Category: Open source

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120: GreyBeards talk CEPH storage with Phil Straw, Co-Founder & CEO, SoftIron

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.

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117: GreyBeards talk HPC file systems with Frank Herold, CEO of ThinkParQ, makers of BeeGFS

We return back to our storage thread with a discussion of HPC file systems with Frank Herold, (@BeeGFS) CEO of ThinkParQ GmbH, the makers of BeeGFS. I’ve seen BeeGFS start to show up in some IO500 top storage benchmark results and as more and more data keeps coming online every day, we thought it time to start finding out how our friends in the HPC world handle their data deluge.

Frank’s a former rocket scientist, that’s been in and around the storage industry for years, and was very knowledgeable about BeeGFS’s software defined, parallel file system. He seemed to have a great grasp of the IO requirements in HPC, Life Sciences and other HPC-like applications. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Turns out that ThinkParQ is a spinoff of the research institute in Germany that originally developed BeeGFS parallel file system. There are apparently two version of their product one which is publicly available (downloadable from their website) and another with commercial support. It’s not quite 100% open source but it’s got a lot of open source in it and their GIT repository is available

BeeGFS was primarily focused on HPC workloads but as this type of work has become more mainstream, they have moved beyond HPC and now have significant installations in Life Sciences, Oil&Gas and many other big data environments.

It runs on x86/AMD, OpenPower, and ARM CPUs. BeeGFS comes as a number of services, one of which is a storage service which uses a backend with ZFS or XFS file system. It also uses (POSIX compliant) host client software to access their system. There’s also a metadata and monitoring service. Most of the time these services run on separate servers but BeeGFS also supports a “converged mode”, where all these services run on a single server. And you can have multiple converged mode servers in a cluster.

BeeGFS is a parallel file system. This means that it intrinsically supports multiple metadata services/servers and multiple storage servers which allow it to scale up storage bandwidth and performance considerably beyond single appliance systems. Data is automatically distributed across all the storage servers in the configuration, unless you specify that data reside on specific, say all flash storage servers. Similarly, metadata is automatically distributed across all metadata servers in the system.

They don’t support any specific RAID protection other than mirroring and that really to speed up read throughput. Rather they depend on the underlying XFS/ZFS file system to provide drive failure protection (RAID5/6).

One of BeeGFS’s selling points is that it has few tuning parameters that a customer needs to fiddle with. Frank said it runs quite well right out of the box.

BeeGFS offers a single name space that spans the cluster (of metadata servers/storage servers). But customers can elect to split this name space across a subset of these metadata and storage servers, and by doing so they create multiple BeeGFS clusters.

There’s no inherent support for NFS or SMB but customers can configure NFS or SAMBA servers that use BeeGFS as backend storage. Also, there’s no data reduction built into BeeGFS and no automatic data tiering across the backend storage (file systems).

But as noted above, customers can direct which backend storage to use to hold their data. And they do offer a CLI data movement primitive and customers can use this in conjunction with other software to implement storage tiering or do it themselves.

Metadata performance is extremely important for small files and for large multi Billion object file systems. BeeGFS uses extensive metadata caching to provide faster access to this information.

Speaking of small file performance, we had a decent discussion on the tradeoffs involved between small and large file performance. And although BeeGFS has decent small file performance it’s not a be all for every small file intensive application. According to Frank, not every small file workload is optimal for BeeGFS.

They offer BeeOND which is BeeGFS on demand. This is an integration with Slurm workload scheduler (HPC work scheduler) that allows customers to spin up a scratch BeeGFS parallel file system across compute servers with storage.

Slurm’s BeeOND integration brings all BeeGFS services up and deploys them on compute nodes you specify. At this point you have a fully installed BeeGFS (scratch) parallel file system. Customers may use this scratch file system to support any compute-data intensive workload theyneed to run. When no longer needed, Slurm can be directed to automatically dismantle the BeeGFSl file system.

We talked about BeeGFS partners. They have a number of regional partners that provide installation and onsite support and a number of technical partners, such as NetApp, Dell, HPE and INSPUR, that supply BeeGFS configured servers and systems for deployment/installation.

Frank Herold, CEO ThinkparQ

Frank Herold is the CEO of ThinkParQ GmbH – the company behind BeeGFS. He actively leads the company and the product strategy of BeeGFS as a global player for parallel high-performance file systems.

Prior to joining ThinkParQ, he held various senior management positions within ADIC and Quantum Corporation, responsible for market segments within the academic and scientific research, oil and gas, broadcast and video surveillance sectors, focusing on large scale, high-performance and enterprise accounts within EMEA. 

Frank has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry and holds a master’s degree in engineering (Dipl. -Ing.) in rocket science.

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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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099: GreyBeards talk Folding@Home with Mike Harsch, a longtime enthusiast

Microscopic picture of Coronavirus

Mike Harsch (@harschness) is a personal friend, a computer enthusiast with a particular and enduring interest in distributed systems and GPU computing. MIke’s been a longtime user and proponent of Folding@Home, a distributed system focused on protein dynamics that anyone can download and run on their personal computer(s) or gaming devices.

We started the discussion on the history of distributed processing using home computers. Mike apparently first ran accross these systems in college and was using one in his college dorm room, back in 1997. At the time there was a system called, distributed.net, which was attempting to crack the (RC5-56[bit]) encryption keys used for computer security and offered a $10K prize for solving it. That was solved in 250 days (source: wikipedia article on distributed.net). Distributed.net is still up and working but since then they have moved to ever larger keys.

Next came Seti@Home which was a 2nd gen distributed system. SETI @Home sent out slices of recorded radio telescope spectrum and tasked people’s computers (during screen saving) to analyze that spectrum for alien signals. Seti@Home painted a nice image of the analysis. Seti@Home also used some gamification, where users gained points for analyzing spectrum. Over time they had something like a leader board tracking the top users. Recently, Seti@Home shut down their distributed system and changed their focus to analyze all the results they received from their users. I was a SETI@Home user for a while.

Folding@Home

Folding@Home is 3rd generation distributed computing solution built along the same lines but rather than searching for aliens, with Folding@Home you are running a simulation of what a protein molecule does over time. Mike mentioned that a typical Folding@Home work unit is to simulate a few nanoseconds in the life of a protein and this could take an hour or more on a x86 class multi-core CPU (with less time on GPUs).

Mike mentioned that there was a recent Ask Me Anything (AMA) event on Reddit with the team on Folding@Home answering questions. And on March 15th, the team at Folding@Home clarified how they are helping to solve the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keith has used Folding@Home in the past. And my son was an early user as well.

What Folding@Home does

Fold@Home uses idle CPU or GPU time on home gaming platforms/computers/servers or data center servers. Initially, in October of 2000, it was used to understand protein folding. But nowadays it’s gone beyond just folding, to simulate the life of a protein.

Prior to their turn to concentrate on COVID-19, they usually had ~30K active users, supplying ~100PFlops (100 quintillian x86 double precision floating point operations per second) of compute power. 

You get points for doing Folding@Home work. When Folding@Home was launched it was designed to use a single CPU/single core. Sometime in 2006, they released a SMP version of the code ,which could use multi-cores. Later they released a multi-threaded version which worked better on multi-core CPUs. And within the last few years, they have released a GPU support that could take advantage of the massive numbers of GPU cores available today.

Mike said that Folding@Home work unit GPU is generally 10 to 100X faster than what can be done with multi-core/multi-threaded CPU systems. 

Around Feb 27, Folding@Home announced they were going to focus all their efforts on understanding how to combat the COVID-19 coronavirus. After the announcement, their user count went through the roof, to now ~400K active users/day. This led to throttling requests for work and delays in handling responses. Over the ensuing weeks, (as of 3/18), they seem to have added enough resources to support their current levels of users.

The architecture of the old Folding@Home system was 2 tiered, they had a set of Folding@Home front-end servers that handled web traffic and distributed the work requests/responses to a set of backend servers that supplied work requests to users and combined work results. In their latest rush they seemed to have had to add servers, networking and storage to both tiers.

Sometime around March 25th, Folding@Home became the firsth and only ExaFlop supercomputer, achieving 1.56 (x86) ExaFlops (10**18 FLOPS, source: wikipedia article on Folding@Home) and have over 1 million active computing devices (GPUs & CPUs) in their network (see: Greg Bowwan’s status tweet).

Deploying Folding@Home on your systems

Folding@Home operates on any number of endpoint devices OSs and gaming console -systems. It comes in two software packages, one is the software that logs into the Folding@Home server to gather the next slice of work unit to perform and the other is the one that does the simulation work. They have an option to paint a picture of what is happening but most disable this feature to devote 100% of any idle CPU/GPU resources to the simulation. They also have a support forum, if you have any questions or need assistance in deploying their software.

Keith mentioned that some gal at VMware asked VMware users to devote their home server CPUs/GPUs to the project. I checked their website and they have a vSphere appliance (FLING) that will run Folding@Home and will register itself as joining the VMware team. Mike mentioned that GitHub (announced on Twitter) was going to supply up to 60K CPU core hours a day to the project. They recently reported that they are shifting work units from understanding COVID-19 to screening compounds for therapeutic potential against the coronavirus.

The world needs you to help solve the COVID-19 pandemic. So join up with Folding@Home to do your part. Downloading the software and installing it on a Mac was easy. Just don’t forget to reboot afterwards and then run FAHcontrol and FAHviewer in “Applications/Folding@home” folder to see what’s going on.

The podcast runs a little under 40 minutes. Mike was very knowledgeable about the IT side of Folding@Home, but was less knowledgeable about the biological side of what they are doing.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Mike Harsch, a computer

Mike is a long time computer enthusiast with particular interests in distributed systems and GPU computing.  He lives in CO and has a basement full of (GPUs &) computers.

Mike and I have co-coached a local high school, FTC robotics team for the last 4 years. And Mike has been involved with FTC robotics for much longer than that.

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68: GreyBeards talk NVMeoF/TCP with Ahmet Houssein, VP of Marketing & Strategy @ Solarflare Communications

In this episode we talk with Ahmet Houssein, VP of Marketing and Strategic Direction at Solarflare Communications, (@solarflare_comm). Ahmet’s been in the industry forever and has a unique view on where NVMeoF needs to go. Howard had talked with Ahmet at last years FMS. Ahmet will also be speaking at this years FMS (this week in Santa Clara, CA)..

Solarflare Communications sells Ethernet communication gear, mostly to the financial services market and has developed a software plugin for the standard TCP/IP stack on Linux that supports both target and client mode NVMeoF/TCP. That is, their software plugin provides a complete implementation of NVMeoF across TCP Ethernet that extends the TCP protocol but doesn’t require RDMA (RoCE or iWARP) or data center bridging.

Implementing NVMeoF/TCP

Solarflare’s NVMeoF/TCP is a free plugin that once approved by the NVMe(oF) standard’s committees anyone can use to create a NVMeoF storage system and consume that storage from almost anywhere. The standards committee is expected to approve the protocol extension soon and sometime after that the plugin will be added to the Linux Kernel. After standards approval, maybe VMware and Microsoft will adopt it as well, but may take more work.

Over the last year plus most NVMeoF/Ethernet we encounter requires sophisticated RDMA hardware. When we talked with Pavilion Data Systems, a month or so ago, they had designed a more networking like approach to NVMeoF using RoCE and TCP a special purpose FPGA that’s used in their RDMA NICs and Mellanox switches to support client-target mode NVMeoF/UDP [updated 8/8/18 after VR’s comment, the ed.]. When we talked with Attala Systems, they had special purpose FPGA that’s used in RDMA NICs and Mellanox switches to support target & client mode NVMeoF/UDP were using standard RDMA NICs and Mellanox switches to support their NVMeoF/Ethernet storage [updated 8/8/18 after VR’s comment, the ed.].

Solarflare is taking a different tack.

One problem with the NVMeoF/Ethernet RDMA is compatibility. You can use either RoCE or iWARP RDMA NICs but at the moment you can’t use both. With TCP/IP plugins there’s no hardware compatibility issue. (Yes, there’s software compatibility at both ends of the pipe).

SolarFlare recently measured latencies for their NVMeoF/TCP (Iometer/FIO) which shows that the with the protocol running it adds about a 5-10% increase in latency versus running RDMA NVMeoF/UDP-RoCE-iWARP.

Performance measurements were taken using a server, running Red Hat Linux + their TCP plugin with NVMe SSDs on the storage side and a similar configuration on the client side without the SSDs.

If they add 10% latency to 10 microsec. IO (for Optane), latency becomes 11 microsec. Similarly for flash NVMe SSDs it moves from 100 microsec to 110 microsec.

Ahmet did mention that their NICs have some hardware optimizations which brings down this added latency into something approaching closer to 5%. And later we discuss the immense parallelism opportunities using the TCP stack in user space. Their hardware also better supports more threads doing IO in parallel.

Why TCP

Ahmets on a mission. He says there’s this misbelief that Ethernet RDMA hardware is required to achieve lightening fast response times using NVMeoF, but it’s not true. Standard TCP with proper protocol enhancements is more than capable of performing at very close to the same latencies as RDMA, without special NICs and DCB switch configurations.

Furthermore, TCP/IP already has multipathing support. So current high availability characteristics of TCP are readily applicable to NVMeoF/TCP

Parallelism through user space

NVMeoF/TCP was the subject of 1st half of our discussion but we spent the 2nd half talking about scaling or parallelism. Even if you can do 11 or 110 microsecond latency at some point, if you do enough of these IOs, the kernel overhead in processing blocks and transferring control from kernel space to user space will become a bottleneck.

However, there’s nothing stopping IT from running the TCP/IP stack in user space and eliminating any kernel control transfer whatsoever. By doing so, data centers could parallelize all this IO using as many cores as available.

Running the plugin in a TCP/IP stack in user space allows you to scale NVMeoF lightening fast IO to as many users as you have user spaces or cores, and the kernel doesn’t even break into a sweat

Anyone could simply download Solarflare’s plugin, configure a white box server with Linux and 24 NVMe SSDs and support ~8.4M IOPS (350Kx24) at ~110 microsec latency And with user space scaling, one could easily have 1000s of user spaces connected to it.

They’re going to need need faster pipes!

The podcast runs ~39 minutes. Ahmet was very knowledgeable about NVMe, NVMeoF and TCP.  He was articulate and easy to talk with.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Ahmet Houssein, VP of Marketing and Strategic Direction at Solarflare Communications 

Ahmet Houssein is responsible for establishing marketing strategies and implementing programs to drive revenue growth, enter new markets and expand brand awareness to support Solarflare’s continuous development and global expansion.

He has over twenty-five years of experience in the server, storage, data center and networking industry, and held senior level executive positions in product development, marketing and business development at Intel and Honeywell. Most recently Houssein was SVP/GM at QLogic where he successfully delivered first to market with 25Gb Ethernet products securing design wins at HP and Dell.

One of the key leaders in the creation of the INFINIBAND and PCI-Express industry standard, Houssein is a recipient of the Intel Achievement Award and was a founding board member of the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), a global organization of 400 companies in the storage market. He was educated in London, UK and holds an Electrical Engineering Degree equivalent.