Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

startup

Vendors to check out at VMworld

· ·

Cormac just released his article about storage vendors to check out at VMworld, right when I was typing up this article. Make sure to read that one as well as it contains some great suggestions… I was looking at the list of vendors who have a booth at VMworld, there are a whole bunch I am going to try to check out this round. Of course some of the obvious ones are my friends over at Tintri, Nutanix and Pure Storage but lets try to list a few lesser known vendors. These are not all storage vendors by the way, but a mix of various types of startups from the VMware ecosystem. I have added my own oneliner to it, so you know what to expect.

  • Actifio – Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery solution that seems to be gaining traction, maybe I should say “Copy Data Management” solution instead, as that is ultimately what it is they do.
  • CloudPhysics – Monitoring / Analytics, the power of many! Or as I stated a while back: Where most monitoring solutions stop CloudPhysics continues.
  • Cumulus Networks – Linux Network Operating System is how they describe themselves, decoupling software from hardware is another way of looking at it… interesting company!
  • Infinio – Downloadable NFS performance enhancer! AKA memory caching solutions for NFS based infrastructures, check the intro article I wrote a while back…
  • Maxta – Software Defined Storage solution, virtual appliance based and hypervisor agnostic… Not spoken with them, or seen their solution yet
  • Panzura – A name that keeps popping up more and more often, a global distributed cloud storage solution. Haven’t dug in to it yet, but when I get the chance at VMworld I will…
  • PernixData – Came out of stealth this year, and as you all know is working on a write back flash caching solution… One of the few offering a clustered write back solution within the hypervisor
  • Plexxi – Networking done in a different way, SDN I would say.
  • SolidFire – SolidFire is definitely one cool scale-out storage solution to watch out for, one of the few which actually has a good answer to the question: do you offer Quality of Service? More details about what it is they do here… Not on the show floor, but outside of the expo.

Just a couple of companies which I feel are interesting and worth talking with.

Startup intro: SolidFire

· ·

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.

What is Diane Greene up to these days?

· ·

I am not an expert on networking like some of my colleagues out there are but still I was intrigued by the Cumulus release Wednesday. I liked the whole decoupling hardware from software aspect and how they allow you to buy the switch you want and combine it with their software solution aka Cumulus Linux. I am not going in to much details, as that isn’t the title of this article or what triggered me to write this. (If you want to know more about Cumulus I suggest you read this article by Ben Kepes or hit their website.) What triggered this article was a quote in the Silicon Valley Business Journal which was taken from an article on the Wall Street Journal blog and it made me wonder, what is Diane Greene up to these days?

“They’re taking a lot of the cost out of the system…especially with people building larger and larger data centers,” said Greene, who said she needed a switch and a scalable data center for her own new project. “We invested because of the disruptive nature of the company, and it’s such a smart thing to do.”

For those who don’t know, Diane Greene was one of the founders and CEO of VMware from 1998 until 2008. She’s currently on the board of Google and Intuit, she has invested in companies like Cumulus, Cloudera, Typesafe, CloudPhysics, Nicira, Pure Storage, Rockmelt, Unity Technologies and Nimbula. An impressive track record indeed, but anyway… what stood out to me from this article is “she needed a switch and a scalable data center for her own new project“.

I have heard some rumors about the talent she is recruiting, and I guess time will tell what it is this new company is working on. It must be something big, exciting and challenging if Diane Greene decided to take it on herself. When I bump in to more details, you guys will be the first to know.

Startup Intro: Infinio

· ·

Infinio is demo’ing their brand new product today at Tech Field Day #9. I was briefed by Infinio a couple of weeks back and figured I would share some details with you. Infinio is releasing a product called Infinio Accelerator and describes it as a “downloadable storage performance” solution. That sounds nice, but what does that mean?

Infinio has developed a virtual appliance that sits in between your virtual machine storage traffic and your NFS datastore. Note I said “NFS datastore” and not just “datastore”, as NFS is their current focus. Why just NFS and not block storage? Currently that is because of the architecture they have chosen, or better said due to how they intercept traffic going to or coming from the datastore.

The Infinio virtual appliance enhances storage performance by caching IO. Their primary use case is to do caching in memory. So what does it look like? Basically every host in the cluster gets an Infinio appliance installed. This appliance has 2 vCPUs and 8GB of memory by default and from that memory a shared caching pool is created to accelerate read IO. (Yes there is a downside to using an appliance, read this article by Frank.) The nice thing is that this pool of memory is cluster wide deduplicated, considering though the appliance holds 8GB of memory that deduplication is a requirement if you ask me. (Just revealed at TFD is that the appliance will get deployed with 4, 8 or 16GB memory based on the amount of memory in the host.) The other key word here is “read IO”, for now Infinio Accelerator is a read cache solution, so no write back, but that might change in the future, who knows. The video below also mentions SSD caching, the Tech Field Day session revealed that this is something that is being worked on to be included in the future.

One thing where Infinio definitely excels is the installation / configuration process, and even the purchase options are simple. You download a simple installer, point it to your vCenter Server, do a couple of “next / next / finish” actions and that is that. You want to buy the product? It will be even easier then installing, just hit the website, grab your creditcard and that is it. Definitely something I always appreciate, companies keeping it simple.

One thing I want to call, I asked this question during the TFD broadcast, as that today there is no direct integration with vCenter Server or with VC Ops. In my opinion a missed opportunity, especially considering the product is focused on the virtualization market.

How do they compare to other caching solutions out there? Well that is difficult to say at the moment, if I can find the time and get some proper SSDs in my lab I might test and compare the various solutions at some point. If you ask me there are benefits to both SSD/Flash and “in memory” caching. What will determine their success is: how it is implemented (product quality), where they sit in the I/O stack, how resilient the solution is and what kind of caching they offer. As I said, maybe more in the future on this.

That is all about I can share for now, for some more details I suggest watching the 8 minute pitch by their Co-founder and CEO Arun Agarwal all the way at the bottom or the Tech Field Day introduction videos and deepdive.

When will it be available? The public beta is scheduled to be available around VMworld, and Infinio is aiming for a GA release in Q4 of 2013.

Tech Field Day – Introductions

Tech Field Day – Demo

Tech Field Day – Deepdive / How it works

8 Minute Pitch

Startup Intro: AetherStore

· ·

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.