Category: SSD

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61: GreyBeards talk composable storage infrastructure with Taufik Ma, CEO, Attala Systems

In this episode,  we talk with Taufik Ma, CEO, Attala Systems (@AttalaSystems). Howard had met Taufik at last year’s FlashMemorySummit (FMS17) and was intrigued by their architecture which he thought was a harbinger of future trends in storage. The fact that Attala Systems was innovating with new, proprietary hardware made an interesting discussion, in its own right, from my perspective.

Taufik’s worked at startups and major hardware vendors in his past life and seems to have always been at the intersection of breakthrough solutions using hardware technology.

Attala Systems is based out of San Jose, CA.  Taufik has a class A team of executives, engineers and advisors making history again, this time in storage with JBoFs and NVMeoF.

Ray’s written about JBoF (just a bunch of flash) before (see  FaceBook moving to JBoF post). This is essentially a hardware box, filled with lots of flash storage and drive interfaces that directly connects to servers. Attala Systems storage is JBOF on steroids.

Composable Storage Infrastructure™

Essentially, their composable storage infrastructure JBOF connects with NVMeoF (NVMe over Fabric) using Ethernet to provide direct host access to  NVMe SSDs. They have implemented special purpose, proprietary hardware in the form of an FPGA, using this in a proprietary host network adapter (HNA) to support their NVMeoF storage.

Their HNA has a host side and a storage side version, both utilizing Attala Systems proprietary FPGA(s). With Attala HNAs they have implemented their own NVMeoF over UDP stack in hardware. It supports multi-path IO and highly available dual- or single-ported, NVMe SSDs in a storage shelf. They use standard RDMA capable Ethernet 25-50-100GbE (read Mellanox) switches to connect hosts to storage JBoFs.

They also support RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) NICS for additional host access. However I believe this requires host (NVMeoF) (their NVMeoY over UDP stack) software to connect to their storage.

From the host, Attala Systems storage on HNAs, looks like directly attached NVMe SSDs. Only they’re hot pluggable and physically located across an Ethernet network. In fact, Taufik mentioned that they already support VMware vSphere servers accessing Attala Systems composable storage infrastructure.

Okay on to the good stuff. Taufik said they measured their overhead and it was able to perform an IO with only an additional 5 µsec of overhead over native NVMe SSD latencies. Current NVMe SSDs operate with a response time of from 90 to 100 µsecs, and with Attala Systems Composable Storage Infrastructure, this means you should see 95 to 105 µsec response times over a JBoF(s) full of NVMe SSDs! Taufik said with Intel Optane SSD’s 10 µsec response times, they see response times at ~16 µsec (the extra µsec seems to be network switch delay)!!

Managing composable storage infrastructure

They also use a management “entity” (running on a server or as a VM),  that’s used to manage their JBoF storage and configure NVMe Namespaces (like a SCSI LUN/Volume).  Hosts use NVMe NameSpaces to access and split out the JBoF  NVMe storage space. That is, multiple Attala Systems Namespaces can be configured over a single NVMe SSD, each one corresponding to a single  (virtual to real) host NVMe SSD.

The management entity has a GUI but it just uses their RESTful APIs. They also support QoS on an IOPs or bandwidth limiting basis for Namespaces, to control manage noisy neighbors.

Attala systems architected their management system to support scale out storage. This means they could support many JBoFs in a rack and possibly multiple racks of JBoFs connected to swarms of servers. And nothing was said that would limit the number of Attala storage system JBoFs attached to a single server or under a single (dual for HA) management  entity. I thought the software may have a problem with this (e.g., 256 NVMe (NameSpaces) SSDs PCIe connected to the same server) but Taufik said this isn’t a problem for modern OS.

Taufik mentioned that with their RESTful APIs,  namespaces can be quickly created and torn down, on the fly. They envision their composable storage infrastructure to be a great complement to cloud compute and container execution environments.

For storage hardware, they use storage shelfs from OEM vendors. One recent configuration from Supermicro has hot-pluggable, dual ported, 32 NVMe slots in a 1U chasis, which at todays ~16TB capacities, is ~1/2PB of raw flash. Taufik mentioned 32TB NVMe SSDs are being worked on as we speak. Imagine that 1PB of flash NVMe SSD storage in 1U!!

The podcast runs ~47 minutes. Taufik took a while to get warmed up but once he got going, my jaw dropped away.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Taufik Ma, CEO Attala Systems

Tech-savvy business executive with track record of commercializing disruptive data center technologies.  After a short stint as an engineer at Intel after college, Taufik jumped to the business side where he led a team to define Intel’s crown jewels – CPUs & chipsets – during the ascendancy of the x86 server platform.

He honed his business skills as Co-GM of Intel’s Server System BU before leaving for a storage/networking startup.  The acquisition of this startup put him into the executive team of Emulex where as SVP of product management, he grew their networking business from scratch to deliver the industry’s first million units of 10Gb Ethernet product.

These accomplishments draw from his ability to engage and acquire customers at all stages of product maturity including partners when necessary.

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59: GreyBeards talk IT trends with Marc Farley, Sr. Product Manager, HPE

In Episode 59,  we talk with Marc Farley, Senior Product Manager at HPE discussing trends in the storage industry today. Marc been on our show before (GreyBeards talk Cloud Storage…, GreyBeards video discussing file analytics, Greybeards talk cars, storage and IT…) and has been a longtime friend and associate of both Howard and I.

Marc’s been at HPE for a while now but couldn’t discuss publicly what he is working on, so we spent time discussing industry trends rather than HPE products.

We discussed the public cloud and its impact on enterprise IT. Although the cloud has been arguable alive and well for almost a decade now, its impact is still being felt today and for the foreseeable future

We next discussed AI and data storage. HPE’s acquisition of Nimble brought InfoSight into their product family, which was arguably one of the first to use big data analytics to improve field support and ongoing operations.

Howard mentioned that a logical next step is to apply AI to storage performance. Using AI to fingerprint application workloads and thereby help determine when that app’s data was needed in cache. We also mentioned that AI could be better used to help workload optimization/orchestration, in almost real time, rather than after the fact.

We talked about containerization as the next big thing. Howard and Marc said sometimes it’s less risky to just keep chugging away with what IT has always done rather than risking a move to a new paradigm/platform AKA containers. As further evidence, Marc had seen a survey (by an unnamed research firm) of customers pre-purchase expectations for new storage and what they actually used it for post-purchase. Pre-purchase, customers expected to use storage for server virtualization but post-purchase, a majority used it for more traditional, non-virtualized applications.

We returned to a perennial theme, when will SSDs supplant disk. Howard talked about a recent vendors introduction of a dual head disk and which he thought was  overreach. But all agreed the key metric is $/GB and getting the difference between rotating media and SSD $/GB below 10X. Howard believes when it’s more like 4X, then SSDs will kill off disk technology. Although some of us felt disks would never completely go away, witness tape.

The podcast runs ~38 minutes. Marc’s always a gas to talk with and is currently the most frequent guest we have had on our show  (although Jim Handy was tied with him up until now). Its’ great to hear from him again.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Marc Farley, Senior Product Manger, HPE

Marc is a storage greybeard who has worked for many storage companies and is currently providing product strategy for HPE. He has written three books on storage including his most recent, Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybrid Cloud Model and his previous books Building Storage Networksand Storage Networking Fundamentals.

In addition to his writing books he has been a blogger and podcaster about storage topics while working for EqualLogic, Dell, 3PAR, HP, StorSimple,  Microsoft, HPE and others.

When he is not working, Marc likes to ride bicycles, listen to music, spend time with his family and dote on his cats. Of course there’s that car video curation…

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57: GreyBeards talk midrange storage with Pierluca Chiodelli, VP of Prod. Mgmt. & Cust. Ops., Dell EMC Midrange Storage

Sponsored by:

Dell EMC Midrange Storage

In this episode we talk with Pierluca Chiodelli  (@chiodp), Vice President of Product, Management and Customer Experience at Dell EMC Midrange storage.  Howard talked with Pierluca at SFD14 and I talked with Pierluca at SFD13. He started working there as a customer engineer and has worked his way up to VP since then.

This is the second time (Dell) EMC has been on our show (see our EMCWorld2015 summary podcast with Chad Sakac) but this is the first sponsored podcast from Dell EMC. Pierluca seems to have been with (Dell) EMC forever.

You may recall that Dell EMC has two product families in their midrange storage portfolio. Pierluca provides a number of reasons why both continue to be invested in, enhanced and sold on the market today.

Dell EMC Unity and SC product lines

Dell EMC Unity storage is the outgrowth of unified block and file storage that was first released in the EMC VNXe series storage systems. Unity continues that tradition of providing both file and block storage in a dense, 2 rack U system configuration, with dual controllers, high availability, AFA and hybrid storage systems. The other characteristic of Unity storage is its tight integration with VMware virtualization environments.

Dell EMC SC series storage continues the long tradition of Dell Compellent storage systems, which support block storage and which invented data progression technology.  Data progression is storage tiering on steroids, with support for multi-tiered rotating disk (across the same drive), flash, and now cloud storage. SC series is also considered a set it and forget it storage system that just takes care of itself without the need for operator/admin tuning or extensive monitoring.

Dell EMC is bringing together both of these storage systems in their CloudIQ, cloud based, storage analytics engine and plan to have both systems supported under the Unisphere management engine.

Also Unity storage can tier files to the cloud and copy LUN snapshots to the public cloud using their Cloud Tiering Appliance software.  With their UnityVSA Software Defined Storage appliance and VMware vSphere running in AWS, the file and snapshot data can then be accessed in the cloud. SC Series storage will have similar capabilities, available soon.

At the end of the podcast, Pierluca talks about Dell EMC’s recently introduced Customer Loyalty Programs, which include: Never Worry Data Migrations, Built-in VirtuSteram Storage Cloud, 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee, All-inclusive Software pricing, 3-year Satisfaction Guarantee, Hardware Investment Protection, and Predictable Support Pricing.

The podcast runs ~27 minutes. Pierluca is a very knowledgeable individual and although he has a beard, it’s not grey (yet). He’s been with EMC storage forever and has a long, extensive history in midrange storage, especially with Dell EMC’s storage product families. It’s been a pleasure for Howard and I to talk with him again.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Pierluca Chiodelli, V.P. of Product Management & Customer Operations, Dell EMC Midrange Storage

Pierluca Chiodelli is currently the Vice President of Product Management for Dell EMC’s suite of Mid-Range solutions including, Unity, VNX, and VNXe from heritage EMC storage and Compellent, EqualLogic, and Windows Storage Server from heritage Dell Storage.

Pierluca’s organization is comprised of four teams: Product Strategy, Performance & Competitive Engineering, Solutions, and Core & Strategic Account engineering. The teams are responsible for ensuring Dell EMC’s mid-range solutions enable end users and service providers to transform their operations and deliver information technology as a service.

Pierluca has been with EMC since 1999, with experience in field support and core engineering across Europe and the Americas. Prior to joining EMC, he worked at Data General and as a consultant for HP Corporation.

Pierluca holds one degree in Chemical Engineering and second one in Information Technology.

 

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55: GreyBeards storage and system yearend review with Ray & Howard

In this episode, the Greybeards discuss the year in systems and storage. This year we kick off the discussion with a long running IT trend which has taken off over the last couple of years. That is, recently the industry has taken to buying pre-built appliances rather than building them from the ground up.

We can see this in all the hyper-converged solutions available  today but it goes even deeper than that. It seems to have started with the trend in organizations to get by with less man-women power.

This led to a desire to purchase pre-buit software applications and now, appliances rather than build from parts. It just takes to long to build and lead architects have better things to do with their time than checking compatibility lists, testing and verifying that hardware works properly with software. The pre-built appliances are good enough and doing it yourself doesn’t really provide that much of an advantage over the pre-built solutions.

Next, we see the coming systems using NVMe over Fabric storage systems as sort of a countertrend to the previous one. Here we see some customers paying well for special purpose hardware with blazing speed that takes time and effort to get working right, but the advantages are significant. Both Howard and I were at the Excelero SFD12 event and it blew us away. Howard also attended the E8 Storage SFD14 event which was another example along a similar vein.

Finally, the last trend we discussed was the rise of 3D TLC and the absence of 3DX and other storage class memory (SCM) technologies to make a dent in the marketplace. 3D TLC NAND is coming out of just about every fab these days and resulting in huge (but costly) SSDs, in the multi-TB range.  Combine these with NVMe interfaces and you have msec access to almost a PB of storage without breaking a sweat.

The missing 3DX SCM tsunami some of us predicted is mainly due to the difficulties in bringing new fab technologies to market. We saw some of this in the stumbling with 3D NAND but the transition to 3DX and other SCM technologies is a much bigger change to new processes and technology. We all believe it will get there someday but for the moment, the industry just needs to wait until the fabs get their yields up.

The podcast runs over 44 minutes. Howard and I could talk for hours on what’s happening in IT today. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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

 

Ray Lucchesi is the President and Founder of Silverton Consulting, a prominent blogger at RayOnStorage.com, and can be found on twitter @RayLucchesi.

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52: GreyBeards talk software defined storage with Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, VP Product Management, Maxta

This month we talk with an old friend from Storage Field Day 7 (videos), Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, VP of Product Management for Maxta. Maxta has a software defined storage solution which currently works on VMware vSphere, Red Hat Virtualization and KVM to supply shared, scale out storage and HCI solutions for enterprises across the world.

Maxta is similar to VMware’s vSAN software defined storage whose licenses can be transferred from one server to another, as you upgrade your data center over time. As software defined storage, Maxta runs on any standard Intel X86 hardware. Indeed, Maxta has one customer running two Super Micro servers and one Cisco server in the same cluster.

Maxta advantages

One item that makes Maxta unique is all of its storage properties are assignable at a VM granularity. That is,  replication, deduplication, compression and even blocksize can all be enabled/set at the VMDK-VM level.  This could be useful for environments supporting diverse applications, such as having a 64K block size for Microsoft Exchange and 4K block size for web servers.

Another advantage is their multi-hypervisor support. Maxta’s support for RH Virtualization, VMware and KVM offers the unique ability to migrate storage and even powered off VMs, from one hypervisor to another. Maxta’s file system is the same for both VMware and KVM clusters.

Maxta clusters

Their software must be licensed on all servers in a vSphere or KVM cluster with access to Maxta storage. The minimum Maxta cluster size is 3 nodes for 2-way replication and 5 nodes for 3-way replication.  Most Maxta systems run on 8 to 12 server node clusters. But Maxta has installations with 20 to 24 nodes in customer deployments.

Maxta supports SSD only as well as SSD-disk hybrid storage. And SSDs can be NVMe as well as SATA SSD storage. In hybrid configurations, Maxta SSDs are used as read and write back caches for disk storage.

Maxta supports compute only nodes, compute-storage nodes and witness only nodes (node with 1 storage device). In addition, besides heterogeneous server support, Maxta clusters can have nodes with different storage capacities. Maxta will optimize VM data placement to balance IO activity across heterogeneous nodes.

Maxta provides a vCenter plugin so VMware admins can manage and monitor their storage inside vSphere environment. Maxta also offers a Cloud Connect MX which is a cloud based system allowing for management of all your Maxta clusters through out an enterprise, wherever they reside.

Even HCI, through partners

For customers wanting an HCI solution, Maxta partners can supply pre-tested, HCI appliances or can configure Maxta software with servers at customer data centers. Maxta has done well OEMing their solution, and one significant success has been their OEM deal with Lenovo in China and East Asia, where they sell HCI appliances with Maxta software.

Maxta has also found success with managed service providers (that want to deploy the software on their own hardware), and SME & ROBO environments. Also Maxta seems to be doing very well in Latin America as well as previously mentioned China.

The podcast runs ~42 minutes. Kiran is knowledgeable individual and has worked with some of the leading storage companies of the last two decades.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, VP Product Management, Maxta

Kiran Sreenivasamurthy is the Vice President of Product Management for Maxta Inc. He has developed and managed storage hardware and software products for more than 20 years with leading storage companies and startups including HP 3PAR, NetApp and Mendocino Software.

Kiran Manages all aspects of Maxta’s hyperconvergence product portfolio from inception through revenue.