Category: Hyper converged

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148: GreyBeards talk software defined infrastructure with Anthony Cinelli and Brian Dean, Dell PowerFlex

Sponsored By:

This is one of a series of podcasts the GreyBeards are doing with Dell PowerFlex software defined infrastructure. Today, we talked with Anthony Cinelli, Sr. Director Dell Technologies and Brian Dean, Technical Marketing for PowerFlex. We have talked with Brian before but this is the first time we’ve met Anthony. They were both very knowledgeable about PowerFlex and the challenges large enterprises have today with their storage environments.

The key to PowerFlex’s software defined solution is its extreme flexibility, which comes mainly from its architecture which offers scale-out deployment options ranging from HCI solutions to a fully disaggregated compute-storage environment, in seemingly any combination (see technical resources for more info). With this sophistication, PowerFlex can help consolidate enterprise storage across just about any environment from virtualized workloads, to standalone databases, big data analytics, as well as containerized environments and of course, the cloud. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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To support this extreme flexibility, PowerFlex uses both client and storage software that can be configured together on a server (HCI) or apart, across compute and storage nodes to offer block storage. PowerFlex client software runs on any modern bare-metal or virtualized environment.

Anthony mentioned that one common problem to enterprises today is storage sprawl. Most large customers have an IT environment with sizable hypervisor based workloads, a dedicated database workload, a big data/analytics workload, a modern container based workload stack, an AI/ML/DL workload and more often than not, a vertical specific workload.

Each workload usually has their own storage system. And the problem with 4-7 different storage systems is cost, e.g., cost of underutilized storage. Typical to these environments, each storage system could be used at say, 60% utilization on average, but this will vary a lot between silos, leading to stranded capacity.

The main reason customers haven’t consolidated yet is because each silo has different performance characteristics. As a result, they end up purchasing excess capacity which increases cost and complexity, as a standard part of doing business.

To consolidate storage across these disparate environments requires a no-holds barred approach to IO performance, second to none, which PowerFlex can deliver. The secret to to its high levels of IO performance is RAID 10, deployed across a scale-out cluster. And PowerFlex clusters can range from 4 to 1000 or more nodes.

RAIID 10 mirrors data and spreads mirrored data across all drives and servers in a cluster or some subset. As a result, as you add storage nodes, IO performance scales up, almost linearly.

Yes, there can be other bottlenecks in clusters like this, most often networking, but with PowerFlex storage, IO need not be one of them. Anthony mentioned that PowerFlex will perform as fast as your infrastructure will support. So if your environment has 25 Gig Ethernet, it will perform IO at that speed, if you use 100 Gig Ethernet, it will perform at that speed.

In addition, PowerFlex offers automated LifeCycle Management (LCM), which can make having a 1000 node PowerFlex cluster almost as easy as a 10 node cluster. However to make use this automated LCM, one must run its storage server software on Dell PowerEdge servers.

Brian said adding or decommissioning PowerFlex nodes is a painless process. Because data is always mirrored, customers can remove any node, at any time and PowerFlex will automatically rebuild data across other nodes and drives. When you add nodes, those drives become immediately available to support more IO activity. Another item to note, because of RAID 10, PowerFlex mirror rebuilds happen very fast, as just about every other drive and node in the cluster (or subset) participates in the rebuild process.

PowerFlex supports Storage Pools. This partitions PowerFlex storage nodes and devices into multiple pools of storage used to host volume IO and data Storage pools can be used to segregate higher performing storage nodes from lower performing ones so that some volumes can exclusively reside on higher (or lower) performing hardware.

Although customers can configure PowerFlex to use all nodes and drives in a system or storage pool for volume data mirroring, PowerFlex offers other data placement alternatives to support high availability.

PowerFlex supports Protection Domains which are subsets or collections of storage servers and drives in a cluster where volume data will reside. This will allow one protection domain to go down while others continue to operate. Realize that because volume data is mirrored across all devices in a protection domain, it will take lots of nodes or devices to go down before a protection domain is out of action.

PowerFlex also uses Fault Sets, which are a collection of storage servers and their devices within a Protection Domain, that will contain one half of a volume’s data mirror. PowerFlex will insure that a primary and its mirror copy of volume’s data will not both reside on the same fault set. A fault set could be a rack of servers, multiple racks, all PowerFlex storage servers in an AZ, etc. With fault sets, customer data will always reside across a minimum of two fault sets, and if any one goes down, data is still available.

PowerFlex also operates in the cloud. In this case, customers bring their own PowerFlex software and deploy it over cloud compute and storage.

Brian mentioned that anything PowerFlex can do such as reconfiguring servers, can be done through RESTful/API calls. This can be particularly useful in cloud deployments as above, if customers want to scale up or down IO performance automatically.

Besides block services, PowerFlex also offers NFS/CIFS-SMB native file services using a File Node Controller. This frontends PowerFlex storage nodes to support customer NFS/SMB file access to PowerFlex data.

Anthony Cinelli, Sr. Director Global PowerFlex Software Defined & MultiCloud Solutions

Anthony Cinelli is a key leader for Dell Technologies helping drive the success of our software defined and multicloud solutions portfolio across the customer landscape. Anthony has been with Dell for 13 years and in that time has helped launch our HCI and Software Defined businesses from startup to the multi-billion dollar lines of business they now represent for Dell.

Anthony has a wealth of experience helping some of the largest organizations in the world achieve their IT transformation and multicloud initiatives through the use of software defined technologies.

Brian Dean, Dell PowerFlex Technical Marketing

Brian is a 16+ year veteran of the technology industry, and before that spent a decade in higher education. Brian has worked at EMC and Dell for 7 years, first as Solutions Architect and then as TME, focusing primarily on PowerFlex and software-defined storage ecosystems.

Prior to joining EMC, Brian was on the consumer/buyer side of large storage systems, directing operations for two Internet-based digital video surveillance startups.

When he’s not wrestling with computer systems, he might be found hiking and climbing in the mountains of North Carolina.

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141: GreyBeards annual 2022 wrap-up podcast

Well it has been another year and time for our annual year end wrap up. Since Covid hit, every year has certainly been interesting. This year we have seen the start of back in person conferences which was a welcome change from the covid lockdown. We are very glad to start seeing everybody again.

From the tech standpoint, the big news this year was CXL. As everyone should recall, CXL is a new-ish PCIe hardware and protocol that supports larger memory sitting out on a PCIe bus and in the future shared memory between servers. All this is to enable a new wave of memory based computing. We spent probably half our time discussing CXL and it’s impact on IT.

The other major topic was the Cloud Native ecosystem. In the past all we talked about was K8s but nowadays the ecosystem that surrounds it is almost as important as K8s itself. The final topic was a bit of a shock earlier this year and yes it was the Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Jason and I spend our Explore podcast talking about it (see our 137: VMware Explore wrap-up). Keith has high hopes that the EU will shut it down but the jury’s still out on that one. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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As for CXL, it turns out that AMD have just released full support for CXL hardware and protocols with their latest round of CPU chips. But the new AMD CPUs only support DDR5 memory, (something about there’s only so much logic one can fit on a chip…) which means all those DDR4 DIMs out in the wild need somewhere to land. CXL could supply a new lease on life for DDR4 DIMs.

And it’s not just about shared memory or increased memory sizes, CXL can also provide a tiered memory hierarchy, with gobs of flash behind memory DIMs (see: 136: FMS2022 wrap up …) So, now its no longer a TB or ten of server memory but potentially 100s of TBs. What this means for SAP HANNA, AWS Aurora and other heavy-memory solutions has yet to play out.

Cloud Native won. We see this in the increasing adoption of containers and K8s in the enterprise, cloud and just about anywhere IT happens these days. But the ecosystem surrounding K8s is chaos.

Over time, many of these ecosystem solutions will die off, be purchased, or consolidated but in the mean time, it’s entirely too confusing. Red Hat’s OpenShift is one answer and VMware’s Tanzu is another. And of course all the clouds have their own K8s packaged solution. But just to cover their bets, everyone also supports native K8s and just about every software package that works with it. So, K8s’s ecosystem is in a state of flux and may take time to become a stable set of tools useable by the enterprise IT.

Finally, Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has everyone up in arms. Customers are concerned the R&D juggernaut that VMware has been, since its very beginning, will be jettisoned in favor of profits. And HCI vendors that always felt Dell EMC had an unfair advantage will all look at Broadcom in a similar light.

Keith says there’s a major difference in how USA regulators view an acquisition and how EU regulators view one. According to Keith, EU views acquisitions in how they help or hurt the customer. USA regulators view acquisitions on show they help or hurt the competition. Will have to wait and see how this all plays for Broadcom-VMware.

On the other hand, speaking of competition, Nutanix seems to be feeling the heat as well. Rumors are it’s up for sale. Who will want it and how the regulators view both of these acquisitions may be as interesting story for 2023

2023 looks to be another year of transition for enterprise IT. The cloud players all seem to be coming around to the view that they can’t be all things to all (IT) people. And the enterprise vendors are finally seeing some modicum of staying power in the face of a relentless push to the cloud. How this plays out over the next few years will be of major interest to everybody.

Happy New Year from the GreyBeards!

Keith Townsend, The CTO Advisor

Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) is a IT thought leader who has written articles for many industry publications, interviewed many industry heavyweights, worked with Silicon Valley startups, and engineered cloud infrastructure for large government organizations. Keith is the co-founder of The CTO Advisor, blogs at Virtualized Geek, and can be found on LinkedIN.

Jason Collier, Principal Member of Technical Staff, 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.

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107: GreyBeards talk MinIO’s support of VMware’s new Data Persistence Platform with AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO

Sponsored by:

The GreyBeards have talked with Anand Babu (AB) Periasamy (@ABPeriasamy), CEO MinIO, before (see 097: GreyBeards talk open source S3… episode). And we also saw him earlier this year, at their headquarters for Storage Field Day 19 (SFD19) where AB gave a great discussion of what they were doing and how it worked (see MinIO’s SFD18 presentation videos).

The podcast runs ~26 minutes. AB is very technically astute and always a delight to talk with. He’s extremely knowledgeable about the cloud, containerized applications and high performing S3 compatible object storage. And now with MinIO and vSAN Data Persistence under VCF Tanzu, very knowledgeable about the virtualized IT environment as well. Listen to the podcast to learn more. [We’re trying out a new format placing the podcast up front. Let us know what you think; The Eds.]

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VMware VCF vSAN Data Persistence Platform with MinIO

Earlier this month VMware announced a new capability available with the next updates of vSAN, vSphere & VCF called the vSAN Data Persistence Platform. The Data Persistence Platform is a VMware framework designed to integrate stateful, independent vendor software defined storage services in vSphere. By doing so, VCF can provide API access to persistent storage services for containerized applications running under Tanzu Kubernetes (k8s) Grid service clusters.

At the announcement, VMware identified three object storage and one (Cassandra) database technical partners that had been integrated with the solution.  MinIO was an object storage, open source partner.

VMware’s VCF vSAN Data Persistence framework allows vCenter administrators to use vSphere cluster infrastructure to configure and deploy these new stateful storage services, like MinIO, into namespaces and enables app developers direct k8s API access to these storage namespaces to provide persistent, stateful object storage for applications. 

With VCF Tanzu and the vSAN Data Persistence Platform using MinIO, dev can have full support for their CiCd pipeline using native k8s tools to deploy and scale containerized apps on prem, in the public cloud and in hybrid cloud, all using VCF vSphere.

MinIO on the Data Persistence Platform

AB said MinIO with Data Persistence takes advantage of a new capability called vSAN Direct which gives vSAN almost JBOF types of IO control and performance. With MinIO vSAN Direct, storage and k8s cluster applications can co-reside on the same ESX node hardware so that IO activity doesn’t have to hop off host to be performed. In addition, can now populate ESX server nodes with lots (100s to 1000s?) of storage devices and be assured the storage will be used by applications running on that host.

As a result, MinIO’s object storage IO performance on VCF Tanzu is very good due to its use of vSAN Direct and MinIO’s inherent superior IO performance for S3 compatible object storage.

With MinIO on the VCF vSAN Data Persistence Platform, VMware takes over all the work of deploying MinIO software services on the VCF cluster. This way customers can take advantage of MiniO’s fully compatible S3 object storage system operating in their VCF cluster. For app developers they get the best of all worlds, infrastructure configured, deployed and managed by admins but completely controllable, scaleable and accessible through k8s API services.

If developers want to take advantage of MinIO specialized services such as data security or replication, they can do so directly using MinIOs APIs, just like they would when operating bare metal or in the cloud.

AB said the VMware development team was very responsive during development of Data Persistence. AB was surprised to see such a big company, like VMware, operate with almost startup like responsiveness. Keith mentioned he’s seen this in action as vSAN has matured very rapidly to a point of almost feature parity, with just about any storage system out there today .

With MinIO object storage, container applications that need PB of data, now have a home on VCF Tanzu. And it’s as easily usable as any public cloud storage. And with VCF Tanzu configuring and deploying the storage over its own infrastructure, and then having it all managed and administered by vCenter admins, its simple to create and use PB of object storage.

MinIO is already the most popular S3 compatible object storage provider for applications running in the cloud and on prem. And VMware is easily the most popular virtualization platform on the planet. Now with the two together on VCF Tanzu, there seems to be nothing in the way of conquering containerized applications running in IT as well.

With that, MinIO is available everywhere containers want to run, natively available in the cloud, on prem and hybrid cloud or running with VCF Tanzu everywhere as well.

AB Periasamy, CEO MinIO

AB Periasamy is the CEO and co-founder of MinIO. One of the leading thinkers and technologists in the open source software movement,

AB was a co-founder and CTO of GlusterFS which was acquired by RedHat in 2011. Following the acquisition, he served in the office of the CTO at RedHat prior to founding MinIO in late 2015.

AB is an active angel investor and serves on the board of H2O.ai and the Free Software Foundation of India.

He earned his BE in Computer Science and Engineering from Annamalai University.

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78: GreyBeards YE2018 IT industry wrap-up podcast

In this, our yearend industry wrap up episode, we discuss trends and technology impacting the IT industry in 2018 and what we can see ahead for 2019 and first up is NVMeoF

NVMeoF has matured

In the prior years, NVMeoF was coming from startups, but last year it’s major vendors like IBM FlashSystem, Dell EMC PowerMAX and NetApp AFF releasing new NVMeoF storage systems. Pure Storage was arguably earliest with their NVMeoF JBOF.

Dell EMC, IBM and NetApp were not far behind this curve and no doubt see it as an easy way to reduce response time without having to rip and replace enterprise fabric infrastructure.

In addition, NVMeoFstandards have finally started to stabilize. With the gang of startups, standards weren’t as much of an issue as they were more than willing to lead, ahead of standards. But major storage vendors prefer to follow behind standards committees.

As another example, VMware showed off an NVMeoF JBOF for vSAN. A JBoF like this improves vSAN storage efficiency for small clusters. Howard described how this works but with vSAN having direct access to shared storage, it can reduce data and server protection requirements for storage. Especially, when dealing with small clusters of servers becoming more popular these days to host application clusters.

The other thing about NVMeoF storage is that NVMe SSDs have also become very popular. We are seeing them come out in everyone’s servers and storage systems. Servers (and storage systems) hosting 24 NVMe SSDs is just not that unusual anymore. For the price of a PCIe switch, one can have blazingly fast, direct access to a TBs of NVMe SSD storage.

HCI reaches critical mass

HCI has also moved out of the shadows. We recently heard news thet HCI is outselling CI. Howard and I attribute this to the advances made in VMware’s vSAN 6.2 and the appliance-ification of HCI. That and we suppose NVMe SSDs (see above).

HCI makes an awful lot of sense for application clusters that VMware is touting these days. CI was easy but an HCI appliance cluster is much, simpler to deploy and manage

For VMware HCI, vSAN Ready Nodes are available from just about any server vendor in existence. With ready nodes, VARs and distributors can offer an HCI appliance in the channel, just like the majors. Yes, it’s not the same as a vendor supplied appliance, doesn’t have the same level of software or service integration, but it’s enough.

[If you want to learn more, Howard’s is doing a series of deep dive webinars/classes on HCI as part of his friend’s Ivan’s ipSpace.net. The 1st 2hr session was recorded 11 December, part 2 goes live 22 January, and the final installment on 5 February. The 1st session is available on demand to subscribers. Sign up here]

Computional storage finally makes sense

Howard and I 1st saw computational storage at FMS18 and we did a podcast with Scott Shadley of NGD systems. Computational storage is an SSD with spare ARM cores and DRAM that can be used to run any storage intensive, Linux application or Docker container.

Because it’s running in the SSD, it has (even faster than NVMe) lightening fast access to all the data on the SSD. Indeed, And the with 10s to 1000s of computational storage SSDs in a rack, each with multiple ARM cores, means you can have many 1000s of cores available to perform your data intensive processing. Almost like GPUs only for IO access to storage (SPUs?).

We tried this at one vendor in the 90s, executing some database and backup services outboard but it never took off. Then in the last couple of years (Dell) EMC had some VM services that you could run on their midrange systems. But that didn’t seem to take off either.

The computational storage we’ve seen all run Linux. And with todays data intensive applications coming from everywhere these days, and all the spare processing power in SSDs, it might finally make sense.

Futures

Finally, we turned to what we see coming in 2019. Howard was at an Intel Analyst event where they discussed Optane DIMMs. Our last podcast of 2018 was with Brian Bulkowski of Aerospike who discussed what Optane DIMMs will mean for high performance database systems and just about any memory intensive server application. For example, affordable, 6TB memory servers will be coming out shortly. What you can do with 6TB of memory is another question….

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Howard Marks, Founder and Chief Scientist, DeepStorage

Howard Marks is the Founder and Chief Scientist of DeepStorage, a prominent blogger at Deep Storage Blog and can be found on twitter @DeepStorageNet.

Raymond Lucchesi, Founder and President, Silverton Consulting

Ray Lucchesi is the President and Founder of Silverton Consulting, a prominent blogger at RayOnStorage.com, and can be found on twitter @RayLucchesi. Signup for SCI’s free, monthly e-newsletter here.

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73: GreyBeards talk HCI with Gabriel Chapman, Sr. Mgr. Cloud Infrastructure NetApp

Sponsored by: NetApp

In this episode we talk HCI  with Gabriel Chapman (@Bacon_Is_King), Senior Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, NetApp. Gabriel presented at the NetApp Insight 2018 TechFieldDay Extra (TFDx) event (video available here). Gabriel also presented last year at the VMworld 2017 TFDx event (video available here). If you get a chance we encourage you to watch the videos as Gabriel, did a great job providing some design intent and descriptions of NetApp HCI capabilities. Our podcast was recorded after the TFDx event.

NetApp HCI consists of NetApp Solidfire storage re-configured, as a small enterprise class AFA storage node occupying one blade of a four blade system, where the other three blades are dedicated compute servers. NetApp HCI runs VMware vSphere but uses enterprise class iSCSI storage supplied by the NetApp SolidFire AFA.

On our podcast, we talked a bit about SolidFire storage. It’s not well known but the 1st few releases of SolidFire (before NetApp acquisition) didn’t have a GUI and was entirely dependent on its API/CLI for operations. That heritage continues today as NetApp HCI management console is basically a front end GUI for NetApp HCI API calls.

Another advantage of SolidFire storage was it’s extensive QoS support which included state of the art service credits as well as service limits.  All that QoS sophistication is also available in NetApp HCI, so that customers can more effectively limit noisy neighbor interference on HCI storage.

Although NetApp HCI runs VMware vSphere as its preferred hypervisor, it’s also possible to run other hypervisors in bare metal clusters with NetApp HCI storage and compute servers. In contrast to other HCI solutions, with NetApp HCI, customers can run different hypervisors, all at the same time, sharing access to NetApp HCI storage.

On our podcast and the Insight TFDx talk, Gabriel mentioned some future deliveries and roadmap items such as:

  • Extending NetApp HCI hardware with a new low-end, 2U configuration designed specifically for RoBo and SMB customers;.
  • Adding NetApp Cloud Volume support so that customers can extend their data fabric out to NetApp HCI; and
  • Adding (NFS) file services support so that customers using NFS data stores /VVols could take advantage of NetApp HCI storage.

Another thing we discussed was the new development HCI cadence. In the past they typically delivered new functionality about 1/year. But with the new development cycle,  they’re able to deliver functionality much faster but have settled onto a 2 releases/year cycle, which seems about as quickly as their customer base can adopt new functionality.

The podcast runs ~22 minutes. We apologize for any quality issues with the audio. It was recorded at the show and we were novices with the onsite recording technology. We promise to do better in the future. Gabriel has almost become a TFDx regular these days and provides a lot of insight on both NetApp HCI and SolidFire storage.  Listen to our podcast to learn more.

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Gabriel Chapman, Senior Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, NetApp

Gabriel is the Senior Manager for NetApp HCI Go to Market. Today he is mainly engaged with NetApp’s top tier customers and partners with a primary focus on Hyper Converged Infrastructure for the Next Generation Data Center.

As a 7 time vExpert that transitioned into the vendor side after spending 15 years working in the end user Information Technology arena, Gabriel specializes in storage and virtualization technologies. Today his primary area of expertise revolves around storage, data center virtualization, hyper-converged infrastructure, rack scale/hyper scale computing, cloud, DevOps, and enterprise infrastructure design.

Gabriel is a Prime Mover, Technologist, Unapologetic Randian, Social Media Junky, Writer, Bacon Lover, and Deep Thinker, whose goal is to speak truth on technology and make complex ideas sound simple. In his free time, Gabriel is the host of the In Tech We Trust podcast and enjoys blogging as well as public speaking.

Prior to joining SolidFire, Gabriel was a storage technologies specialist covering the United States with Cisco, focused on the Global Service Provider customer base. Before Cisco, he was part of the go-to-market team at SimpliVity, where he concentrated on crafting the customer facing messaging, pre-sales engagement, and evangelism efforts for the early adopters of Hyper Converged Infrastructure.