GreyBeards talk universal CEPH storage solutions with Phil Straw (@SoftIronCEO), CEO of SoftIron. Phil’s been around IT and electronics technology for a long time and has gone from scuba diving electronics, to DARPA/DOD researcher, to networking, and is now doing storage. He’s also their former CTO and co-founder of the company. SoftIron make hardware storage appliances for CEPH, an open source, software defined storage system.
CEPH storage includes file (CEPHFS, POSIX), object (S3) and block (RBD, RADOS block device, Kernel/librbd) services and has been out since 2006. CEPH storage also offers redundancy, mirroring, encryption, thin provisioning, snapshots, and a host of other storage options. CEPH is available as an open source solution, downloadable at CEPH.io, but it’s also offered as a licensed option from RedHat, SUSE and others. For SoftIron, it’s bundled into their HyperDrive storage appliances. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
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SoftIron uses the open source version of CEPH and incorporates this into their own, HyperDrive storage appliances, purpose built to support CEPH storage.
There are two challenges to using open source solutions:
- Support is generally non-existent. Yes, the open source community behind the (CEPH) project supplies bug fixes and can possibly answer some questions but this is not considered enterprise support where customers require 7x24x365 support for a product
- Useability is typically abysmal. Yes, open source systems can do anything that anyone could possibly want (if not, code it yourself), but trying to figure out how to use any of that often requires a PHD or two.
SoftIron has taken both of these on to offer a CEPH commercial product offering.
Take support, SoftIron offers enterprise level support that customers can contract for on their own, even if they don’t use SoftIron hardware. Phil said the would often get kudos for their expert support of CEPH and have often been requested to offer this as a standalone CEPH service. Needless to say their support of SoftIron appliances is also excellent.
As for ease of operations, SoftIron makes the HyperDrive Storage Manager appliance, which offers a standalone GUI, that takes the PHD out of managing CEPH. Anything one can do with the CEPH CLI can be done with SoftIron’s Storage Manager. It’s also a very popular offering with SoftIron customers. Similar to SoftIron’s CEPH support above, customers are requesting that their Storage Manager be offered as a standalone solution for CEPH users as well.
HyperDrive hardware appliances are storage media boxes that offer extremely low-power storage for CEPH. Their appliances range from high density (120TB/1U) to high performance NVMe SSDs (26TB/1U) to just about everything in between. On their website, I count 8 different storage appliance offerings with various spinning disk, hybrid (disk-SSD), SATA and NVMe SSDs (SSD only) systems.
SoftIron designs, develops and manufacturers all their own appliance hardware. Manufacturing is entirely in the US and design and development takes place in the US and Europe only. This provides a secure provenance for HyperDrive appliances that other storage companies can only dream about. Defense, intelligence and other security conscious organizations/industries are increasingly concerned about where electronic systems come from and want assurances that there are no security compromises inside them. SoftIron puts this concern to rest.
Yes they use CPUs, DRAMs and other standardized chips as well as storage media manufactured by others, but SoftIron has have gone out of their way to source all of these other parts and media from secure, trusted suppliers.
All other major storage companies use storage servers, shelves and media that come from anywhere, usually sourced from manufacturers anywhere in the world.
Moreover, such off the shelf hardware usually comes with added hardware that increases cost and complexity, such as graphics memory/interfaces, Cables, over configured power supplies, etc., but aren’t required for storage. Phil mentioned that each HyperDrive appliance has been reduced to just what’s required to support their CEPH storage appliance.
Each appliance has 6Tbps network that connects all the components, which means no cabling in the box. Also, each storage appliance has CPUs matched to its performance requirements, for low performance appliances – ARM cores, for high performance appliances – AMD EPYC CPUs. All HyperDrive appliances support wire speed IO, i.e, if a box is configured to support 1GbE or 100GbE, it transfers data at that speed, across all ports connected to it.
Because of their minimalist hardware design approach, HyperDrive appliances run much cooler and use less power than other storage appliances. They only consume 100W or 200W for high performance storage per appliance, where most other storage systems come in at around 1500W or more.
In fact, SoftIron HyperDrive boxes run so cold, that they don’t need fans for CPUs, they just redirect air flom from storage media over CPUs. And running colder, improves reliability of disk and SSD drives. Phil said they are seeing field results that are 2X better reliability than the drives normally see in the field.
They also offer a HyperDrive Storage Router that provides a NFS/SMB/iSCSI gateway to CEPH. With their Storage Router, customers using VMware, HyperV and other systems that depend on NFS/SMB/iSCSI for storage can just plug and play with SoftIron CEPH storage. With the Storage Router, the only storage interface HyperDrive appliances can’t support is FC.
Although we didn’t discuss this on the podcast, in addition to HyperDrive CEPH storage appliances, SoftIron also provides HyperCast, transcoding hardware designed for real time transcoding of one or more video streams and HyperSwitch networking hardware, which supplies a secure provenance, SONiC (Software for Open Networking in [the Azure] Cloud) SDN switch for 1GbE up to 100GbE networks.
Standing up PB of (CEPH) storage should always be this easy.
Phil Straw, Co-founder & CEO SoftIron
The technical visionary co-founder behind SoftIron, Phil Straw initially served as the company’s CTO before stepping into the role as CEO.
Previously Phil served as CEO of Heliox Technologies, co-founder and CTO of dotFX, VP of Engineering at Securify and worked in both technical and product roles at both Cisco and 3Com.
Phil holds a degree in Computer Science from UMIST.
