Winter has arrived here in the northern hemisphere and it is also the last day of 2015 e.g. End Of Year or EOY). For some this means relaxing and having fun after a busy year, for others, it’s the last day of the most important quarter of the most important year ever, particular if you are involved in sales or spending.
This is also that time of year where predictions for 2016 will start streaming out as well as reflections looking back at 2015 appear (more on these in January). Another EOY activity is planning for 2016 as well as getting items ready for roll-out or launch in the new year. Overall 2015 has been a very good year with many things in the works both public facing, as well as several behind the scenes some of which will start to appear throughout 2016.
Enjoy this abbreviated edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, predictions, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.
Thank you for enabling a successful 2015 and wishing you all a prosperous new year in 2016.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Hello and welcome to this November 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Winter has arrived here in the northern hemisphere, although technically its still fall until the winter solstice in December. Regardless of if summer or winter depending on which hemisphere you are, 2015 is about to wrap up meaning end of year (EOY) activities.
EOY activities can mean final shopping or acquisitions for technology and services or simply for home and fun. This is also that time of year where predictions for 2016 will start streaming out as well as reflections looking back at 2015 appear (lets save those for December ;). Another EOY activity is planning for 2016 as well as getting items ready for roll-out or launch in the new year. Needless to say there is a lot going on so with that, enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.
Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:
Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs): EVO:RAIL Part II – Why And When To Use It? This is the second of a multi-part series looking at Converged Infrastructures (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructures (HCI), Cluster in Box (CiB) and other unified solution bundles. There is a trend of industry adoption talking about CI, HCI, CiB and other bundled solutions, along with growing IT customer adoption and deployment. Different sized organizations are looking at various types of CI solutions to meet various application and workloads needs. Read more here and part I here.
TheFibreChannel.com: Industry Analyst Interview: Greg Schulz, StorageIO In part one of a two part article series, Frank Berry, storage industry analyst and Founder of IT Brand Pulse and editor of TheFibreChannel.com, recently spoke with StorageIO Founder Greg Schulz about Fibre Channel SAN integration with OpenStack, why Rackspace is using Fibre Channel and more. Read more here
CloudComputingAdmin.com: Cloud Storage Decision Making – Using Microsoft Azure for cloud storage Let’s say that you have been tasked with, or decided that it is time to use (or try) public cloud storage such as Microsoft Azure. Ok, now what do you do and what decisions need to be made? Keep in mind that Microsoft Azure like many other popular public clouds provides many different services available for fee (subscription) along with free trials. These services include applications, compute, networking, storage along with development and management platform tools. Read more here.
Check out these resources and links technology, techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here
The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of my books.
In case you had not heard, Microsoft recently released the bits (e.g. software download) for Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 (TP4). TP4 is the successor to Technical Preview 3 (TP3) that was released this past August and is the most recent public preview version of the next Windows Server. TP4 adds a new tiering capability where Windows and storage spaces can cache and migrate data between Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) including flash SSD. The new tiering feature supports a mixed HDD and NVM with flash SSD (including NVM Express or NVMe), as well as an all NVM scenario. Yes, that is correct, tiering with all NVM is not a type, instead enables using lower latency faster NVM along with lower cost higher capacity flash SSD. Learn more about what’s in TP4 from a server and storage I/O perspective in this Microsoft post, as well as more about S2D in this Microsoft Technet post here and here. You can get the Windows Server 2016 TP4 bits here which are already running in the Server StorageIO lab.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Recently I did a piece over at InfoStor titled "Water, Data and Storage Analogy". Besides being taken for granted and all of us being dependent on them, several other similarities exist between water, data, and storage. In addition to being a link that piece, this is a companion with some different images to help show the similarities between water, data and storage if for no other reason to have a few moments of fun. Read the entire piece here.
Water, Data and Storage Similarities
Water can get cold and freeze, data can also go cold becoming dormant and a candidate for archiving or cold cloud storage.
Like data and storage water can be frozen
Various types of storage drives (HDD & SSD)
Different types and tiers of frozen water storage containers
Data, like water, can move or be dormant, can be warm and active, or cold, frozen and inactive. Water, data and storage can also be used for work or fun.
Fishing on water vs. phishing for data on storage
Eagle fly fishing on water over st croix river
Data can be transformed into 3D images and video, water transformed into Snow can also be made into various virtual images or things.
Data on storage can be transformed like water (e.g. snow)
Data, like water, can exist in clouds, resulting in storms that if not properly prepared for, can cause problems.
Data and storage can be damaged including by water, water can also be damaged by putting things into it or the environment.
Water can destroy things, data and storage can be destroyed
There are data lakes, data pools, data ponds, oceans of storage and seas of data as well as data centers.
Rows of servers and storage in a data center
An indoor water lake (e.g. not an indoor data lake)
As water flows downstream it tends to increase in volume as tributaries or streams adding to the volume in lakes, reservoirs, rivers and streams. Another similarity is that water will tend to flow and seek its level filling up space, while data can involve a seek on an HDD in addition to filling up space.
Flood of water vs. flood of data (e.g. need for Data Protection)
There are also hybrid uses (or types) of water, just like hybrid technologies for supporting data infrastructures.
Hybrid Automobile on water
What this all means
We might take water, data and storage for granted, yet they each need to be managed, protected, preserved and served. Servers utilize storage to support applications for managing water; water is used for cooling and powering storage, not to mention for making coffee for those who take care of IT resources.
When you hear about data lakes, ponds or pools, keep in mind that there are also data streams, all of which need to be managed to prevent the flood of data from overwhelming you.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved
Welcome to NVMe place NVM Non Volatile Memory Express Resources. NVMe place is about Non Volatile Memory (NVM) Express (NVMe) with Industry Trends Perspectives, Tips, Tools, Techniques, Technologies, News and other information.
Disclaimer
Please note that this NVMe place resources site is independent of the industry trade and promoters group NVM Express, Inc. (e.g. www.nvmexpress.org). NVM Express, Inc. is the sole owner of the NVM Express specifications and trademarks.
Image used with permission of NVM Express, Inc.
Visit the NVM Express industry promoters site here to learn more about their members, news, events, product information, software driver downloads, and other useful NVMe resources content.
The NVMe Place resources and NVM including SCM, PMEM, Flash
NVMe place includes Non Volatile Memory (NVM) including nand flash, storage class memories (SCM), persistent memories (PM) are storage memory mediums while NVM Express (NVMe) is an interface for accessing NVM. This NVMe resources page is a companion to The SSD Place which has a broader Non Volatile Memory (NVM) focus including flash among other SSD topics. NVMe is a new server storage I/O access method and protocol for fast access to NVM based storage and memory technologies. NVMe is an alternative to existing block based server storage I/O access protocols such as AHCI/SATA and SCSI/SAS devices commonly used for access Hard Disk Drives (HDD) along with SSD among other things.
Comparing AHCI/SATA, SCSI/SAS and NVMe all of which can coexist to address different needs.
Leveraging the standard PCIe hardware interface, NVMe based devices (that have an NVMe controller) can be accessed via various operating systems (and hypervisors such as VMware ESXi) with both in the box drivers or optional third-party device drivers. Devices that support NVMe can be 2.5″ drive format packaged that use a converged 8637/8639 connector (e.g. PCIe x4) coexisting with SAS and SATA devices as well as being add-in card (AIC) PCIe cards supporting x4, x8 and other implementations. Initially, NVMe is being positioned as a back-end to servers (or storage systems) interface for accessing fast flash and other NVM based devices.
NVMe as a “back-end” I/O interface for NVM storage media
NVMe as a “front-end” interface for servers or storage systems/appliances
NVMe has also been shown to work over low latency, high-speed RDMA based network interfaces including RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and InfiniBand (read more here, here and here involving Mangstor, Mellanox and PMC among others). What this means is that like SCSI based SAS which can be both a back-end drive (HDD, SSD, etc) access protocol and interface, NVMe can also being used for back-end can also be used as a front-end of server to storage interface like how Fibre Channel SCSI_Protocol (aka FCP), SCSI based iSCSI, SCSI RDMA Protocol via InfiniBand (among others) are used.
NVMe features
Main features of NVMe include among others:
Lower latency due to improve drivers and increased queues (and queue sizes)
Lower CPU used to handle larger number of I/Os (more CPU available for useful work)
Higher I/O activity rates (IOPs) to boost productivity unlock value of fast flash and NVM
Bandwidth improvements leveraging various fast PCIe interface and available lanes
Dual-pathing of devices like what is available with dual-path SAS devices
Unlock the value of more cores per processor socket and software threads (productivity)
Various packaging options, deployment scenarios and configuration options
Appears as a standard storage device on most operating systems
Plug-play with in-box drivers on many popular operating systems and hypervisors
NVMe and shared PCIe (e.g. shared PCIe flash DAS)
NVMe related content and links
The following are some of my tips, articles, blog posts, presentations and other content, along with material from others pertaining to NVMe. Keep in mind that the question should not be if NVMe is in your future, rather when, where, with what, from whom and how much of it will be used as well as how it will be used.
MSP CMG, Sept. 2014 Presentation (Flash back to reality – Myths and Realities – Flash and SSD Industry trends perspectives plus benchmarking tips)– PDF
Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Express (NVMe) continues to evolve as a technology for enabling and improving server storage I/O for NVM including nand flash SSD storage. NVMe streamline performance enabling more work to be done (e.g. IOPs), data to be moved (bandwidth) at a lower response time using less CPU.
The above figure is a quick look comparing nand flash SSD being accessed via SATA III (6Gbps) on the left and NVMe (x4) on the right. As with any server storage I/O performance comparisons there are many variables and take them with a grain of salt. While IOPs and bandwidth are often discussed, keep in mind that with the new protocol, drivers and device controllers with NVMe that streamline I/O less CPU is needed.
Additional NVMe Resources
Also check out the Server StorageIO companion micro sites landing pages including thessdplace.com (SSD focus), data protection diaries (backup, BC/DR/HA and related topics), cloud and object storage, and server storage I/O performance and benchmarking here.
If you are in to the real bits and bytes details such as at device driver level content check out the Linux NVMe reflector forum. The linux-nvme forum is a good source if you are developer to stay up on what is happening in and around device driver and associated topics.
Disclaimer: Please note that this site is independent of the industry trade and promoters group NVM Express, Inc. (e.g. www.nvmexpress.org). NVM Express, Inc. is the sole owner of the NVM Express specifications and trademarks. Check out the NVM Express industry promoters site here to learn more about their members, news, events, product information, software driver downloads, and other useful NVMe resources content.
Image used with permission of NVM Express, Inc.
Wrap Up
Watch for updates with more content, links and NVMe resources to be added here soon.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.
Hello and welcome to this October 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Fall has arrived here in the northern hemisphere which means its spring in the southern hemisphere, and getting colder here. While fall means cooler out-door temperature with winter just around the corner, in the IT/ITC industry, particular the data infrastructure sector (server, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, cloud, physical, software defined virtual) things are very hot. Sure the various industry and vendor focused conferences, road shows and mini-events with associated new product, technology or services announcements (PTSA. There are also the various merger and acquisitions (M&A) that have occurred throughout the year including the recent Dell buying EMC, and Western Digital (WD) buying SANdisk among others.
This edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter has a focus on industry trends perspectives including recent M&A and PTSA activity. In addition to industry fall industry M&A and PTSA activity, there also plenty of conference, seminars, workshops, webinars and other events some of which you can see here on the Server StorageIO events page.
On a slightly different note, for those interested and not aware of the European Union (EU) ruling earlier this month on data privacy (e.g. Safe Harbor), here and here are a couple of links to stories discussing the new ruling changes between the EU and US (among other countries). The EU data privacy rulings involve personal data being moved out of EU countries to US data centers such as cloud and application services firms.
Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.
HDD and SSD manufacturer WD buying SANdisk for $19B USD following their acquisition earlier this year of Amplidata (Object Storage) and earlier bought HDD and SSD manufacturer HGST along with SSD PCIe card vendor Virident and STEC among others.
IBM buys Cleversafe for cloud and object storage indicating the technology will be placed in its Softlayer cloud unit.
HP and SANdisk partner on ReRAM for Storage Class Memory aka NVM. Meanwhile HP exiting public cloud market (e.g. shutting down Helion). Keep in mind that HP will also be splitting into two companies in November one focused on PCs and printers (e.g. HP Inc.) and one on enterprise solutions (e.g. HP Enterprise).
Pure Storage (all flash array aka AFA SSD vendor) does an IPO (here and here).
Continue reading more about NVM, NVMe, NAND flash, SSD Server and storage I/O related topics at www.thessdplace.com as well as about I/O performance, monitoring and benchmarking tools at www.storageperformance.us.
Some new Products Technology Services Announcements (PTSA) include:
Amazon Web Service (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) Infrequent Access (IA) storage class for inactive data with immediate access vs. Glacier cold or frozen (dormant) data with slow or time delayed access. AWS also announced Snowball bulk data import/export 50TB appliance service in addition to their earlier offered capabilities.
Microsoft Azure recent enhancements include file access of cloud storage (on-premises and within Azure cloud) leveraging SMB interfaces. Here is a primer on Azure cloud storage service offerings. View other recent Azure Cloud Storage, Compute, Database and Data Analytics service offerings here. In addition to Microsoft Azure cloud offerings or Windows 10 desktop operating system, you can also download WIndows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 (TP3) and see what’s new here. Some of the features include Storage Spaces Direct (e.g. DAS storage) and replication among other features.
Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:
Virtual Blocks (VMware Blogs): EVO:RAIL – What Is It And Why Does It Matter? This is the first of a multi-part series looking at Converged Infrastructures (CI), Hyper-Converged Infrastructures (HCI), Cluster in Box (CiB) and other unified solution bundles. There is a trend of industry adoption talking about CI, HCI, CiB and other bundled solutions, along with growing IT customer adoption and deployment. Different sized organizations are looking at various types of CI solutions to meet various application and workloads needs. Read more here.
WServerNews.com: Cloud (Microsoft Azure) storage considerations Let’s say that you have been tasked with, or decided that it is time to use (or try) public cloud storage such as Microsoft Azure. Ok, now what do you do and what decisions need to be made? Keep in mind that Microsoft Azure like many other popular public clouds provides many difference services available for fee (subscription) along with free trials. These services include applications, compute, networking, storage along with development and management platform tools. Read more here.
NetworkComputing: Selecting Storage: Buzzword Bingo The storage industry is rife with buzzwords. Here are some of the popular ones storage buyers need to navigate carefully to find storage products that truly meet their needs. Read more here.
InfoStor: What’s The Best Storage Benchmark? It Depends…
EnterpriseStorageForum: NAND, DRAM, SAS/SCSI & SATA/AHCI: Not Dead, Yet!
Check out these resources and links technology, techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here
October 13 – Symposium: Software Defined Storage Management October 14 – Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends October 15 – Symposium – Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) October 16 – “Converged Day” Server and Storage Decision making
September 23 – Webinar Redmond Magazine & Dell Data Protection The New World Order of Data Protection – Focus on Recovery Learn more about the 9Rs of data protection and recovery
Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Express (NVMe) continues to evolve as a technology for enabling and improving server storage I/O for NVM including nand flash SSD storage. NVMe streamlines performance enabling more work to be done (e.g. IOPs), data to be moved (bandwidth) at a lower response time using less CPU. The above figure is a quick look comparing nand flash SSD being accessed via SATA III (6Gbps) on the left and NVMe (x4) on the right. As with any server storage I/O performance comparisons there are many variables and take them with a grain of salt. While IOPs and bandwidth are often discussed, keep in mind that with the new protocol, drivers and device controllers with NVMe that streamline I/O less CPU is needed. Learn more about NVM, NVMe, flash, SSD and related topics at www.thessdplace.com.
The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of my books.
The Human Face of Big Data book review. To say this is a big book would be an understatement, then again, big data is a big topic with a lot of diversity if you open your eyes and think in a pragmatic way, which once you open and see the pages you will see. This is physically a big book (11x 14 inches) with lots of pictures, texts, stories, factoids and thought stimulating information of the many facets and dimensions of big data across 224 pages. The Human Face of Big Data is more than a coffee table or picture book as it is full of with information, factoids and perspectives how information and data surround us every day. Open up a copy of The Human Face of Big Data and you will see examples of how data and information are all around us, and our dependence upon it. Read more here.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Dude, Dell is Getting (Buying) an EMC and VMware Deal
Some of you might remember the marketing campaign "Dude you’re getting a Dell" to show somebody buying a Dell computer.
Today, Dell as in Michael Dell and his corporation Dell along with partner Silver Lake investment announced a $67B USD deal that they are acquiring EMC along with their stake in VMware which will stay an independently public traded company. Dell brings strength in small and medium-mid market strength and supplier to cloud and other managed service providers, Dell financing combines with EMC strength and enterprise portfolio. This deal also reunites the two parties who before had a strong storage joint venture with Dell OEMing EMC storage for about a decade before going their separate ways in the late 2000s.
Key points
Privately held Dell is acquiring EMC and its various business units
VMware will stay independent public company with Dell as major owner
EMC based in Hopkinton Massachusetts will be headquarters for new Dell Systems Business Unit
Dell Systems Business Unit will also be headquarters for Dell servers
New Dell Systems Business Unit joint with EMC is expected to be a $30B USD plus sized entity
Dell see’s revenue synergies of about 3x over 1x cost of the combined entities
Dell see’s ability to generate cash to service debt coming from increased revenue growth
EMC global support, professional services, consulting to complement Dell capabilities
Ability for both partners to leverage their best of strengths from SMB to enterprise to cloud
What this means big picture
Basically EMC has gone private under the Dell umbrella while VMware remains an independent publicly traded company, granted with EMC and now Dell being the primary shareholder of that entity. Dell went private back in 2013 with its founder Michael Dell along with Silver Lake Partners as key investors. EMC has been under pressure from activist investors to sell off its investment in VMware to increase shareholder and was rumored to have been in acquisition discussions with other organizations such as HP. Now EMC (e.g. the non-VMware part) is effectively a private held company as the Dell Systems Business Unit to be initially headquartered in Hopkinton Massachusetts (EMC Headquarters) while Dell Corporation headquarters will remain in Austin Texas.
The server business will be based in Hopkinton, which will be targeted at around a $30B USD business. Ironic that Massachusetts used to be a focus for server vendors from Dell (acquired by Compaq and then HP), Wang, DG (acquired by EMC) among others. This transaction puts Massachusetts back on the map as the Dell System Business Unit will also now be home to Dell servers. As of the announcement, there is an expectation that the Hopkinton headquarters will grow vs. shrink. Granted., some consolidation can be expected.
Some questions that exist (among many others)
What about Pivotal?
One of the questions I have is that during the announcement discussions, not much if anything has been said about Pivotal and its future role or how it will be folded in, or set up as a tracking stock or similar activity. Also something to keep in mind as food for thought, or speculation, is that GE is an investor in Pivotal and GE has made noise about becoming more prominent player in software, just saying. In the meantime, let’s wait and see what happens with Pivotal.
What about Lenovo relationship?
After the last Dell breakup, EMC established a partnership and initiative with Lenovo to jointly produce servers that had been being sourced from Dell or others, as well as EMC moving its Iomega SMB storage business into the Lenovo initiative. Note that about a year ago Lenovo bought the former IBM x86 server business. What will become of that partnership for servers, as well as for Iomega moving forward?
How will product rationalization occur?
There is some product overlap in the storage business, as well as backup/data protection among some other areas. However looking at the bigger picture, there is not much if any overlap. Where there is overlap, one near-term approach that might (this is speculation) occur is to segment potential competing products into Enterprise and Systems business vs. SMB or entry-level. This could occur for storage products such as Dell Compellent, Exanet based Fluid NAS, EqualLogic and MD (OEM from NetApp) vs. those from EMC such as VMAX, VNX, Isilon, XtremIO, Datadomain among others. Likewise, there will need to be some rationalization for backup and data protection products such as EMC Networker, Avamar vs. Dell AppAssure, vRanger, NetVault as well as their OEM partners Commvault and Symantec among others.
VCE gets leveraged as part of go to market?
EMC took over ownership of VCE in 2014 with Cisco still involved, in fact if a product has Vblock in its name, it will be a Cisco server and network. However look for other VCE solutions to appear as well as the VxRACK announced earlier this year. I would expect new converge infrastructure (CI), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and Cluster-in-Box (CiB) solutions from VCE that would include Dell servers in the future leveraging different software (VMware among others).
How will Dell OEM business drive things?
Dell has had a server OEM business that has supplied technology to others, including in the past EMC. This business moves in under the new System Business Unit as part of what is or was EMC. Beyond servers, it will be interesting to see how that business unit can also move other technologies into the OEM or high volume market including to cloud and managed service providers who buy in bulk.
Will this cause Cisco an EMC partner to buy another storage vendor?
Maybe, that depends on what Cisco wants to do moving forward in addition to remaining a partner with EMC. Of course, if Cisco were to go storage shopping, who would that be? Perhaps DDN, Nimble or NetApp?
With Michael Dell now having done one of, if not the largest tech deals in history, how will Larry Ellison of Oracle react?
It has been said that the difference between God and Larry Ellison is that God was not interested in becoming Larry Ellison, however, is Larry Ellison still interested in industry bragging rights meaning will he want to do a big block buster deal involving Oracle to get some headlines, or enjoy his semi-retirement, perhaps buying a bankrupt country or something?
Certainly there are many more questions about server, storage, I/O networking, cloud, virtual, software, hardware, security and management tools along with service and support that will get addressed in follow-up discussions.
Near term, the combined entity needs to get out front and sell to customers, partners and prospects that EMC is not going away, or that Dell is going to get in the way of existing business. The two need to run as is pursuing and closing each others respective business making sure that competitors do not create barriers to deals closing and disrupting revenue. In other words, neither Dell nor EMC can afford to foster a revenue prevention department now, nor can either afford to allow any other competitor to become a revenue prevention department as a service (e.g. costing either EMC or Dell revenue).
Overall this deal has some interesting upside synergies and potential, granted, we will need to see how things unfold.
Disclosure: Dell and EMC have been Server StorageIO clients, and StorageIO uses Dell as well as Lenovo servers among others technologies including VMware.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(R) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved
Hello and welcome to this September 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Summer has wrapped up here in the northern hemisphere which means the fall conference season has started. In addition to large conferences, there are also many smaller events including the sessions I will be doing in Nijkerk Holland week of October 13-16, along with others (in-person and on-line) throughout the fall.
Enjoy this edition of the Server StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and podcast’s along with in the news commentary appearing soon.
Recent Server StorageIO articles appearing in different venues include:
NetworkComputing: Selecting Storage: It’s All About The Applications Choosing the right storage for your applications depends on using the PACE model, evaluating Performance, Availability, Capacity and Economics (e.g. PACE). Often when I discuss mainstream applications with people, the perception is that bandwidth only applies to big data and analytics, video, and high-performance compute (HPC) or supercomputing applications such as those used in the seismic, geo, energy, video security surveillance, or entertainment industries. The reality is that those applications can be bandwidth or throughput intensive, but they can also need a large number of small I/Os that need many IOPs to handle metadata related processing. Even bulk storage repositories for archiving, solutions using scale-out NAS, and object storage have a mix of IOPs and bandwidth. Read more here.
EnterpriseStorageForum: NAND, DRAM, SAS/SCSI and SATA/AHCI: Not Dead, Yet
Manufacturers are coming out with new non-volatile memory (NVM) media like3D XPoint. Does that mean that DRAM and other NVM media such as NAND flash are now dead?
Do new NVM storage access protocols such as NVM Express (NVMe) mean SCSI/SAS and AHCI/SATA are now dead?
My simple answer is no, they all have bright futures. Read more here.
Check out these resources and links technology, techniques, trends as well as tools. View more tips and articles here
October 13 – Symposium: Software Defined Storage Management October 14 – Server Storage I/O Fundamental Trends October 15 – Symposium – Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) October 16 – “Converged Day” Server and Storage Decision making
September 23 – Webinar Redmond Magazine & Dell Data Protection The New World Order of Data Protection – Focus on Recovery Learn more about the 9Rs of data protection and recovery
The following are various recommended reading including books, blogs and videos. If you have not done so recently, also check out the Intel Recommended Reading List (here) where you will also find a couple of my books.
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks (A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement) is a book written Eric Redmond (@coderoshi) and Jim Wilson (@hexlib), that takes a look at several non SQL based database systems. Coverage includes PostgreSQL, Riak, Apache HBase, MongoDB, Apache CouchDB, Neo4J and Redis with plenty of code and architecture examples. Also covered include relational vs. key value, columnar and document based systems among others. Read more here.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Supermicro CSE-M14TQC Use your media bay to add 12 Gbps SAS SSD drives to your server
Do you have a computer server, workstation or mini-tower PC that needs to have more 2.5" form factor hard disk drive (HDD), solid state device (SSD) or hybrid flash drives added yet no expansion space?
Do you also want or need the HDD or SSD drive expansion slots to be hot swappable, 6 Gbps SATA3 along with up to 12 Gbps SAS devices?
Do you have an available 5.25" media bay slot (e.g. where you can add an optional CD or DVD drive) or can you remove your existing CD or DVD drive using USB for software loading?
Do you need to carry out the above without swapping out your existing server or workstation on a reasonable budget, say around $100 USD plus tax, handling, shipping (your prices may vary)?
If you need implement the above, then here is a possible solution, or in my case, an real solution.
Supermicro CSE-M14TQC with hot swap canister before installing in one of my servers
In the past I have used a solution from Startech that supports up to 4 x 2.5" 6 Gbps SAS and SATA drives in a 5.25" media bay form factor installing these in my various HP, Dell and Lenovo servers to increase internal storage bays (slots).
Via Amazon.com StarTech 4 x 2.5" SAS and SATA internal enclosure
I still use the StarTech device shown (read earlier reviews and experiences here, here and here) above in some of my servers which continue to be great for 6Gbps SAS and SATA 2.5" HDDs and SSDs. However for 12 Gbps SAS devices, I have used other approaches including external 12 Gbps SAS enclosures.
Recently while talking with the folks over at Servers Direct, I mentioned how I was using StarTech 4 x 2.5" 6Gbps SAS/SATA media bay enclosure as a means of boosting the number of internal drives that could be put into some smaller servers. The Servers Direct folks told me about the Supermicro CSE-M14TQC which after doing some research, I decided to buy one to complement the StarTech 6Gbps enclosures, as well as external 12 Gbps SAS enclosures or other internal options.
What is the Supermicro CSE-M14TQC?
The CSE-M14TQC is a 5.25" form factor enclosure that enables four (4) 2.5" hot swappable (if your adapter and OS supports hot swap) 12 Gbps SAS or 6 Gbps SATA devices (HDD and SSD) to fit into the media bay slot normally used by CD/DVD devices in servers or workstations. There is a single Molex male power connector on the rear of the enclosure that can be used to attach to your servers available power using applicable connector adapters. In addition there are four seperate drive connectors (e.g. SATA type connectors) that support up to 12 Gbps SAS per drive which you can attach to your servers motherboard (note SAS devices need a SAS controller), HBA or RAID adapters internal ports.
Cooling is provided via a rear mounted 12,500 RPM 16 cubic feet per minute fan, each of the four drives are hot swappable (requires operating system or hypervisor support) contained in a small canister (provided with the enclosure). Drives easily mount to the canister via screws that are also supplied as part of the enclosure kit. There is also a drive activity and failure notification LED for the devices. If you do not have any available SAS or SATA ports on your servers motherboard, you can use an available PCIe slot and add a HBA or RAID card for attaching the CSE-M14TQC to the drives. For example, a 12 Gbps SAS (6 Gbps SATA) Avago/LSI RAID card, or a 6 Gbps SAS/SATA RAID card.
Via Supermicro CSE-M14TQC rear details (4 x SATA and 1 Molex power connector)
CSE-M14TQCrear view before installation
CSE-M14TQC ready for installation with 4 x SATA (12 Gbps SAS) drive connectors and Molex power connector
Tip: In the case of the Lenovo TS140 that I initially installed the CSE-M14TQC into, there is not a lot of space for installing the drive connectors or Molex power connector to the enclosure. Instead, attach the cables to the CSE-M14TQC as shown above before installing the enclosure into the media bay slot. Simply attach the connectors as shown and feed them through the media bay opening as you install the CSE-M14TQC enclosure. Then attach the drive connectors to your HBA, RAID card or server motherboard and the power connector to your power source inside the server.
Note and disclaimer, pay attention to your server manufactures power loading and specification along with how much power will be used by the HDD or SSD’s to be installed to avoid electrical power or fire issues due to overloading!
CSE-M14TQC installed into Lenovo TS140 empty media bay
CSE-M14TQC installed with front face plated installed on Lenovo TS140
If you have a server that simply needs some extra storage capacity by adding some 2.5" HDDs, or boosting performance with fast SSDs yet do not have any more internal drive slots or expansion bays, leverage your media bay. This applies to smaller environments where you might have one or two servers, as well as for environments where you want or need to create a scale out software defined storage or hyper-converged platform using your own hardware. Another option is that if you have a lab or test environment for VMware vSphere ESXi Windows, Linux, Openstack or other things, this can be a cost-effective approach to adding both storage space capacity as well as performance and leveraging newer 12Gbps SAS technologies.
For example, create a VMware VSAN cluster using smaller servers such as Lenovo TS140 or equivalent where you can install a couple of 6TB or 8TB higher capacity 3.5" drive in the internal drive bays, then adding a couple of 12 Gbps SAS SSDs along with a couple of 2.5" 2TB (or larger) HDDs along with a RAID card, and high-speed networking card. If VMware VSAN is not your thing, how about setting up a Windows Server 2012 R2 failover cluster including Scale Out File Server (SOFS) with Hyper-V, or perhaps OpenStack or one of many other virtual storage appliances (VSA) or software defined storage, networking or other solutions. Perhaps you need to deploy more storage for a big data Hadoop based analytics system, or cloud or object storage solution? On the other hand, if you simply need to add some storage to your storage or media or gaming server or general purpose server, the CSE-M14TQC can be an option along with other external solutions.
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Intel Micron 3D XPoint server storage NVM SCM PM SSD.
This is the second of a three-part series on the recent Intel and Micron 3D XPoint server storage memory announcement. Read Part I here and Part III here.
Is this 3D XPoint marketing, manufacturing or material technology?
You can’t have a successful manufactured material technology without some marketing, likewise marketing without some manufactured material would be manufactured marketing. In the case of 3D XPoint and its announcement launch, their real technology shown, granted it was only wafer and dies as opposed to an actual DDR4 DIMM or PCIe Add In Card (AIC) or drive form factor Solid State Device (SSD) product. On the other hand, on a relative comparison basis, even though there is marketing collateral available to learn more from, this was far from a over the big-top made for TV or web circus event, which can be a good thing.
Wafer unveiled containing 3D XPoint 128 Gb dies
Who will get access to 3D XPoint?
Initially 3D XPoint production capacity supply will be for the two companies to offer early samples to their customers later this year with general production slated for 2016 meaning early real customer deployed products starting sometime in 2016.
Is it NAND or NOT?
3D XPoint is not NAND flash, it is also not NVRAM or DRAM, it’s a new class of NVM that can be used for server class main memory with persistency, or as persistent data storage among other uses (cell phones, automobiles, appliances and other electronics). In addition, 3D XPoint is more durable with a longer useful life for writing and storing data vs. NAND flash.
Why is 3D XPoint important?
As mentioned during the Intel and Micron announcement, there have only been seven major memory technologies introduced since the transistor back in 1947, granted there have been many variations along with generational enhancements of those. Thus 3D XPoint is being positioned by Intel and Micron as the eighth memory class joining its predecessors many of which continue to be used today in various roles.
Major memory classes or categories timeline
In addition to the above memory classes or categories timeline, the following shows in more detail various memory categories (click on the image below to get access to the Intel interactive infographic).
Initially the 3D XPoint technology is available in a 2 layer 128 bit (cell) per die capacity. Keep in mind that there are usually 8 bits to a byte resulting in 16 GByte capacity per chip initially. With density improvements, as well as increased stacking of layers, the number of cells or bits per die (e.g. what makes up a chip) should improve, as well as most implementations will have multiple chips in some type of configuration.
What will 3D XPoint cost?
During the 3D XPoint launch webinar Intel and Micron hinted that first pricing will be between current DRAM and NAND flash on a per cell or bit basis, however real pricing and costs will vary depending on how packaged for use. For example if placed on a DDR4 or different type of DIMM or on a PCIe Add In Card (AIC) or as a drive form factor SSD among other options will vary the real price. Likewise as with other memories and storage mediums, as production yields and volumes increase, along with denser designs, the cost per usable cell or bit can be expected to further improve.
Where to read, watch and learn more
Intel and Micron unveil new 3D XPoint Non Volatile Memory (NVM) ( Part I)
Part II – Intel and Micron new 3D XPoint server and storage NVM
Part III – 3D XPoint new server storage memory from Intel and Micron
Intel and Micron ( Media Room, links, videos, images and more including B roll videos)
DRAM which has been around for sometime has plenty of life left for many applications as does NAND flash including new 3D NAND, vNAND and other variations. For the next several years, there will be a co-existences between new and old NVM and DRAM among other memory technologies including 3D XPoint. Read more in this series including Part I here and Part III here.
Disclosure: Micron and Intel have been direct and/or indirect clients in the past via third-parties and partners, also I have bought and use some of their technologies direct and/or in-direct via their partners.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.
Part III – 3D XPoint server storage class memory SCM
Updated 1/31/2018
3D XPoint nvm pm scm storage class memory.
This is the third of a three-part series on the recent Intel and Micron 3D XPoint server storage memory announcement. Read Part I here and Part II here.
What is 3D XPoint and how does it work?
3D XPoint is a new class or class of memory (view other categories of memory here) that provides performance for reads and writes closer to that of DRAM with about 10x the capacity density. In addition to the speed closer to DRAM vs. the lower NAND flash, 3D XPoint is also non-volatile memory (NVM) like NAND flash, NVRAM and others. What this means is that 3D XPoint can be used as persistent higher density fast server memory (or main memory for other computers and electronics). Besides being fast persistent main memory, 3D XPoint will also be a faster medium for solid state devices (SSD’s) including PCIe Add In Cards (AIC), m2 cards and drive form factor 8637/8639 NVM Express (NVMe) accessed devices that also has better endurance or life span compared to NAND flash.
3D XPoint architecture and attributes
The initial die or basic chip building block 3D XPoint implementation is a layer 128 Gbit device which if using 8 bits would yield 16GB raw. Over time increased densities should become available as the bit density improves with more cells and further scaling of the technology, combined with packaging. For example while a current die could hold up to 16 GBytes of data, multiple dies could be packaged together to create a 32GB, 64GB, 128GB etc. or larger actual product. Think about not only where packaged flash based SSD capacities are today, also think in terms of where DDR3 and DDR4 DIMM are at such as 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB densities.
The 3D aspect comes from the memory being in a matrix initially being two layers high, with multiple rows and columns that intersect, where those intersections occur is a microscopic material based switch for accessing a particular memory cell. Unlike NAND flash where an individual cell or bit is accessed as part of a larger block or page comprising several thousand bytes at once, 3D XPoint cells or bits can be individually accessed to speed up reads and writes in a more granular fashion. It is this more granular access along with performance that will enable 3D XPoint to be used in lower latency scenarios where DRAM would normally be used.
Instead of trapping electrons in a cell to create a bit of capacity (e.g. on or off) like NAND flash, 3D XPoint leverages the underlying physical material propertied to store a bit as a phase change enabling use of all cells. In other words, instead of being electron based, it is material based. While Intel and Micron did not specify what the actual chemistry and physical materials that are used in 3D XPoint, they did discuss some of the characteristics. If you want to go deep, check out how the Dailytech makes an interesting educated speculation or thesis on the underlying technology.
Watch the following video to get a better idea and visually see how 3D XPoint works.
Left many dies on a wafer, right, a closer look at the dies cut from the wafer
Dies (here and here) are the basic building block of what goes into the chips that in turn are the components used for creating DDR DIMM for main computer memory, as well as for create SD and MicroSD cards, USB thumb drives, PCIe AIC and drive form factor SSD, as well as custom modules on motherboards, or consumption via bare die and wafer level consumption (e.g. where you are doing really custom things at volume, beyond using a soldering iron scale).
Has Intel and Micron cornered the NVM and memory market?
We have heard proclamations, speculation and statements of the demise of DRAM, NAND flash and other volatile and NVM memories for years, if not decades now. Each year there is the usual this will be the year of “x” where “x” can include among others. Resistive RAM aka ReRAM or RRAM aka the memristor that HP earlier announced they were going to bring to market and then earlier this year canceling those plans while Crossbar continues to pursue RRAM. MRAM or Magnetorestive RAM, Phase Change Memory aka CRAM or PCM and PRAM, FRAM aka FeRAM or Ferroelectric RAM among others.
Expanding persistent memory and SSD storage markets
Keep in mind that there are many steps taking time measured in years or decades to go from research and development lab idea to prototype that can then be produced at production volumes in economic yields. As a reference for, there is still plenty of life in both DRAM as well as NAND flash, the later having appeared around 1989.
Technology industry adoption precedes customer adoption and deployment
There is a difference between industry adoption and deployment vs. customer adoption and deployment, they are related, yet separated by time as shown in the above figure. What this means is that there can be several years from the time a new technology is initially introduced and when it becomes generally available. Keep in mind that NAND flash has yet to reach its full market potential despite having made significant inroads the past few years since it was introduced in 1989.
This begs the question of if 3D XPoint is a variation of phase change, RRAM, MRAM or something else. Over at the Dailytech they lay out a line of thinking (or educated speculation) that 3D XPoint is some derivative or variation of phase change, time will tell about what it really is.
What’s the difference between 3D NAND flash and 3D XPoint?
3D NAND is a form of NAND flash NVM, while 3D XPoint is a completely new and different type of NVM (e.g. its not NAND).
3D NAND is a variation of traditional flash with the difference between vertical stacking vs. horizontal to improve density, also known as vertical NAND or V-NAND. Vertical stacking is like building up to house more tenants or occupants in a dense environment or scaling up, vs scaling-out by using up more space where density is not an issue. Note that magnetic HDD’s shifted to perpendicular (e.g. vertical) recording about ten years ago to break through the super parametric barrier and more recently, magnetic tape has also adopted perpendicular recording. Also keep in mind that 3D XPoint and the earlier announced Intel and Micron 3D NAND flash are two separate classes of memory that both just happen to have 3D in their marketing names.
Where to read, watch and learn more
Intel and Micron unveil new 3D XPoint Non Volatile Memory (NVM) for servers and storage ( Part I)
Part II – Intel and Micron new 3D XPoint server and storage NVM
Part III – 3D XPoint new server storage memory from Intel and Micron
Intel and Micron ( Media Room, links, videos, images and more including B roll videos)
First, keep in mind that this is very early in the 3D XPoint technology evolution life-cycle and both DRAM and NAND flash will not be dead at least near term. Keep in mind that NAND flash appeared back in 1989 and only over the past several years has finally hit its mainstream adoption stride with plenty of market upside left. Same with DRAM which has been around for sometime, it too still has plenty of life left for many applications. However other applications that have the need for improved speed over NAND flash, or persistency and density vs. DRAM will be some of the first to leverage new NVM technologies such as 3D XPoint. Thus at least for the next several years, there will be a co-existences between new and old NVM and DRAM among other memory technologies. Bottom line, 3D XPoint is a new class of NVM memory, can be used for persistent main server memory or for persistent fast storage memory. If you have not done so, check out Part I here and Part II here of this three-part series on Intel and Micron 3D XPoint.
Disclosure: Micron and Intel have been direct and/or indirect clients in the past via third-parties and partners, also I have bought and use some of their technologies direct and/or in-direct via their partners.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.
3D XPoint NVM persistent memory PM storage class memory SCM
Updated 1/31/2018
This is the first of a three-part series on Intel Micron unveil new 3D XPoint Non Volatie Memory NVM for servers storage announcement. Read Part II here and Part III here.
In a webcast the other day, Intel and Micron announced new 3D XPoint non-volatile memory (NVM) that can be used for both primary main memory (e.g. what’s in computers, serves, laptops, tablets and many other things) in place of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), for persistent storage faster than today’s NAND flash-based solid state devices (SSD), not to mention future hybrid usage scenarios. Note that this announcement while having the common term 3D in it is different from the earlier Intel and Micron announcement about 3D NAND flash (read more about that here).
Data needs to be close to processing, processing needs to be close to the data (locality of reference)
Server Storage I/O memory hardware and software hierarchy along with technology tiers
What did Intel and Micron announce?
Intel SVP and General Manager Non-Volatile Memory solutions group Robert Crooke (Left) and Micron CEO D. Mark Durcan did the joint announcement presentation of 3D XPoint (webinar here). What was announced is the 3D XPoint technology jointly developed and manufactured by Intel and Micron which is a new form or category of NVM that can be used for both primary memory in servers, laptops, other computers among other uses, as well as for persistent data storage.
Robert Crooke (Left) and Mark Durcan (Right)
Summary of 3D XPoint announcement
New category of NVM memory for servers and storage
Joint development and manufacturing by Intel and Micron in Utah
Non volatile so can be used for storage or persistent server main memory
Allows NVM to scale with data, storage and processors performance
Leverages capabilities of both Intel and Micron who have collaborated in the past
Performance Intel and Micron claim up to 1000x faster vs. NAND flash
Availability persistent NVM compared to DRAM with better durability (life span) vs. NAND flash
Capacity densities about 10x better vs. traditional DRAM
Economics cost per bit between dram and nand (depending on packaging of resulting products)
What applications and products is 3D XPoint suited for?
In general, 3D XPoint should be able to be used for many of the same applications and associated products that current DRAM and NAND flash-based storage memories are used for. These range from IT and cloud or managed service provider data centers based applications and services, as well as consumer focused among many others.
3D XPoint enabling various applications
In general, applications or usage scenarios along with supporting products that can benefit from 3D XPoint include among others’. Applications that need larger amounts of main memory in a denser footprint such as in-memory databases, little and big data analytics, gaming, wave form analysis for security, copyright or other detection analysis, life sciences, high performance compute and high-productivity compute, energy, video and content severing among many others.
In addition, applications that need persistent main memory for resiliency, or to cut delays and impacts for planned or un-planned maintenance or having to wait for memories and caches to be warmed or re-populated after a server boot (or re-boot). 3D XPoint will also be useful for those applications that need faster read and write performance compared to current generations NAND flash for data storage. This means both existing and emerging applications as well as some that do not yet exist will benefit from 3D XPoint over time, like how today’s applications and others have benefited from DRAM used in Dual Inline Memory Module (DIMM) and NAND flash advances over the past several decades.
Where to read, watch and learn more
Intel and Micron unveil new 3D XPoint Non Volatile Memory (NVM) ( Part I)
Part II – Intel and Micron new 3D XPoint server and storage NVM
Part III – 3D XPoint new server storage memory from Intel and Micron
Intel and Micron (Media Room, links, videos, images and more including B roll videos)
First, keep in mind that this is very early in the 3D XPoint technology evolution life-cycle and both DRAM and NAND flash will not be dead at least near term. Keep in mind that NAND flash appeared back in 1989 and only over the past several years has finally hit its mainstream adoption stride with plenty of market upside left. Continue reading Part II here and Part III here of this three-part series on Intel and Micron 3D XPoint along with more analysis and commentary.
Disclosure: Micron and Intel have been direct and/or indirect clients in the past via third-parties and partners, also I have bought and use some of their technologies direct and/or in-direct via their partners.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.
EMCworld 2015 How Do You Want Your Storage Wrapped?
Back in early May I was invited by EMC to attend EMCworld 2015 which included both the public sessions, as well as several NDA based discussions. Keep in mind that there is the known, there is the unknown (or assumed or speculated) and in between there are NDA’s, nuff said on that. EMC covered my hotel and registration costs to attend the event in Las Vegas (thanks EMC, that’s a disclosure btw ;) and here is a synopsis of various EMCworld 2015 announcements.
What EMC announced
VMAX3 enhancements to the EMC enterprise flagship storage platform to keep it relevant for traditional legacy workloads as well as for in a converged, scale-out, cloud, virtual and software defined environment.
VNX 3200 entry-level All Flash Array (AFA) flash SSD system starting at $25,000 USD for a 3TB unified platform with full data services found in other VNX products.
vVNX aka Virtual VNX aka "project liberty" which is a community (e.g. free) software version of the VNX. vVNX is a Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) that you download and run on a VMware platform. Learn more and download here. Note the install will do a CPU type check so forget about trying to run it on a Intel Nuc or similar, I tried just because I could, the install will protect you from doing such things.
Various data protection related items including new Datadomain platforms as well as software updates and integration with other EMC platforms (storage systems).
All Flash Array (AFA) XtremIO 4.0 enhancements including larger clusters, larger nodes to boost performance, capacity and availability, along with copy service updates among others improvements.
Preview of DSSD shared (inside a rack) external flash Solid State Device (SSD) including more details. While much of DSSD is still under NDA, EMC did provide more public details at EMCworld. Between what was displayed and announced publicly at EMCworld as well as what can be found via Google (or other searches) you can piece together more of the DSSD story. What is known publicly today is that DSSD leverages the new Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) access protocol built upon underlying PCIe technology. More on DSSD in future discussions,if you have not done so, get an NDA deep dive briefing on it from EMC.
ScaleIO is now available via a free download here including both Windows and Linux clients as well as instructions for those operating systems as well as VMware.
ViPR can also be downloaded here for free (has been previously available) from here as well as it has been placed into open source by EMC.
What EMC announced since EMCworld 2015
Acquisition of cloud services (and software tools) vendor Virtustream for $1.2B adding to the federation cloud services portfolio (companion to VMware vCloud Air).
Release of ECS 2.0 including a free download here. This new version of ECS (Elastic Cloud Storage) can be used independent of the ViPR controller, or in conjunction with ViPR. In addition ECS now has about 80% of the functionality of the Centera object storage platform. The remaining 20% functionality (mainly regulatory compliance governance) of Centera will be added to ECS in the future providing a migration path for Centera customers. In case you are wondering what does EMC do with Centera, Atmos, ViPR and now ECS, answer is that ECS can work with or without ViPR, second is that the functionality of Centera, Atmos are being rolled into ECS. ECS as a refresher is software that transforms general purpose industry standard servers with direct storage into a scale-out HDFS and object storage solution.
Check out EMCcode including S3motion that I use and have reviewed here. Also check out EMCcode Rex-Ray which if you are into docker containers, it should be of interest, I know I’m interested in it.
What this all means and wrap-up
There were no single major explosive announcements however the sum of all the announcements together should not be over shadowed by the big tent made for TV (or web) big tent productions and entertainment. What EMC announced was effectively how would you like, how do you want and need your storage and associated data services along with management wrapped.
By being wrapped, do you want your software defined storage management and storage wrapped in a legacy turnkey solution such as VMAX3, VNX or Isilon, do you want or need it to be hybrid or all flash, converged and unified, block, file or object.
Or do you need or want the software defined storage management and storage to be "shrink wrapped" as a download so you can deploy on your own hardware "tin wrapped" or as a VSA "virtual wrapped" or cloud wrapped? Do you need or want the software defined storage management and storage to leverage anybody’s hardware while being open source?
How do you need or want your storage to be wrapped to fit your specific needs, that IMHO was the essence of what EMC announced at EMCworld 2015, granted the motorcycles and other production entertainment was engaging as well as educational.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Modernizing Data Protection = Using new and old things in new ways
This is part of an ongoing series of posts that part of www.storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ on data protection including archiving, backup/restore, business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BC), data footprint reduction (DFR), disaster recovery (DR), High Availability (HA) along with related themes, tools, technologies, techniques, trends and strategies.
Keep in mind that a fundamental goal of an Information Technology (IT) organization is to protect, preserve and serve data and information in a cost-effective as well as productive way when needed. There is no such thing as an information recession with more data being generated and processed. In addition to more of it, data is also getting larger, having more dependencies on it being available as well as living longer (e.g. retention).
Proof Points, No Data or Information Recession
A quick easy proof point of more data and it getting larger is your cell phone and the pictures it take. Compare the size of those photos today to what you had in your previous generation of smart phone or even digital camera as the Mega Pixels (e.g. resolution and size of data) increased, along with the size of media (e.g. storage) to save those to also grew. Another proof point is look at your presentations, documents, web sites and other mediums with how the amount of rich or unstructured content (e.g. photos, videos) exists on those now vs. a few years ago. Yet another proof-point is to look at your structured little data databases and how there are more rows and columns, as well as how some of those columns have gotten larger or are point to external "blobs" or "objects" that have also gotten larger.
Industry trend and challenges
There has been industry buzz the past several years around data protection modernizing, modernizing data protection or simply modernizing backup along with modernizing your data and information infrastructure. Many of these conversations focus around swapping out an older technology in favor of whatever the new industry buzzword trend is (e.g. swap tape for disk, disk for cloud) or perhaps from one data protection, backup, archive or copy tool for another. Some of these conversations also focus around swapping legacy for virtual, cloud or some other variation of software defined marketing.
The Opportunity to do new things
What is common with all the above is basically swapping out one technology, tool, medium or technique for another new one yet using it in old ways. For example tape gets swapped for disk, yet the same approach to when, where, why, how often and what gets copied or protected is left the same. Sure some new tools and technologies get introduced. However when was the last time you put the tools down, took a step back and revisited the fundamental questions of how and why you are doing data protection the way it is being done? When was the last time you thought about data protection as an asset or business enabler as opposed to a cost center, overhead or after thought?
What’s in your data protection toolbox, do you know what to use when?
What about modernizing beyond the tools
One of the challenges with modernizing is that there is a cost involved including people time, staff skills as well as budgets not to mention keeping things running, so how do you go about paying for any improvements? Sure you can go get a data infrastructure or habitat for technology aka data home improvement loan, however there are costs associated to that.
What about reducing data protection costs?
So why not self-fund the improvements and modernization activities by finding and removing costs, eliminating complexity vs. moving and masking issues? Part of this can be accomplished by simply revisiting if you are treating all your applications and data the same from a data protection perspective. Are you providing a data protection service ability to your organization that is based on business wants or business needs? For example, does the business want recovery time objective (RTO) 0 and recovery point objective (RPO) 0 for all applications, while it needs RTO 4 hours and RPO 15 minutes for application-a while application-b requires RTO 12 hours and RPO of 2 hours and application must have RTO 24 hours with RPO of 12 hours?
As a reminder RTO is how much time, or how quickly you need your applications and data to be restored and made ready for use. RPO is the point in time to where data needs to be protected as of, or the amount of data or time frame data could be lost or missing. Thus RTO = 0 means instant recovery no downtime and RPO = 0 means no loss of data. RTO one day and RPO of ten (10) minutes means applications and their data are ready for use within 24 hours and no more than 10 minutes of data can be lost (e.g. the granularity of protection coverage)., Also keep in mind that you can have various RTO and RPO combinations to meet your specific application along with business needs as part of a tiered data protection strategy implementation.
With RTO and RPO in mind, when was the last time you sat down with the business and applications people to revisit what they want vs. what they must have? From these conversation you can easily Transition into how long to keep, how many copies in what place among other things which in turn allows you to review data protection as well as start using both old and new technologies, tools and techniques in new ways.
Where to learn more
Learn more about data protection and related topics, themes, trends, tools and technologies via the following links:
How do primary storage clouds and cloud for backup differ?
What’s most important to know about my cloud privacy policy?
What this all means and wrap-up
Data protection is a broad topic that spans from logical and physical security to HA, BC, BR, DR, archiving (including life beyond compliance) along with various tools, technologies, techniques. Key is aligning those to the needs of the business or organization for today’s as well as tomorrows requirements. Instead of doing things what has been done in the past that may have been based on what was known or possible due to technology capabilities, why not start using new and old things in new ways. Let’s start using all the tools in the data protection toolbox regardless of if they are new or old, cloud, virtual, physical, software defined product or service in new ways while keeping the requirements of the business in focus.
Keeping with the theme of protect preserve and serve, data protection to be modernized needs to become and be seen as a business asset or enabler vs. an after thought or cost over-head topic. Also, keep in mind that only you can prevent data loss, are your restores ready for when you need them? as well as one of the fundamental goals of IT is to protect, preserve and serve information including its applications as well as data when, where needed in a cost-effective way.
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Hello and welcome to this April 2015 Server and StorageIO update newsletter.
This months newsletter has a focus on cloud and object storage for bulk data, unstructured data, big data, archiving among other scenarios.
Enjoy this edition of the Server and StorageIO update newsletter and watch for new tips, articles, StorageIO lab report reviews, blog posts, videos and Podcasts along with in the news commentary appearing soon.
April Newsletter Feature Theme Cloud and Object Storage Fundamentals
There are many facets to object storage including technology implementation, products, services, access and architectures for various applications and use scenarios. The following is a short synopsis of some basic terms and concepts associated with cloud and object storage.
Common cloud and object storage terms
Account or project – Top of the hierarchy that represent owner or billing information for a service that where buckets are also attached.
Availability Zone (AZ) can be rack of servers and storage or data center where data is spread across for storage and durability.
Bucket or Container – Where objects or sub-folders containing objects are attached and accessed. Note in some environments such as AWS S3 you can have sub-folders in a bucket.
Connector or how your applications access the cloud or object storage such as via an API, S3, Swift, Rest, CDMI, Torrent, JSON, NAS file, block of other access gateway or software.
Durability – Data dispersed with copies in multiple locations to survive failure of storage or server hardware, software, zone or even region. Availability = Access + Durability.
End-point – Where or what your software, application or tool and utilities or gateways attach to for accessing buckets and objects.
Ephemeral – Temporary or non-persistent
Eventual consistency – Data is eventually made consistency, think in terms of asynchronous or deferred writes where there is a time lag vs. synchronous or real-time updates.
Immutable – Persistent, non-altered or write once read many copy of data. Objects generally are not updated, rather new objects created.
Object – Byte (or bit) stream that can be as small as one byte to as large as several TBytes (some solutions and services support up to 5TByte sized objects). The object contains what ever data in any organization along with meta data. Different solutions and services support from a couple hundred KBytes of meta-data to MBytes worth of meta-data. In terms of what can be stored in an object, anything from files, videos, images, virtual disks (VMDK’s, VHDX), ZIP or tar files, backup and archive save sets, executable images or ISO’s, anything you want.
OPS – Objects per second or how many objects accessed similar to a IOP. Access includes gets, puts, list, head, deletes for a CRUD interface e.g. Created, Read, Update, Delete.
Region – Location where data is stored that can include one or more data centers also known as Availability Zones.
Sub-folder – While object storage can be accessed in a flat name space for commonality and organization some solutions and service support the notion of sub-folder that resemble traditional directory hierarchy.
AWS recently announced their new cloud based Elastic File Storage (EFS) to compliment their existing Elastic Block Storage (EBS) offerings. However are you aware of what is going on with cloud files within OpenStack?
For those who are familiar with OpenStack or simply talk about it and Swift object storage, or perhaps Cinder block storage, are you aware that there is also a file (NAS or Network Attached Storage) component called Manila?
In concept Manila should provide a similar capability to what AWS has recently announce with their Elastic File Service (EFS), or depending on your perspective, perhaps the other way around. If you are familiar and have done anything with Manila what are your initial thoughts and perspectives.
What this all means
People routinely tell me this is the most exciting and interesting times ever in servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software, backup or data protection, performance, cloud and virtual or take your pick too which I would not disagree.
However, for the past several years (no, make that decade), there is new and more interesting things including in adjacent areas.
I predict that at least for the next few years (no, make that decades), we will continue to see plenty of new and interesting things, questions include.
However, what’s applicable to you and your environment vs. simply fun and interesting to watch?
Data Protection Gumbo Podcast Protect Preserve and Serve Data
In this episode, Greg Schulz is a guest on Data Protection Gumbo hosted by Demetrius Malbrough(@dmalbrough). The conversation covers various aspects of data protection which has a focus of protect preserve and serve information, applications and data across different environments and customer segments.
While we discuss enterprise and SMB data protection, we also talk about trends from Mobile to the cloud among many others tools, technologies and techniques. Check out the podcast here.
Springtime in Kentucky With Kendrick Coleman of EMCcode Cloud Object Storage S3motion and more
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