future versions will add additional control beyond monitoring and reporting with features — such as policy based load balancing and REST APIs to facilitate customized automation/scripts involving a combination of features across multiple VMstore systems such as reporting, snapshots, replication, and cloning. ”

Atlantis seems to be going full steam ahead announcing partnership with NetApp and Violin recently. I guess what struck me personally with these announcements is that we are bringing “all flash arrays” (AFAs) and “memory caching” together and it makes you wonder where you benefit from what the most. It is kind of like a supersized menu at McD, after ordering I always wonder if it was too much. But to be honest I have to read the menu in more detail, and maybe even try it out before I draw that conclusion. I do like the concept of AFAs and I love the concept of Atlantis… It appears that Atlantis is bringing in functionality which these solutions are lacking for now, and of course crazy performance. If anyone has experience with the combination, feel free to chime in!

Some older news:

  • Nothing to do with technology but more about validation of technology and a company. Vaughn Stewart, former NetApp executive, announced he joined Pure Storage as their Chief Evangelist. Pure Storage went all out and create an awesome video which you can find in this blog post. Nice move Vaughn, and congrats Pure Storage.
  • The VSAN Beta went live last week and the community forums opened up. If you want to be a part of this, don’t forget to sign up!