Category: Containers

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140: Greybeards talk data orchestration with Matt Leib, Product Marketing Manager for IBM Spectrum Fusion

As our listeners should know, Matt Leib (@MBleib) was a GreyBeards co-host But since then, Matt has joined IBM to become Product Marketing Manager on IBM Spectrum Fusion, a data orchestration solution for Red Hat OpenShift environments. Matt’s been in and around the storage and data management industry for many years which is why we tapped him for GreyBeards co-host duties.

IBM Fusion, in its previous incarnation, came as an OpenShift software defined storage or as an OpenShift (H)CI solution. But recently, Fusion has taken on more of a data orchestration role for OpenShift stateful containerized applications. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Fusion can run in any OpenShift deployment whether (currently AWS, Azure, & IBM) clouds, under VMware (wherever it runs), or on (x86 or IBM Z) bare metal. It supplies NFS file or S3 compatible object storage for container applications running under OpenShift. But it does more than just storage.

Beyond storage, Fusion includes backup/recovery, site to site DR and global (file & object) data access. It’s almost like someone opened up the IBM Spectrum software pantry and took out the best available functionality and cooked it up in to an OpenShift solution. IBM’s Spectrum Fusion current website (linked to above (Dec.’22)) still refers only to the software defined storage and (H)CI solution, but today’s Fusion includes all of the functions identified above.

All Fusion facilities run as containers under OpenShift. Customers can elect to run all Fusion services or pick and chose which ones they want for their environment. IBM Fusion supports an API, an API backed GUI, and CLI for its storage & data management as well as REST access. Fusion is fully compatible with Red Hat Ansible.

IBM Fusion is intended to be storage agnostic. Which means it can support its data management services for any NFS file storage as well as anyone’s S3 compatible, object storage.

Now that Red Hat software defined CEPH and ODF are under IBM product management, CEPH and ODF options will become available under Fusion. And CEPH offers block as well as file and object. We’ve talked about CEPH before, packaged in a hardware appliance, see our SoftIron podcast.

One intriguing part of the Fusion solution is its global data access. With global access, any OpenShift application can access data from any Fusion data store, across clouds, across on prem installations, or just about anywhere OpenShift is running. Matt mentioned that compute could be on AWS OpenShift, Fusion’s data control plane could be running on prem OpenShift and the data storage could be running on Azure OpenShift. All this would be glued together by Fusion global access, so that AWS compute had access to data on Azure.

There’s some sophisticated caching magic to make global access happen seamlessly and with decent levels of performance, but customers no longer have to copy whole file systems over from one cloud to another in order to move compute or data. IBM Fusion would need to run in all those locations for global access.

Keith asked if it was directly available in the AWS marketplace. Matt said not yet but you can deploy OpenShift out of the marketplace and then deploy IBM Fusion onto that.

It took us sometime to get our heads wrapped around what Fusion has to offer and throughout it all, Keith and I had a bit of fun with Matt.

Matthew Leib, Product Marketing Manager, IBM Spectrum Fusion

Matt has spent years in IT, from Engineering, to Architecture, from PreSales to analyst work, and finally to Product Marketing at IBM.

He’s spent years trying to achieve both credibility in the space, as a podcaster, blogger, and community member.

In his spare time, he’s a dad, dog owner, and amateur guitar player..

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138: GreyBeards talk big data orchestration with Adit Madan, Dir. of Product, Alluxio

We have never talked with Alluxio before but after coming back last week from Cloud Field Day 15 (CFD15) it seemed a good time to talk with other solution providers attempting to make hybrid cloud easier to use. Adit Madan (@madanadit) , Director of Product Management, Alluxio, which is a data orchestration solution that’s available in both a free to download/use, open source, community edition (apparently, Meta is a customer ) or a licensed, closed source, enterprise edition.

Alluxio data orchestration is all about suppling local like, IO access to data that resides elsewhere for BI, AI/ML/DL, and just about any other application needing to process data residing elsewhere. Listen to the podcast to learn more

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Alluxio started out at UC Berkeley’s AMPlab, which is focused on big data problems and was designed to provide local access to massive amounts of distributed data. Alluxio ends up constructing a locally accessible, federation of data sources for compute apps running elsewhere,

Alluxio software installs near where compute apps run that need access to remote data. We asked about a typical cloud bursting case where S3 object data needed by an app are sitting on prem, but the apps need to run in a cloud, e.g., AWS.

He said Alluxio software would be deployed in AWS, close to app compute and that’s all there is. There’s no Alluxio software running on prem, as Alluxio just uses normal (remote access) S3 APIs to supply data to the compute apps running in AWS.

Adit mentioned that BI was one of the main applications to take advantage of Alluxio, but AI/ML/DL learning is another that could use data orchestration. It turns out that AI/ ML/DL training’s consumption of data is repetitive and highly sequential, so caching, sequential pre-fetch and other Alluxio techniques can work well there to provide local-like access to remote data.

Adit said that enterprises are increasingly looking to avoid vendor lock-in and this applies equally well to the cloud. By supporting data access in one location, say GC,P and accessing that data from another, say Azure, data gravity need no longer limit where work is done.

Adit said what makes their solution so valuable is that instead of duplicating all data from one place to another all that Alluxio moves is just the data required/requested by the apps running there.

Keith asked whether Adit considered Alluxio a data mesh or data fabric. Keith had to explain the terms to me and said data fabrics are pipes and physical infrastructure/functionality that moves data around and data mesh is what gives clients/apps/users access to that data. From that perspective Alluxio is a data mesh.

Alluxio Caching

Adit said that caching is one of the keys to making Alluxio work. Much of the success of their solution depends on applications having a well behaved working set. He also mentioned they use pre-fetching and other techniques to minimize access latency and maximize throughput. However, the first byte of data being accessed may take some time to get to where compute executes.

Adit said it’s not unusual for them to have a 1/2PB of cache (storage) for an application with multiPBs of source data.

Keith asked how Alluxio’s performance can be managed. Adit said they (we assume enterprise edition) have a solution called Cache Insights which uses Alluxio’s extensive access pattern history to predict application IO performance with larger cache (storage), higher speed networking, higher performing/more compute cores, etc. In this way, customers can see what can be done to improve application IO performance and what it would cost.

Keith asked if Alluxio were available as a SaaS solution. Adit said, although it could be deployed in that fashion, it’s not currently a SaaS solution. When asked how Alluxio (enterprise) was priced, Adit said it’s a function of the total resources consumed by their service, i.e, storage (cache), cores, networking that runs Alluxio software etc.

As for deployment options, it turns out for Spark, Alluxio is just another lib package installed inside Spark. For K8s, Alluxio is installed as a CSI drivers and a set of containers and can be deployed as containers within a cluster that needs access to data or in an external, standalone K8s cluster, servicing IO from other clusters. Alluxio HA is supplied by using multiple nodes to provide IO access.

Alluxio also supports access to multiple data locations. In this case, the applications would just access different mount points.

Data reads are easy, writes can be harder due to data integrity issues. As such, trying to supply IO performance becomes a trade off for data integrity when data updates are supported. Adit said Alluxio offers a couple of different configuration options for write concurrency (data integrity) that customers can select from. We assume this includes write through, write back and perhaps other write consistency options.

Alluxio supports AWS, Azure and GCP cloud compute accessing HDFS, S3 and Posix protocol access to data residing at remote sites. At remote sites, they currently support MinIO, Cloudian and any other S3 compatible storage solutions as well as NetApp (ONTAP) and Dell (ECS) storage as data sources.

Adit Madan, Director of Product, Alluxio

Adit Madan is the Director of Product Management at Alluxio. Adit has extensive experience in distributed systems, storage systems, and large-scale data analytics.

Adit holds an MS from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS from the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi.

Adit is the Director of Product Management at Alluxio and is also a core maintainer and Project Management Committee (PMC) member of the Alluxio Open Source project.

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137: GreyBeards talk VMware Explore 2022 Wrap-up

Jason Collier Principle Member of Technical Staff, AMD (@bocanuts), a current GreyBeardsOnStorage co-host and I both attended VMware Explore 2022 this past week and we recorded a podcast discussing VMware’s announcements on the show floor. It turns out that Keith Townsend, TheCTOAdvisor (@thectoadvisor) had brought his Airstream &studio and was exhibiting on the show floor. Keith kindly offered the use of his studio to record the podcast.

This one is a video. Let us know what you think. I clearly need a cowboy hat and Jason said (off camera) that I’m showing more grey in my beard than before. I take that as a compliment here.

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Here’s the news as we saw it:

  • vSphere 8 – has a number of new features but the ones we thought important were the GA of Project Monterey. This supports new DPUs that now run ESXi out board from the CPU. They are able to offload lot’s of the CPU networking cycles to the DPU freeing up these for other (more important) work. vSphere 8 supports 2 DPUs now, the NVIDIA (Mellanox) BlueField(-2?) DPU and the AMD (Pensando) DPU. AMD recently purchased Pensando and Jason seemed to know an awful lot about this tech. VMware also announced support for concurrent ESXi upgrades which can now allow upgrading ESXi running in DPUs while hosts and clusters continue to operate. Finally, the other item of interest was vSphere is now more API driven. I guess it’s only a matter of time before all VMware functionality is API driven to make it even more cloud-like
  • vSAN 8 – also has a number of new features. The first we discussed was is a faster data path. This means more IOPS, more bandwidth and lower latency for IOs. Next, vSAN 8 now supports single tier storage pools . These will no longer require a caching layer. This should also speed up IO operations (as long as the single tier is at least as fast as the old caching layer). They also announced faster snapshots. Apparently this has been a problem in the past and they’ve done the work to speed this up considerably. Jason mentioned an AMD open source VM migration tool (from somebody else’s X86 CPUs to AMDs) that depends a lot on vSAN snapshots.
  • Cloud Flex Storage – mentioned at the show but not well explained, Jason and I speculated that this was an internal storage service available on for Cloud Foundation users on AWS where customers could subscribe to storage as-a-service in much lower increments (maybe even GB/month) than standing up more vSAN hosts to increase storage.
  • NetApp FsX (ONTAP) storage – along the same line, VMware announced support for NetApp’s FsX as yet another storage option for Cloud Foundation users on AWS. Supplying yet another storage-as-a-service option for this environment.
  • Cloud Flex Compute – also mentioned at the show was their new Compute-As-A-Service for Cloud Foundation users on AWS. This way users could subscribe to more or less compute, on an as needed basis rather than having to spin up new ESXi hosts. I later found out this allows users to run a single VM and pay for it on a subscription basis.
  • Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) – is a new VMware supplied (and supported) “development experience” for K8s on vSphere. Note, it doesn’t include any advanced Tanzu services such as Tanzu K8s Grid (TKG) so it’s a true DevOps bare bones environment.
  • Tanzu K8S Operations (TKO) – another new Tanzu based service which offers operations complete control over the Tanzu services running on vSphere. Note Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is not part of TKO.
  • Aria management – VMware rebranded vRealize and CloudHealth, which now comes in 3 bundles, Aria Cost (CloudHealth+), Aria Operations and Aria Automation. Which are all built onto of Aria Graph that graphs all the nodes in your VMware clusters with all their connections so that Aria management can traverse this graph to find out what’s where. On top of Aria Graph are Aria Hub, Aria Insights, and Aria Guardrails (sort of like providing boundary’s where services can be deployed).

They also announced Ransomware Recovery [changed 7Sep22, the Eds] as a Service which builds on VMware’s DR-aaS announced last year and Tanzu now works with Red Hat OpenShift

We also discussed the show. I heard somewhere there were 10K people there, Jason heard somewhere between 6K and 9K. In any case much smaller than VMworlds prior to Covid (25kish). And of course the rebranding of the show seemed counter-intuitive at best.

The show floor was much smaller than usual, (not withstanding Keith’s Airstream RV exhibit). And there were a number of storage vendors not at the show?? There was less hardware on the show floor, this could be a Covid thing but there were just as many mini-white boards/class rooms per large exhibiter, so don’t think it was because of Covid.

But the elephant in the room was Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. At one of the analyst briefings I asked an exec about attrition. He made a couple of comments but in the end said VMware has been bought and sold before and has always come out of it in better shape. This will be no different.

That’s about all from the show.

And Thanks again to Keith and his crew, for lending us his studio to record the show. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an RV on a show floor. Keith seemed to have a ball with it…

Tell us how you like our video. If everyone is for it we could do something like this with a Zoom (in this case Zencastr) recording, Or just try this at the next joint conference. .

Jason Collier, Principle Member of Technical Staff at AMD

Jason Collier (@bocanuts) is a long time friend, technical guru and innovator who has over 25 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur in technology.

He was founder and CTO of Scale Computing and has been an innovator in the field of hyperconvergence and an expert in virtualization, data storage, networking, cloud computing, data centers, and edge computing for years.

He’s on LinkedIN. He’s currently working with AMD on new technology and he has been a GreyBeards on Storage co-host since the beginning of 2022

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134: GreyBeards talk (storage) standards with Dr. J Metz, SNIA Chair & Technical Director AMD

We have known Dr. J Metz (@drjmetz, blog), Chair of SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) BoD, for over a decade now and he has always been an intelligent industry evangelist. DrJ was elected Chair of SNIA BoD in 2020.

SNIA has been instrumental in the evolution of storage over the years working to help define storage networking, storage form factors, storage protocols, etc. Over the years it’s been crucial to the high adoption of storage systems in the enterprise and still is.. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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SNIA started out helping to define and foster storage networking before people even knew what it was. They were early proponents of plugfests to verify/validate compatibility of all the hardware, software and systems in a storage network solution.

One principal that SNIA has upheld, since the very beginning, is strict vendor and technology neutrality. SNIA goes out of it’s way to insure that all their publications,  media and technical working group (TWGs) committees maintain strict vendors and technology neutrality.

The challenge with any evolving technology arena is that new capabilities come and go with a regular cadence and one cannot promote one without impacting another. Ditto for vendors, although vendors seem to stick around a bit longer.

One SNIA artifact that has stood well the test of time is the SNIA dictionary.  Free to download and free copies available at every conference that SNIA attends. The dictionary covers just about every relevant acronym, buzzword and technology present in the storage networking industry today as well as across its long history.

SNIA also presents and pushes the storage networking point of view at every technical alliance in the IT industry. .

In addition, SNIA holds storage conferences around the world, as well as plugfests and  hackathons focused on the needs of the storage industry. Their Storage Developer Conference (SDC), coming up in September in the USA, is a highly technical conference specifically targeted at storage system developers. 

SDC presenters include many technology inventors driving the leading edge of storage (and memory, see below) industries. So, if you are developing storage systems, SDC is a must attend conference.

As for plugfests, SNIA has held FC storage networking plugfests over the years which have been instrumental in helping storage networking adoption.

We also talked about SNIA hackathons. Apparently a decade or so back, SNIA held a hackathon on SMB (the file protocol formerly known as CIFS) where most of the industry experts and partners doing work on SAMBA (open source SMB implementation) and SMB proprietary software were present.

At the time, Jason was working for another company, developing an SMB protocol. While attending the hackathon, Jason found that he was able to develop 1-1 relationships with many of the lead SMB/SAMBA developers and was able to solve problems in days that would have taken months before.

SNIA also has technology alliances with just about every other standards body involved in IT infrastructure, software and hardware today. As an indicator of where they are headed, SNIA recently joined with CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) to push for better storage under K8s.

SNIA has TWGs focused on technological areas that impact storage access. One TWG that has been going on now, for a long time, is Swordfish, an extension to the DMTF Redfish that focuses on managing storage.

Swordfish has struggled over the years to achieve industry adoption. We spent time discussing some of the issues with Swordfish, but honestly,  IMHO, it may be too late to change course.

Given the recent SNIA alliance with CNCF, we started discussing the state of storage under K8s and containers. DrJ and Jason mentioned that storage access under K8s goes through so many layers of abstraction that IO performance is almost smothered in overhead. The thinking at SNIA is we need to come up with a better API that bypasses all this software overhead to  directly access hardware.

 SNIA’s been working on SDXI (Smart Data Acceleration Interface), a new hardware memory to memory, direct path protocol. Apparently, this is a new byte level, (storage?) protocol for moving data between memories. I believe SDXI assumes that at least one memory device is shared. The other could be in a storage server, smartNIC, GPU, server, etc. If SDXI were running in your shared memory and server, one could use the API to strip away all of the software abstraction layers that have built up over the years to accessi shared memory at near hardware speeds

DrJ mentioned was NVMe as another protocol that strips away software abstractions to allow direct access to (storage) hardware. The performance of Optane and SSDs (and it turns out disks) was being smothered by SCSI device protocols/abstrations that were the only way to talk to storage devices in the past. But NVM and NVMe came along, and stripped all the non-essential abstractions and protocol overhead away and all of a sudden sub 100 microsecond IO’s were possible. 

Dr. J Metz,  SNIA Chair & Technical Director AMD

J is the Chair of SNIA’s (Storage Networking Industry Association) Board of Directors and Technical Director for Systems Design for AMD where he works to coordinate and lead strategy on various industry initiatives related to systems architecture. Recognized as a leading storage networking expert, J is an evangelist for all storage-related technology and has a unique ability to dissect and explain complex concepts and strategies. He is passionate about the innerworkings and application of emerging technologies.

J has previously held roles in both startups and Fortune 100 companies as a Field CTO,  R&D Engineer, Solutions Architect, and Systems Engineer. He has been a leader in several key industry standards groups, sitting on the Board of Directors for the SNIA, Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). A popular blogger and active on Twitter, his areas of expertise include NVMe, SANs, Fibre Channel, and computational storage.

J is an entertaining presenter and prolific writer. He has won multiple awards as a speaker and author, writing over 300 articles and giving presentations and webinars attended by over 10,000 people. He earned his PhD from the University of Georgia.

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131: GreyBeards talk native K8s data protection using Veritas NetBackup with Reneé Carlisle

The GreyBeards have been discussing K8s storage services a lot over the last year or so and it was time to understand how container apps and data could be protected. Recently, we saw an article about a Veritas funded survey, discussing the need for data protection in K8s. As such, it seemed a good time to have a talk with Reneé Carlisle (@VeritasTechLLC), Staff Product Manager for NetBackup (K8S), Veritas.

It turns out that Veritas NetBackup (NBU) has just released their 2nd version of K8s data protection. It’s gone completely (K8s) native. That is, Veritas have completely re-implemented all 3 tiers of NBU as K8s micro services. Moreover, the new release still supports all other NBU infrastructure implementations, such as bare metal or VM NBU primary server/media server services. It’s almost like you have all the data protection offered by NBU for the enterprise over the years, now also available for K8s container apps. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Veritas-22-04-transcriptDownload

To make use of NBU K8s, backup admins establish named gold, silver, bronze backup policies selecting frequency of backups, retention periods, backup storage, etc. Then DevOps would tag a namespace, pods, containers, or PVs with those data protection policy names. Once this is done, NBU K8S will start protecting that namespace, pod, container, or PV.

In addition, backup admins can include or exclude specific K8s namespace(s), pod(s), container(s), labels (tags), or PVs to be backed up with a specific policy. When that policy is triggered it will go out into the cluster to see if those K8s elements are active and start protecting them or excluding them from protection as requested.

NBU K8s has an Operator service, Data Mover services and other micro services that execute in the cluster. That is, at least one Operator service must be deployed in the cluster (recommended to be in a separate namespace but this is optional). The Operator service is the control plane for NBU K8S services. It will spin up data movers when needed and spin them down when done.

The Operator service supports a CLI but more importantly to DevOps, a complete implemented RESTful API service. Turns out the CLI is implemented ontop of the NBU (Operator) API. With the NBU API DevOps CI/CD tools or other automation can perform all the data protection services to protect K8s.

One historical issue with backup processing is that it can consume every ounce of network/storage and sometimes compute power in an environment. The enterprise class data movers (or maybe the Operator control plane) has various mechanisms to constrain or limit NBU K8S resource consumption so that this doesn’t become a problem.

But as the Operator and its Data Mover are just micro services, if there’s need for more throughput, more can be spun up or if there’s a need to reduce bandwidth, some of them can be spun down, all with no manual intervention whatsoever.

Furthermore, NBU K8s can be used to restore/recover PVs, containers, applications or namespaces to other, CNCF compliant K8s infrastructure. So, if you wanted to say, move your K8s namespace from AKS to GKE or onprem to RedHat OpenShift, it becomes a simple matter of moving the last NBU backup to the target environment, deploying NBU K8s in that environment and restoring the namespace.

NBU K8s can also operate in the cloud just as well as on prem and works in any CNCF compatible K8s environment which includes AKS, EKS, GKE, VMware Tanzu and OpenShift.

In the latest NBU K8s they implemented new, enterprise class Data Movers as micro services in order to more efficiently protect and recover K8S resources. Enterprise class Data Movers can perform virus-scanning/ransomware detection, encryption, data compression, and other services that enterprise customers have come to expect from NBU data protection.

NBU K8S accesses PV data, container, pod and namespace data and metadata using standard CSI storage provider and normal K8s API services.

As mentioned earlier, in the latest iteration of NBU K8s, they have completely implemented their NBU infrastructure, natively as containers. That adds, K8s auto-scaling, full CI/CD automation via APIs, to all the rest of NBU infrastructure operating completely in the K8s cluster.

So, now backup admins can run NBU completely in K8s or run just the Operator and its data mover services connecting to other NBU infrastructure (primary server and media servers) executing elsewhere in the data center.

NBU K8s supports all the various, disk, dedicated backup appliances, object/cloud storage or other backup media options that NBU uses. So that means you can store your K8s backup data on the cloud, in secondary storage appliances, or anyplace else that’s supported by NBU.

Licensing for NBU K8s follows the currently available Veritas licensing such as front end TB protected, subscription and term licensing options are available.

Reneé Carlisle, Staff Product Manager, Veritas NetBackup (K8S)

Reneé (LinkedIn) has been with Veritas Technologies for eleven years in various focus areas within the NetBackup Product Management Team.  In her current role she is the Product Manager responsible for the NetBackup strategic direction of Modern Platforms including Kubernetes and OpenStack.   She has a significant technical background into many of the NetBackup features including Kubernetes, virtualization, Accelerator, and cloud.  

Prior to working for Veritas, she was a customer running a large-scale NetBackup operation as well as a partner implementing, designing, and integrating NetBackup in many different companies.