Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

flash

PernixData feature announcements during Storage Field Day

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During Storage Field Day today PernixData announced a whole bunch of features that they are working on and will be released in the near future. In my opinion there were four major features announced:

  • Support for NFS
  • Network Compression
  • Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory
  • Topology Awareness

Lets go over these one by one:

Support for NFS is something that I can be brief about I guess; as it is what it says it is. Something that has come up multiple times in conversations seen on twitter around Pernix and it looks like they have managed to solve the problem and will support NFS in the near future. One thing I want to point out, PernixData does not introduce a virtual appliance in order to support NFS or create an NFS server and proxy the IOs, sounds like magic right… Nice work guys!

It gets way more interesting with Network compression. What is it, what does it do? Network Compression is an adaptive mechanism that will look at the size of the IO and analyze if it makes sense to compress the data before replicating it to a remote host. As you can imagine especially with larger block sizes (64K and up) this could significantly reduce the data that is transferred over the network. When talking to PernixData one of the questions I had was well what about the performance and overhead… give me some details, this is what they came back with as an example:

  • Write back with local copy only = 2700 IOps
  • Write back + 1 replica = 1770 IOps
  • Write back + 1 replica + network compression = 2700 IOps

As you can see the number of IOps went down when a remote replica was added. However, it went up again to “normal” values when network compression was enabled, of course this test was conducted using large blocksizes. When it came to CPU overhead it was mentioned that the overhead so far has been demonstrated to be negligible.You may ask yourself why, it is fairly simple: the cost of compression weighs up against the CPU overhead and results in an equal performance due to lower network transfer requirements. What also helps here is that it is an adaptive mechanism that does a cost/benefit analyses before compressing. So if you are doing 512 byte or 4KB IOs then network compression will not kick in, keeping the overhead low and the benefits high!

I personally got really excited about this feature: DFTM = Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory. Say what? Yes, distributed fault tolerant memory! FVP, indeed besides virtualizing flash, can now also virtualize memory and create an aggregated pool of resources out of it for caching purposes. Or in a more simplistic way: what they allow you to do is reserve a chunk of host memory as virtual machine cache. Once again happens on a hypervisor level, so no requirement to run a virtual appliance, just enable and go! I would want to point out though that there is “cache tiering” at the moment, but I guess Satyam can consider that as a feature request. Also, when you create an FVP cluster hosts within that cluster will either provide “flash caching” capabilities or “memory caching” capabilities. This means that technically virtual machines can use “local flash” resources while the remote resources are “memory” based (or the other way around). I would avoid this at all cost personally though as it will give some strange unpredictable performance result.

So what does this add? Well crazy performance for instance…. We are talking 80k IOps easily with a nice low latency of 50-200 microseconds. Unlike other solutions, FVP doesn’t restrict the size of your cache either. By default it will make a recommendation of 50% unreserved capacity to be used per host. Personally I think this is a bit high, as most people do not reserve memory this will typically result 50% of your memory to be recommended… but fortunately FVP allows you to customize this as required. So if you have 128GB of memory and feel 16GB of memory is sufficient for memory caching then that is what you assign to FVP.

Another feature that will be added is Topology Awareness. Basically what this allows you to do is group hosts in a cluster and create failure domains. An example may make this a bit easier to grasp: Lets assume you have 2 blade chassis each with 8 hosts, when you enable “write back caching” you probably want to ensure that your replica is stored on a blade in the other chassis… and that is exactly what this feature allows you to do. Specify replica groups, add hosts to the replica groups, easy as that!

And then specify for your virtual machine where the replica needs to reside. Yes you can even specify that the replica needs to reside within its failure domain if there are requirements to do so, but in the example below the other “failure domain” is chosen.

Is that awesome or what? I think it is, and I am very impressed by what PernixData has announced. For those interested, the SFD video should be online soon, and those who are visiting the Milan VMUG are lucky as Frank mentioned that he will be presenting on these new features at the event. All in all, an impressive presentation again by PernixData if you ask me… awesome set of features to be added soon!

Startup News Flash part 16

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Number 16 of the Startup News Flash, here we go:

Nakivo just announced the beta program for 4.0 of their backup/replication solution. It adds some new features like: recovery of Exchange objects directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups, Exchange logs truncation, and automated backup verification. If you are interested in testing it, make sure to sign up here. I haven’t tried it, but they seem to be a strong upcoming player in the backup and DR space for SMB.

SanDisk announced a new range of SATA SSDs called “cloudspeed”. They released 4 different models with various endurance levels and workload targets, of course ranging in sizes from 100GB up to 960GB depending on the endurance level selected. Endurance level ranges from 1 up to 10 full drive writes per day. (Just as an FYI, for VSAN we recommend 5 full drive writes per day as a minimum) Performance numbers range between 15k to 20k write IOps and 75 to 88K read IOps. More details can be found in the spec sheet here. What interest me most is the FlashGuard Technology that is included, interesting how SanDisk is capable of understanding wear patterns and workloads to a certain extend and place data in a specific way to prolong the life of your flash device.

CloudPhysics announced the availability of their Storage Analytics card. I gave it a try last week and was impressed. I was planning on doing a write up on their new offering but as various bloggers already covered it I felt there was no point in repeating what they said. I think it makes a lot more sense to just try it out, I am sure you will like it as it will show you valuable info like “performance” and the impact of “thin disks” vs “thick disks”. Sign up here for a 30day free trial!

Startup News Flash part 15

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Number 15 of the Startup News Flash… What happened in the world of (storage / flash related) startup’s in the last couple of weeks? Not too much news, but I felt it was worth releasing anyway as other wise the below would be really old news.

One of the most interesting BC/DR startups of the last couple of years, if you ask me, just announced a new round of funding: 100 million. Investors include North Bridge, Greylock, Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Technology Crossover Ventures. For those who don’t know Actifio… Actifio offers what is commonly referred to as a “Data Copy Management” solution. It could be described as a solution which sits in between your storage solution and your hypervisor and can do things like: backup, cloning, replication, archiving etc. Really neat solution, with a brilliant super simple UI. Worth checking out if you are looking to improve your business continuity story!

A while back I wrote an introduction to SoftNAS. When doing that review there was one thing that stood out to me and that was that SoftNAS didn’t have a great availability story. I spoke with Rick Brady about that and he said that it would be one of the first things they would try to tackle in an upcoming release. In the just announced release SoftNAS introduces Snap HA. Snap HA provides an “active / passive” solution where when an issue arises ownership is transferred to the “passive” node which then of course becomes “active”. More details can be found in this blog post by Rick Brady. Awesome work guys!

Startup News Flash part 14

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Part 13 of the Startup News Flash… Hopefully not an unlucky one for the startups featured. Just a short one considering I am in Vietnam and away ‘from work’ for the last 2 weeks.

A3Cube is a startup which came out of stealth recently and announced as they call it a ‘brain inspired’ data plane encapsulated in a NIC designed to bridge supercomputing benefits to the enterprise. The core of their solution is called Ronnie Express. They aim is to eliminate the I/O performance gap between CPU power and data access performance for HPC, Big Data and data center applications. A3CUBE’s In-Memory Network technology allows direct shared non-coherent global memory across the entire network, enabling global communication based on shared memory segments and direct load/store operations between the nodes. Basically a server “interconnect” solutions for lrge scale. They took the word “scale” serious by the way and can go up to 64,000 nodes. For more details, I highly recommend to read this excellent article by Enrico.

Infinio just announced Infinio Accelerator 1.2. This new version of the Infinio Accelerator now supports vSphere 5.5. Useful to know for those who have a home lab, Infinio is running a limited-time offer of free non-expiring licenses for test labs. Hit their website to find out more.

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.