Category: File storage

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098: GreyBeards talk data protection & visualization for massive unstructured data repositories with Christian Smith, VP Product at Igneous

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Even before COVID-19 there was a lot of file data being created and mined, but with the advent of the pandemic, this has accelerated considerably. As such, it seemed an appropriate time to talk with Christian Smith, VP of Product at Igneous, (@IgneousIO) a company that targets the protection and visibility of massive quantities of unstructured data, on premise, in the cloud, or just about anywhere else it may live.

Let me state at the outset, that my belief had always been, that you don’t backup 10PB of data, rather you bite the (big expense) bullet to replicate it and hope for the best. After talking with Christian and Igneous I am going to have to modify that belief by a couple of more orders of magnitude.

All this data is coming from: LIDAR, RADAR, audio, video, pictures, medical film, MRI/CAT Scans, etc., and as noted above, it’s exploding. Christian talked about one customer of theirs that supplies aerial photography/LIDAR/RADAR scans of areas on request. This can used to better understand crop, forest, wildlife, land health and use. One surprise Igneous found with this customer is that the data is typically archived after first use, but within a month or so it’s moved back online for some other purpose.

Igneous heritage

Many of the people who started up and currently work at Igneous have been around file storage for some time having, primarily coming from (Dell EMC) Isilon, NetApp, Qumulo and other industry heavyweights. When they started Igneous, they realized the world didn’t need another NAS box or file system. Rather, with the advent of 10-100PB unstructured data farms, what was needed was an effective way to protect and understand that data.

When they considered how to protect and visualize 100PB of unstructured data, the only they found to do this was to build a scale-out solution that used on premise and cloud infrastructure and was offered as a service.

Igneous DataProtect solution

With 10PB or 100PB of files, located across a gaggle of heterogeneous file servers, with billions of files across ~100s of servers, each of with has ~1K or more file shares, just scanning all the file servers would take weeks, if not longer and then you need to move the data someplace to protect it. Seems like an impossible task.

Igneous immediately figured out the first thing they needed was a radically new, scale out architecture to rapidly scan of the file servers. Thus was born ActiveScan. Christian said it was designed to scan a trillion files and they have customers with a billion files using their service today. ActiveScan doesn’t use NFS/SMB/Object (S3) access protocols to talk with file servers rather it uses internal APIs to access file metadata. DataProtect currently supports APIs for NetApp, Dell EMC Isilon, Pure FlashBlade, Qumulo, Gluster, Lustre, & GPFS (IBM Spectrum Scale) file systems. They use ActiveScan to build a file index database.

Their other major concern was hot to move PBs of data rapidly across to the cloud and other locations. Again they created a scale out, multi-threaded service to do this and also made use of internal APIs rather than standard file or object protocols. This became IntelliMove. That same customer above with billions of files, has 6PB of file data to protect.

Normal data movement is fine for largish, files but bogs down with lots of small files or extremely large files to back up. DataProtect gathers together small files into a large chunks and splits up extremely large files into smaller chunks and moves these chunks to secondary storage.

Data expiration is another problem, especially when you chunk files together. Here they came up with an intelligent garbage collection algorithm which only collects free space when it makes the most sense but deletes data access at the time of expiration.

DataProtect uses a cloud based, SaaS control plane that manages and coordinates its activities across data centers, sites and cloud instances. It also has a client VM (OVA, with 8 core CPU, 32GB DRAM, ~100MB) that runs in the customers infrastructure, on site, in CoLo’s or in the cloud that is used to scan-move-protect customer unstructured data. If more scan and data movement performance is needed, the VM can spawn additional threads automatically and more VMs can be added to provide even more throughput.

DataDiscover solution

The other service that Igneous offers is DataDiscover a data visualization tool. DataDiscover uses ActiveScan and its database to provide customers a way to understand the file data that resides in their massive unstructured data farms across the data center, cloud or wherever else it resides.

We didn’t discuss this solution as much but having a way to better understand the files in a 10-100PB unstructured data farm could be very useful and a great way to keep that 100PB from growing to 1EB faster than it has too.

As part of their outreach to the world, Igneous is giving away free DataProtect services to organizations that are focused on COVID-19 research. Check out their offer here

The podcast ran ~24 minutes. Christian was extremely knowledgeable about the problems that happen with very large unstructured data farms and how Igneous solutions can provide a better way to protect and visualize that data. Matt and I had a fun time discussing Igneous’s approach with Christian. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Christian Smith, VP Product at Igneous

Christian is VP of Product, responsible for product management, solutions, and customer success. Prior to Igneous, Christian spent 15 years running field engineering organizations at EMC, Isilon Systems, NetApp and Silicon Graphics.

Christian has been working with organizations that work with file data since working at Silicon Graphics. Before that Christian was co-founder of a small management consulting company associated with Y2K and deregulation.

Christian received dual bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry and Computer Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Christian is an avid camper, skier and traveler and has long since traveled through all of the continental 48 states.

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095: GreyBeards talk file sync&share with S. Azam Ali, VP Customer Success at CentreStack

We haven’t talked with a file synch and share vendor in a while now and Matt was interested in the technology. He had been talking with CentreStack, and found that they had been making some inroads in the enterprise. So we contacted S. Azam Ali, VP of Customer Success at CentreStack and asked if he wanted to talk about their product on our podcast.

File synch and share, is part collaboration tool, part productivity tool. With file synch & share many users share the same files, across many different environments and end point devices. It’s especially popular with road warriors that need access to the same files on the road that reside in corporate data centers. With this technology, files updated anywhere would be available to all.

Most file synch&share systems require you to use their storage. But CentreStack just provides synch and share access to NFS and SMB storage that’s already in the data center.

CentreStack doesn’t use VPNs to access data, many other vendor do. But with CentreStack, one just log’s into a website (with AD credentials) and they have immediate browser access to files.

CentreStack uses a gateway VM, that runs in the corporate data center, configured to share files/file directories/shares. We asked whether they were in the data path and Azam said no. However, the gateway does register for file system notifications (e.g. when files are updated, outside CentreStack, they get notified).

CentreStack does maintain meta-data on the files, directories, shares that are under it’s control. Presumably, once an admin sets it up, it goes out and access the file systems that have shared files and populates their meta-data for those files.

CentreStack works with any NFS and SMB file system as well as NAS servers that support these two. It’s unclear whether customers can have more than one gateway server in their data center supporting synch and share but Azam did say that it wasn’t unusual for customers with multi-data centers to have a gateway in each, to support synch&share requirements for each data center.

They use client software on end point devices, which presents the shared files as an external drive (to Mac), presumably a cloud drive for Windows PCs and similar services (in an App) for other systems (IOS, Android phones, iPad, etc.). We believe Azam said Linux was coming soon.

The client software can be configured in cache mode or offline mode:

  • Cache mode – the admin can configure how much space to use on the endpoint device and the software will cache the most recently used files in that space for faster access
  • Offline mode – the software moves all files that the endpoint login can access, to the device.

In cache mode, when users open a file (not in the most recently used cache), there will be some delay as the system retrieves data from the internet and copies it to the endpoint device. Unclear what the delay might be but it’s probably a function of internet speed and load on the gateway, with possibly some overhead for the NFS/SMB/NAS system to supply the data. If there’s not enough space to hold the file, the oldest non-open file is erased from the cache.

In both modes, Centrestack supports cross domain locking. That is, if one client has a file open (for update), all other systems/endpoints may only access the file in read-only mode. After the file is closed. the file can then be opened for update by other users.

When CentreStack clients are used to update files, the data is stored back in the original file systems with versioning. This way if the data is corrupted, admins can easily return back to a known good copy version.

CentreStack also offers a cloud backup and DR service. Gateway admins can request that synch&share files be backed up to cloud storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob and Wasabi). When CentreStack backups file data to the cloud, it also includes metadata information about the files so they can be re-constituted anywhere.

A CentreStack cloud gateway VM can be activated in the cloud to supply access to backed up files. Unclear whether the CentreStack cloud backup has to be restored to block or file storage first or if it just accesses the data on cloud storage directly. But one customers using CentreStack cloud DR would need to run client software in their applications accessing these files.

Wasabi seemed an odd solution to have on their list of supported cloud storage providers, but Azam said for their market, the economics of Wasabi storage were hard to ignore. See our previous podcast with David Friend, Co-Founder& CEO, Wasabi, to learn more about Wasabi.

CentreStack is licensed on a per user basis, not storage capacity bucking industry trends. But they don’t actually own the storage so it makes sense. For CentreStack cloud backup, customers also have to supply the cloud storage.

They also offer a 30 day free trial on their website with unlimited users. We assume this uses CentreStacks cloud gateway and customers bring their own cloud storage to support it.

The podcast runs about 35 minutes. Azam was a bit more marketing than we are used to, but he warmed up once we started asking questions. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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S. Azam Ali, VP of Customer Success, CentreStack

S. Azam Ali, is VP of Customer Success at CentreStack and is an executive with extensive experience in managing global teams including sales, support and consulting services.

Azam’s channel experience includes on-boarding new partners including creation of marketing and training collateral for the partners. Azam is an executive with a passion for customer success and establishing long term relationships and partnerships.

Azam is also an advisor to startups as well as established technology companies.

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094: GreyBeards talk shedding light on data with Scott Baker, Dir. Content & Data Intelligence at Hitachi Vantara

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At Hitachi NEXT 2019 Conference, last month, there was a lot of talk about new data services from Hitachi. Keith and I thought it would be a good time to sit down and talk with Scott Baker (@Kraken-Scuba), Director of Content and Data Intelligence, at Hitachi Vantara about what’s going on with data operations these days and how customers are shedding more light on their data.

Information supply chain

Something Scott said in his opening remarks caught my attention when he mentioned customer information supply chains. The information supply chain is similar to manufacturing supply chains, but it’s all about data. Just like manufacturing supply chains where parts and services come from anywhere and are used to create products/services for customers,

information supply chains are about the data used in their organization operations. Information supply chain data is A) being sourced from many places (or applications); B) being added to by supply chain processing (or other applications); and C) ultimately used by the organization to supply a product/service to customers.

But after the product/service is supplied the similarity between manufacturing and information supply chains breaks down. With the information supply chain, data is effectively indestructible, is infinitely re-useable and can live forever. Who throws data away anymore?

The problem most organizations have with information supply chains is once the product/service is supplied, data is often put away never to be seen again or as Scott puts it, goes dark.

This is where Hitachi Content intelligence (HCI) comes in. HCI is designed to take (unstructured or structured) data and analyze it (using natural language and other processing tools) to surround it with information and other metadata, so that it can become more visible and useful to the organization for the life of its existence.

Customers can also use HCI to extract and blend data streams together, automating the creation of an information rich, data repository. The data repository can readily be searched to re-discover or uncover attributes about the data not visible before.

Scott also mentioned the Hitachi Pentaho Platform which can be used to make real time decision from structured data. Pentaho information can also be fed into HCI to provide more intelligence for your structured data.

But HCI can also be used to analyze other database data as well. For instance, database blob and text elements can be fed to and analyzed by HCI. HCI analysis can include natural language processing and other functionality to tag the data by adding key:value information, all of which can be supplied back to the database or Pentaho to add further value to structured data.

Customers can also use HCI to read and transform database tables into XML files. XML files can be stored in object stores as objects or in file systems. XML data could easily be textually indexed and be searched by various tools to better understand the structured data information

We also talked about Hadoop data that can be offloaded to Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) object storage with a stub left behind. Once data is in HCP, HCI can be triggered to index and add more metadata, which can then later be used to decide when to move data back to Hadoop for further analysis.

Finally, Keith mentioned that he just got back from KubeCon and there was an increasing cry for data being used with containerized applications. Scott mentioned HCP for Cloud Scale, the newest member of the HCP object store family, focused on scale out capabilities to provide highly consistent, object storage performance for customers that need it. Customers running containerized workloads use scale-out capabilities to respond to user demand and now they have on premises object storage that can scale with them, as needs change.

The podcast ran ~24 minutes. Scott was very knowledgeable about data workflows, pipelines and the need for better discovery tools. We had a great time discussing information supply chains and how Hitachi can help customers optimize their data pipelines. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Scott Baker, Director of Content and Data Intelligence at Hitachi Vantara

Scott Baker is, and has been, an active member of the information technology, data analytics, data management, and data protection disciplines for longer than he is willing to admit.

In his present role at Hitachi, Scott is the Senior Director of the Content and Data Intelligence organization focused on Hitachi’s Digital Transformation, Data Management, Data Governance, Data Mobility, Data Protection and Data Analytics solutions which includes Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), HCP Anywhere, HCP Gateway, Hitachi Content Intelligence, and Hitachi Data Protection Solutions.

Scott is a VMware Certified Professional, recognized as a subject matter expert, industry speaker, and author. Scott has been a panelist on topics related to storage, cloud, information governance, data security, infrastructure standardization, and social media topics. His educational background includes an MBA, Master’s & Bachelor’s in Computer Science.

When he’s not working, Scott is an avid scuba diver, underwater photographer, and PADI Scuba Instructor. He has a passion for public speaking, whiteboarding, teaching, and traveling the world.

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89: Keith & Ray show at Pure//Accelerate 2019

There were plenty of announcements at Pure//Accelerate in Austin this past week and we were given a preview of them at a StorageFieldDay Exclusive (SFDx), the day before the announcement.

First up is Pure’s DirectMemory. They have added Optane SSDs to FlashArray//X to be used as a read cache for customer data. As you may know, Pure already has an NVRAM write cache. With DirectMemory, customers can have 3TB or 6TB of Optane storage in a FlashArray//X70 or //X90 storage. It almost looks plug and play, you take out one or two flash modules and plug in Optane SSD(s) and off it goes. DirectMemory went GA at the show.

Pure also announced FlashArray//C at Accelerate. This is a new capacity optimized storage solution. They have re-designed their flash module to support higher capacity flash, and supply higher capacity storage (targeted for QLC flash but will originally ship with TLC). FlashArray//C supplies ~5PB of effective (~1.4PB raw) capacity in 9U. Although, FlashArray//C offers cheaper storage on $/GB basis it is also much slower (RT latency on order of 2-4msec) than FlashArray//X storage.. Pure like other vendors we have talked with are trying to drive disk technology out of the enterprise. We had some interesting discussions with Pure (and others) on this topic at the reception. Just remember, tape is still alive and well in the enterprise AND cloud, 52 years after being pronounced dead.

Pure had announced CloudBlockStore (CBS) previously but it is now GA through partners or on AWS marketplace. Give them kudos for their approach as they have taken a different approach to Pure storage in the cloud. With CBS, they have effectively re-archetected and re-implemented Pure FlashArray using AWS EC2, IO1, EBS and S3 storage and ended up with a highly available (iSCSI) block software defined storage. It will be interesting to see how well it’s adopted. Picture is from me explaining CBS architecture to @DVellante.

For Pure’s FlashBlade storage, they have doubled the number of blades in a cluster (or name space), from 75 to 150 FlashBlades. Each FlashBlade contains storage and compute (almost computational storage), so one should see an increase in bandwidth with the added blades. None at Pure would go on record with specific numbers on any performance improvement because it’s still undergoing testing.

Finally, FlashArray//X will offer full NFS and SMB file support. This is coming from a recent acquisition (Compuverde). They plan to differentiate between file on FlashArraiy//X file storage and FlashBlade by saying that FlashArray//X file is for those customers with mostly block storage requirements but also need small amount of file storage and FlashBlade for everyone else that needs file.

The podcast is ~23 minutes. Keith is a long time friend and co-host of our GreyBeards On Storage podcast. He’s always got an interesting perspective on how new technology can benefit the data center today. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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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.

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88: A GreyBeard talks DataPlatform with Jon Hildebrand, Principal Technologist, Cohesity at VMworld 2019

Sponsored by:

This is another sponsored GreyBeards on Storage podcast and it was recorded at Vmworld 2019. I talked with Jon Hildebrand (@snoopJ123), Principal Technologist at Cohesity. Jon’s been a long time friend from TechFieldDay days and has been working with Cohesity for ~14 months now. For such a short time, Jon’s seen a lot of changes in Cohesity functionality

Indeed, they just announced general availability of Cohesity 6.4 which he called a “major release”. One of the first things we talked about in the 6.4 release, was CyberScan, Powered by Tenable, which is a new capability that uses backup data and scans it for vulnerabilities and risk postures. This way customers can assess their data to see if it’s been infected, potentially long before ransomware or other cyber threats can cripple your systems.

One of the other features in 6.4 was a new run book automation, called the Cohesity Runbook application, that can be used for instance to standup a physical clone of customer data and applications in the cloud or elsewhere. This way customers can have a fully operational copy of their applications running in the cloud, automatically supplied by Cohesity Runbook. Besides the great use of this facility for DR, and DR testing, such capabilities could be used to fire up a Test/Dev environment of your production applications on public cloud infrastructure.

The last feature of 6.4 that Jon and I discussed, supports archiving data from a primary NAS/filer storage systems and move that data out to Cohesity NAS. A stub or SymLink to the data is retained on the primary NAS system. By doing that, customers still have access to all the metadata and can access the data anytime they want, but frees up primary storage capacity and most of the IO processing to access the data.

Cohesity NAS provides the capacity and the processing power to support the IO and data that has been archived. With the new feature, Cohesity DataPlatform acts as an archive or tier of storage behind the primary NAS server. By doing so, customers should be able to delay tech refresh cycles, which should save them time and money. 

When I asked Jon if there were any last items he wanted to discuss he mentioned the Cohesity Truck. Apparently John, Chris and others at Cohesity have stood up a complete data center inside a semi-trailer. Jon said if we can’t bring customers to the Executive Briefing Center (EBC), then we can bring the EBC to the customers. Jon said the truck is touring the USA and you can arrange a visit by going to Cohesity.com/tour.

The podcast is a little under ~20 minutes. Jon is an old friend from TechFieldDays and seems to be taking to Cohesity very well. I’ve always respected Jon’s knowledge of the customer environment and his technical acumen. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Jon Hildebrand, Principal Technologist, Cohesity. 

Principal Technologist @ Cohesity | Public Speaker | Blogger | Purveyor of PowerShell | VMware vExpert | Cisco Champion