Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

flash

Validate your hardware configuration when it arrives!

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In the last couple of weeks I had 3 different instances of people encountering weird behaviour in their environment. In two cases it was a VSAN environment and the other one was an environment using a flash caching solution. What all three had in common is that when they were driving a lot of IO the SSD device would be unavailable, for one of them they even had challenges enabling VSAN in the first place before any IO load was placed on it.

With the first customer it took me a while what was going on. I asked him the standard questions:

  • Which disk controller are you using?
  • Which flash device are you using?
  • Which disks are you using?
  • Do you have 10GbE networking?
  • Are they on the HCL?
  • What is the queue depth of the devices?

All the answers were “positive”, meaning that the full environment was supported… the queue depth was 600 so that was fine, enterprise grade MLC devices used and even the HDDs were on the HCL. So what was causing their problems? I asked them to show me the Web Client and the disk devices and the flash devices, then I noticed that the flash devices were connected to a different disk controller. The HDDs (SAS drives) were connected to the disk controllers which was on the HCL, a highly performant and reliable device… The flash device however was connected to the on-board shallow queue depth and non-certified controller. Yes indeed, the infamous AHCI disk controller. When I pointed it out the customers were shocked ,”why on earth would the vendor do that…”, well to be honest if you look at it: SAS drives were connected to the SAS controller and the SATA flash device was connected to the SATA disk controller, from that perspective it makes sense right? And in the end, the OEM doesn’t really know what your plans are with it when you configure your own box right? So before you install anything, open it up and make sure that everything is connected properly in a fully supported way! (PS: or simply go VSAN Ready Node / EVO:RAIL :-))

VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash… part 4

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VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash time again. Took me a while to get a bunch of them, so some of the news is a bit older then normal.

  • Dell and SuperMicro to offer an EVO:RAIL bundle with Nexenta for file services on top of VSAN!
    Smart move by Nexenta, first 3rd party vendor to add value to the EVO:RAIL package and straight away they partner with both Dell and SuperMicro. I expect we will start seeing more of these types of partnerships. There are various other vendors who have shown interest in layering services on top of EVO:RAIL so it is going to be interesting to see what is next!
  • Tintri just announced a new storage system called the T800. This device can hold up to 3500 VMs in just 4U and provides 100TB of effective capacity. With up to 140K IOPS this device also delivers good performance at a starting price of 74K USD. But more then the hardware, I love the simplicity that Tintri brings. Probably one of the most user/admin friendly systems I have seen so far, and coincidentally they also announced Tintri OS 3.1 this week which brings:
    • Long awaited integration with Site Recovery Manager. Great to see that they pulled this one off, it something which I know people have been waiting for.
    • Encryption for the T800 series
    • Tintri Automation Toolkit which allows for end-to-end automation from the VM directly to storage through both PowerShell and REST APIs!
  • Dell releases the PowerEdge FX. I was briefed a long time ago on these systems and I liked it a lot as it provides a great modular mini datacenter solution. I can see people using these for Virtual SAN deployments as it allows for a lot of flexibility and capacity in just 2U. What I love about these systems is that they have networking included, that sounds like true hyper-converged to me! A great review here by StorageReview.com which I recommend reading. Definitely something I’ll be looking in to for my lab, how nice would it be: 4 x FC430 for compute + 2 x FD332 for storage capacity!

That it is for now…

VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash… part 3

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It has been a couple of weeks since the last VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash… but we have a couple of items which I felt are worth sharing. Same as with the previous two parts I will share the link, my thoughts around it and hope that you will leave a comment with your thoughts around a specific announcement. If you work for a vendor, I would like to ask to add a disclaimer mentioning this so that all the cards are on the table.

  • PernixData FVP 2.0 available! New features and also new pricing / packaging!
    Frank Denneman has a whole slew of articles describing the new functionality of FVP 2.0 in-depth. If you ask me especially the resilient memory caching is a cool feature, but also the failure domains is something I can very much appreciate as it will allow you to build smarter clusters! The change in pricing/packaging kind of surprised me, an “Enterprise” edition was announced and the current version was renamed to “Standard”. The SMB package was renamed to “Essentials Plus” which from a naming point of view now aligns more with the VMware naming scheme, which makes life easier for customers I guess. I have not seen details around the pricing itself yet, so don’t know what the impact actually is. PernixData has upped the game again and it keeps amazing me how fast they keep growing and at which pace they are releasing new functionality. It makes you wonder what is next for these guys?!
  • Nutanix Unveils Industry’s First All-Flash Hyper-Converged Platform and Only Stretch Clustering Capability!
    I guess the “all-flash” part was just a matter of time considering the price point flash devices have reached. I have looked at these configurations many times, and if you consider that SAS drives are now as expensive as decent SSDs it only makes sense. It should be noted that “all-flash” also means a new model, NX-9000, and this comes as a 2U / 2Node form factor. List price is $110,000 per node… As that is 220k per block and with a 3 node minimum 330K it feels like a steep price, but then again we all know that the street price will be very different. The NX-9000 comes with either 6x 800GB or 1.6TB flash device for capacity, and I am guessing that the other models will also have “all-flash” options as well in the future… it only makes sense. What about that stretched clustering? Well this is what excited me most from yesterdays announcement. In version 4.1  Nutanix will allow for up to 400KM of distance between sites for a stretched cluster. Considering their platform is “vm aware” it should be very easy to select which VMs you want to protect (and which you do not). On top of that they provide the ability to have two different hardware platforms in each of the sites. In other words you can run with a top of the line block in your primary site, while having a lower end block in your recovery site. From a TCO/ROI point of view this can be very beneficial if you have no requirement for a uniform environment. Judging by the answers on twitter, the platform has not gone through VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster certification yet but this is likely to happen soon. SRM integration is also being looked at. All in all, nice announcements if you ask me!
  • SolidFire announces two new models and new round of funding (82 million!)
    What is there to say about the funding that hasn’t been said yet. 82 million in series D says enough if you ask me. SolidFire is one of those startups which have impressed me from the very beginning. They have a strong scale-out storage system which offers excellent quality of service functionality, a system which is primarily aimed at the Service Provider market. Although that seems to slowly change with the introduction of these new models as their smallest model now brings a 100K entry point. Note that the smallest configuration with SolidFire is 4 nodes, spec details can be found here. As stated, what excites me most with SolidFire is the services that the systems brings: QoS, data reduction and replication / SRM integration.

Thanks, and again feel free to drop a comment / leave your thoughts!

VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash… part 1

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I did these startup news flash newsletters for a long time and it kind of died down. Reason for it being that it felt like I missed out on updates of companies who were way beyond the stage of being a startup, which is a shame. I do feel there is a need, or there is a market for these types of blog articles. So lets give it another try but this time with a different name and a slightly different angle. In this VMware / ecosystem / industry news flash I will feature interesting (to me) news items of VMware and its ecosystem. This could range from Nexenta releasing a new version of their software to an acquisition or new round of funding. I hope you will find it useful. Besides a pointer to the originating article, I will also provide some of my thoughts, and I would like to encourage you to do the same via the comment section!

  • VMware announced the intention to acquire CloudVolumes
    I looked in to CloudVolumes about 5 months ago. I was very intrigued with what they developed and how they go about layering applications on top of virtual machines both for the server and desktop space. Especially when it comes to updating applications I was impressed how seamless and flexible CloudVolumes was. What stood out most was that they simply connect a VMDK to a VM instead of streaming data across the network… it was so simple, but yet so innovative and smart at the same time that I am not surprised VMware acquired them.
  • Ubuntu Now Available on VMware vCloud Air
    I guess there are two things here… vCloud Air formerly known as vCloud Hybrid Services, a new name. And Ubuntu being available in the catalog by default which is great. If I have to pick any Linux distribution to work with it typically is Ubuntu, and as it is one of the most used distributions out there in cloud environments this makes sense to me.
  • Nexenta Enables File Services on VMware VSAN
    I did not see this one coming to be honest and I am not sure what it will look like from an implementation perspective. It is interesting though to see the ecosystem layering services on top of VSAN and I am wondering what else is in the pipeline!
  • DataGravity out of stealth… (Steve Foskett opinion, Howard Marks thoughts, Robin Harris)
    I have read multiple articles on DataGravity and it seems they are playing in the same space as Nimble and Tintri with their hybrid storage solution. But what DataGravity adds on top of that in-sight in to the data being stored. It sounds interesting but I do wonder what the target market is as I would suspect that many who need this type of data analytics already have layers on top of their storage systems which will provide this detail for them. I will try to set some time aside at VMworld to chat with them.
  • Pernix Data announced a new round of funding (Business Insider, Venture Beat)
    35 million dollar C round of funding is significant I would say. On top the growth numbers that Pernix published are impressive, but not surprisingly if you look at what they have to offer and still have in the pipeline.
  • Atlantis announced USX 2.0 (vClouds.nl, Andrea Mauro)
    I have always been intrigued by USX. I played around with 1.0 on top of Virtual SAN and was impressed by the capabilities added and the efficiency of their data services, however at the same time I also realized that layering USX on top of Virtual SAN kind of diminished the Virtual SAN policy based management capabilities. However with USX 2.0 it appears that USX will support VVOL and as such SPBM to a full extent, and hopefully also will require a lower number of USX related virtual appliance to be deployed. Will try to explore USX 2.0 in the near future.

Quality of components in Hybrid / All flash storage

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Today I was answering some questions on the VMTN forums and one of the questions was around the quality of components in some of the all flash / hybrid arrays. This person kept coming back to the type of flash used (eMLC vs MLC, SATA vs NL-SAS vs SAS). One of the comments he made was the following:

I talked to Pure Storage but they want $$$ for 11TB of consumer grade MLC.

I am guessing he did a quick search on the internet, found a price for some SSDs and multiplied it and figured that Pure Storage was asking way too much… And even compared to some more traditional arrays filled with SSD they could sound more expensive. I guess this also applies to other solutions, so I am not calling out Pure Storage here.One thing some people seem to forget is that when it comes to these new storage architectures is that they are build with flash in mind.

What does that mean? Well everyone has heard all of the horror stories around consumer grade flash wearing out extremely fast and blowing up in your face. Well fortunately that is only true to a certain extent as some consumer grade SSDs easily reach 1PB of writes these days. On top of that there are a couple of things I think you should know and consider before making statements like these or be influenced by a sales team who says “well we offer SLC versus MLC so we are better than them”.

For instance (As Pure Storage lists on their website), there are many more MLC drives shipped than any other type at this point. Which means that it has been tested inside out by consumers, who can break devices in many more ways than you or your QA team can? Right, the consumer! More importantly if you ask me, ALL of these new storage architectures have in-depth knowledge of the type of flash they are using. That is how their system was architected! They know how to leverage flash, they know how to write to flash, they know how to avoid fast wear out. They developed an architecture which was not only designed but also highly optimized for flash… This is what you pay for. You pay for the “total package” which means the whole solution, not just those flash devices that are leveraged. The flash devices are a part of the solution, and just a relatively small part if you ask me. You pay for total capacity with low latency and functionality like deduplication, compression and replication (in some cases). You pay for the ease of deployment and management (operational efficiency), meaning you get to spent your time on stuff that matters to your customer… their applications.

You can summarize all of it in a single sentence: the physical components used in all of these solutions are just a small part of the solution, whenever someone tries to sell you the “hardware” that is when you need to be worried!