Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

intro

Startup intro: Coho Data

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Today a new startup is revealed named Coho Data, formerly known as Convergent.io. Coho Data was founded by Andrew Warfield, Keir Fraser and Ramana Jonnala. For those who care, they are backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Probably most known for the work they did at Citrix on Xenserver. What is it they introduced / revealed this week?

Coho Data introduces a new scale-out hybrid storage solution (NFS for VM workloads). With hybrid meaning a mix of SATA and SSD. This for obvious reasons, SATA bringing you capacity and flash providing you raw performance. Let me point out that Coho is not a hyperconverged solution, it is a full storage system.

What does it look like? It is a 2U box which holds 2 “MicroArrays” which each MicroArray having 2 processors, 2 x 10GbE NIC port and 2 PCIe INTEL 910 cards. Each 2u block provides you 39TB of capacity and ~180K IOPS (Random 80/20 read/write, 4K block size). Starting at $2.50 per GB, pre-dedupe & compression (which they of course offer). Couple of things I liked looking at their architecture, first and probably foremost the “scale-out” architecture, scale to infinity is what they say in a linear fashion. On top of that, it comes with an OpenFlow-enabled 10GbE switch to allow for ease of management and again scalability.

If you look closely at how they architected their hardware, they created these highspeed IO lanes: 10GbE NIC <–> CPU <–> PCIe Flash Unit. Each highway has its dedicated CPU, NIC Port, ad on top of that they PCIe Flash, allowing for optimal performance, efficiency and fine grained control. Nice touch if you ask me.

Another thing I really liked was their UI. You can really see they put a lot of thought in the user experience aspect by keeping things simple and presenting data in an easy understandable way. I wish every vendor did that. I mean, if you look at the screenshot below how simple does that look? Dead simple right!? I’ve seen some of the other screens, like for instance for creating a snapshot schedule… again same simplicity. Apparently, and I have not tested this but I will believe them on their word, they brought that simplicity all the way down to the “install / configure” part of things. Getting Coho Data up and running literally only takes 15 minutes.

What I also liked very much about the Coho Data solution is that Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Software-defined Storage (SDS) are tightly coupled. In other words, Soho configures the network for you… As just said, it takes 15 minutes to setup. Try creating the zoning / masking scheme for a storage system and a set of LUNs these days, even that takes more time then 15 – 20 minutes. There aren’t too many vendors combining SDN and SDS in a smart fashion today.

When they briefed me they gave me a short demo and Andy explained the scale-out architecture, during the demo it happened various times that I could draw a parallel between the VMware virtualization platform and their solution which made is easy for me to understand and relate to their solution. For instance, Soho Data offers what I would call DRS for Software-Defined Storage. If for whatever reasons defined policies are violated then Coho Data will balance the workload appropriately across the cluster. Just like DRS (and Storage DRS) does, Coho Data will do a risk/benefit analysis before initiating the move. I guess the logical question would be, well why would I want Coho to do this when VMware can also do this with Storage DRS? Well keep in mind that Storage DRS works “across datastores”, but as Coho presents a single datastore you need something that allows you to balance within.

I guess the question then remains what do they lack today? Well today as a 1.0 platform Coho doesn’t offer replication to outside of their own cluster. But considering they have snapshotting in place I suspect their architecture already caters for it, and it something they should be able to release fairly quickly. Another thing which is lacking today is a vSphere Web Client plugin, but then again if you look at their current UI and the simplicity of it I do wonder if there is any point in having one.

All in all, I have been impressed by these newcomers in the SDS space and I can’t wait to play around with their gear at some point!

Startup intro: SolidFire

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This seems to becoming a true series, introducing startups… Now in the case of SolidFire I am not really sure if I should use the word startup as they have been around since 2010. But then again, it is not a consumer solution that they’ve created and enterprise storage platforms do typically take a lot longer to develop and mature. SolidFire was founded in 2010 by Dave Wright who discovered a gap in the current storage market when he was working for Rackspace. The opportunity Dave saw was in the Quality of Service area. Not many storage solutions out there could provide a predictable performance in almost every scenario, and were designed for multi-tenancy and offered a rich API. Back then the term Software Defined Storage wasn’t coined yet, but I guess it is fair to say that is how we would describe it today. This actually how I got in touch with SolidFire. I wrote various articles on the topic of Software Defined Storage, and tweeted about this topic many times, and SolidFire was one of the companies who consistently joined the conversation. So what is SolidFire about?

SolidFire is a storage company, they sell a storage systems and today they offer two models namely the SF3010 and the SF6010. What is the difference between these two? Cache and capacity! With the SF3010 you get 72Gb of cache per node and it uses 300GB SSD’s where the SF6010 gives you 144GB of cache per node and uses 600GB SSD’s. Interesting? Well to a certain point I would say, SolidFire isn’t really about the hardware if you ask me. It is about what is inside the box, or boxes I should say as the starting point is always 5 nodes. So what is inside?

Architecture

SolidFire’s architecture is based on a scale-out model and of course flash, in the form of SSD. You start out with 5 nodes and you can go up to 100 nodes, all connected to your hosts via iSCSI. Those 100 nodes would be able to provide you 5 million IOps and about 2.1 Petabyte of capacity. Each node that is added linearly scales performance and of course adds capacity. Of course SolidFire offers deduplication, compression and thin provisioning. Considering it is a scale-out model it is probably not needed to point this out, but dedupe and compression are cluster wide. Now the nice thing about the SolidFire architecture is that they don’t use a traditional RAID, this means that the long rebuild times when a disk fails or a node fails do not apply to SolidFire. Rather SolidFire evenly distributes data across all disk and nodes, so when a single disk fails or even a node fails rebuild time is not constraint due to a limited amount of resources but many components can help in parallel to get back to a normal state. What I liked most about their architecture is that it already closely aligns with VMware’s Virtual Volume (VVOL) concept, SolidFire is prepared for VVOLs when it is released.

Quality of Service

I already has briefly mentioned this, but Quality of Service (QoS) is one of the key drivers of the SolidFire solution. It revolves around having the ability to provide an X amount of capacity with an X amount of performance (IOps). What does this mean? SolidFire allows you to specify a minimum and maximum number of IOps for a volume, and also a burst space. Lets quote the SolidFire website as I think they explain it in a clear way:

  • Min IOPS – The minimum number of I/O operations per-second that are always available to the volume, ensuring a guaranteed level of performance even in failure conditions.
  • Max IOPS – The maximum number of sustained I/O operations per-second that a volume can process over an extended period of time.
  • Burst IOPS – The maximum number of I/O operations per-second that a volume will be allowed to process during a spike in demand, particularly effective for data migration, large file transfers, database checkpoints, and other uneven latency sensitive workloads.

Now I do want to point out here that SolidFire storage systems have no “form of admission control” when it comes to QoS. Although it is mentioned that there is a guaranteed level of performance this is up to the administrator, you as the admin will need to do the math and not overprovision from a performance point of view if you truly want to guarantee a specific performance level. If you do, you will need to take failure scenarios in to account!

One thing that my automation friends William Lam and Alan Renouf will like is that you can manage all these settings using their REST-based API.

(VMware) Integration

Ofcourse during the conversation integration came up. SolidFire is all about enabling their customers to automate as much as they possibly can and have implemented a REST-based API. They are heavily investing in for instance integration with Openstack but also with VMware. They offer full support for the vSphere Storage APIs – Storage Awareness (VASA) and are also working towards full support for vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI). Currently not all VAAI primitives are supported but they promised me that this is a matter of time. (They support: Block Zero’ing, Space Reclamation, Thin Provisioning. See HCL for more details.) On top of that they are also looking at the future and going full steam ahead when it comes to Virtual Volumes. Obvious question from my side: what about replication / SRM? This is being worked on, hopefully more news about this soon!

Now with all this integration did they forget about what is sitting in between their storage system and the compute resources? In other words what are they doing with the network?

Software Defined Networking?

I can be short, no they did not forget about the network. SolidFire is partnering with Plexxi and Arista to provide a great end-to-end experience when it comes to building a storage environment. Where with Arista currently the focus is more on monitoring the the different layers Plexxi seems to focus more on the configuration and optimization for performance aspect. No end-to-end QoS yet, but a great step forward if you ask me! I can see this being expanded in the future

Wrapping up

I had already briefly looked at SolidFire after the various tweets we exchanged but this proper introduction has really opened my eyes. I am impressed by what SolidFire has achieved in a relatively short amount of time. Their solution is all about customer experience, that could be performance related or the ability to automate the full storage provisioning process… their architecture / concept caters for this. I have definitely added them to my list of storage vendors to visit at VMworld, and I am hoping that those who are looking in to Software Defined Storage solutions will do the same as SolidFire belongs on that list.

Startup Intro: AetherStore

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Every once in a while you see a solution by a startup and you get all excited. AetherStore is one of those type of solutions. The funny thing is that AetherStore is not directly related to my day-to-day job, but I can fully relate to their pitch. So what is AetherStore and who are the folks behind it?

AetherStore was founded by three graduates from Scotland’s University of St Andrews. This by itself is worth mentioning in my opinion as especially in this space I don’t typically see an enormous amount of innovation coming out of Europe. (Although since then they moved to the US.) With experience in distributed systems, fault tolerance, databases and storage it is not surprising to see what problems they are trying to solve and how they are intending to solve it.

AetherStore is indeed a storage solution as you probably had already guessed. AetherStore is all about using spare resources, and in this case storage resources. Essentially what AetherStore is aiming to do for your company is leveraging the available local disk space of your desktops (and servers for that matter) and offer that up as a “data store”. In other words; if you have 20 desktops with a 1 TB disk but only 100GB is used then 900GB of that disk can be used for other purposes. Now reality of course is that it isn’t possible to use the full 900GB for other purposes but you get my point.

AetherStore essentially is a distributed data store solution. This distributed data store is served up to users as a regular network file share and all the magic AetherStore does is hidden from the user. I guess the big question that pops-up immediately is what about availability, security and performance? All three of those are typically what either keeps the user, or the administrator busy. AetherStore solves those problems in various ways:

  • Performance: a local cache is used to optimize the end-user experience
  • Availability: Data is replicated to multiple “nodes” meaning that if a “node” fails than data can be reconstructred. On top of that AetherStore offers the ability to backup (and restore) data to the “cloud” (Mozy, Amazon etc)
  • Security: Data is encrypted

That is not all, on top of that AetherStore offers versioning of files and ensure efficiency by offering deduplication. I guess it all sounds very promising right? In my opinion it does, and it is one of those solutions that I have on my “watch lists”.

I do wonder what the requirements are when it comes down to availability of data when people move around different desktops; and desktops are also powered-off or restarted by users at random. I also would like to point out here that I have not played with AetherStore, neither is this article sponsored or am I affiliated with AetherStore in any way. This is simply and introduction to a cool startup which managed to intrigue / interest me with their technology.

If you want to find out more about AetherStore, make sure to sign up on http://www.aetherstore.com/ for early access if you are interested, and/or follow them on twitter. If you want to know more, I can recommend this white paper about AetherStore as it reveals some more of details of the implementation.