GreyBeards talk global storage with Ellen Rubin CEO & Laz Vekiarides CTO, ClearSky Data

In this edition we discuss ClearSky Data’s global storage service with Ellen Rubin (@ellen_rubin), CEO & Co-Founder and Laz Vekiarides (@lazvek), CTO & Co-founder of ClearSky Data.  Both Ellen and Laz have been around the IT industry for decades and Laz in particular was deeply involved in the development of EqualLogic storage systems both at Dell and at EqualLogic, prior to the acquisition.

ClearSky Data provides a global, primary storage service that connects edge device(s) in the data center that supply a read/write cache for iSCSI block storage to a point-of-presence (PoP) appliance in the metro area which uses cloud storage as its backend storage repository . We get into the technology later but essentially a customer pays a $/GB/month fee and all the edge, point-of-presence hardware and cloud storage repository is bundled into that monthly price.

The service is implemented as a two level caching service: level one at the edge is a cluster of 2U appliances with compute, DRAM and up to 24 SSDs and a dedicated metro-ethernet networking link to the PoP; level two at the PoP includes a dual HA server configuration with a JBOD with even more SSDs that has a direct link to Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service (AWS S3).

Data is compressed, (inline or post-process) deduped and encrypted at the edge. Encryption keys are kept by the customer. Data written to the edge is synch-mirrored to the PoP and when the PoP fills up or the customer’s time interval has elapsed, their data is destaged to Amazon S3 which can then be replicated to other regions, where needed.

As part of their service, ClearSky Data also offers disaster recovery. As all customer data resides in S3, it can easily be supplied to another edge appliance (with the proper keys) at any other metro area location connected to one of their PoP’s.

ClearSky Data handles eventual consistency (not all copies of the data residing in  cloud storage may be the same) by versioning the cloud data objects and providing point-in-time consistency.

At the edge, the service can be deployed as a cluster of appliances that work together to support the IO workload and the PoP is configured to handle whatever IO workload is required in the metro area. Activity at the edge is heavy compute (compression, dedupe and encrypting all the data that comes in) and workload at the PoP is more IO bandwidth/networking based.

ClearSky Data currently has PoP’s in Las Vegas, Philadelphia and Boston with more on the way in the US. Today, ClearSky Data offer’s iSCSI interface protocols but have plans to provide FC, NFS and SMB support as well.  As we recorded the podcast, ClearSky Data’s  service was not quite GA yet, but were close.

Full Disclosure: Howard has worked for ClearSky in the past.

This months edition runs just under 41 minutes and gets into the business side and technical side of their service. Ellen provided the business view and Laz handled all the technical questions Howard and I threw at him. We hope you enjoy the podcast.

Ellen and Laz-orig copyEllen Rubin, CEO & Co-Founder ClearSky Data

Ellen Rubin is an experienced entrepreneur with a proven track record in leading strategy, market positioning and go-to-market for fast-growing companies. Most recently she was co-founder of CloudSwitch, a cloud enablement software company that was successfully acquired by Verizon in 2011. At Verizon, Ellen ran the cloud products group and was responsible for the strategy and roadmap for all cloud offerings.

Prior to founding CloudSwitch, Ellen was Vice President of Marketing at Netezza (NYSE: NZ), the pioneer and global leader in data warehouse appliances that power business intelligence and analytics at over 200 enterprises worldwide. As a member of the early management team at Netezza, Ellen helped grow the company to $130 million in revenues and a successful IPO in 2007. Ellen defined and created broad market acceptance of a new category, “data warehouse appliances,” and led market strategy, product marketing, complementary technology relationships and marketing communications.

Prior to Netezza, Ellen founded Manna, an Israeli and Boston-based developer of real-time personalization software. Ellen played a key role in raising over $18 million in venture financing from leading US and Israeli venture capital firms, recruiting the US-based management team and defining product and market strategy. Ellen began her career as a marketing strategy consultant at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Harvard College. She speaks regularly at industry events and has been recognized as one of the Top 10 Women in the Cloud by CloudNOW, as a Woman to Watch by Mass High Tech and Rising Star Entrepreneur by the New England Venture Capital Association.

Laz Vekiarides, CTO  & Co-Founder ClearSky Data

For over 20 years Laz Vekiarides has served in key technical and leadership roles delivering breakthrough technologies to market. Most recently, he served as the Executive Director of Software Engineering for Dell’s EqualLogic Storage Engineering group, where he led the development of numerous storage innovations and established the EqualLogic product line as a leader in host OS and hypervisor integration.

Laz joined Dell from EqualLogic, which was acquired in early 2008, where he was a member of the core leadership team – playing a key role in the company’s early success as a Senior Engineering Manager and Architect for the PS Series SAN arrays and host tools. Prior to EqualLogic, Laz held senior engineering and management positions at several companies including 3COM and Banyan Systems.

An occasional blogger, Laz frequently speaks at industry conferences, particularly in the areas of virtualization and data storage. He holds several storage technology patents, as well as a BSEE from Northeastern University, and an MSCS from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

GreyBeards talk VMware agentless backup with Chris Wahl, Tech Evangelist, Rubrik

In this edition we discuss Rubrik’s converged data backup with Chris Wahl (@ChrisWahl), Tech Evangelist for Rubrik.  You may recall Chris as a blogger on a number of Tech, Virtualization and Storage Field Days (VFD2, TFD extra at VMworld2014, SFD4, etc.) which is where  I met him. Chris is one of the bloggers that complains about me pounding on my laptop keyboard so loud at SFDs ;/

Chris had only been with Rubrik about 3 weeks when we  talked with him but both Howard and I thought it was time to find out what Rubrik was up to.

Rubrik provides an agentless, scale-out backup appliance for VMware vSphere clusters. It uses VADP to tap into VM data stores and obtain changed blocks for backup data. Rubrik deduplicates and compresses VM backup data and customers define a SLA  policy at the VM, folder or vSphere cluster level to determine when to backup VMs.

Rubrik supports cloud storage (any S3 or SWIFT provider) for long term archive storage of VM backups. With Rubrik, customers can search the backup catalog (for standard VM, NFS file, and backup metadata) that spans the Rubrik cluster data as well as S3/SWIFT storage backups.  Moreover, Rubrik can generate compliance reports to indicate how well your Rubrik-vSphere backup environment has met requested backup SLAs, over time.

Aside from the standard recovery facilities, Rubrik offers some interesting recovery options such as “instant restore” which pauses a VM and reconfigures its storage to come up on the Rubrik cluster (as a set of NFS VMDKs). Another option is “instant mount”, which runs a completely separate copy of a VM using Rubrik storage as its primary storage. In this case the VM’s NIC is disconnected so that the VM gets an error when it fires up, which has to be resolved to run the VM.

Rubrik hardware comes in a 2U package with 4 nodes. Each node has one flash SSD and 3 4 or 8TB SATA disks for customer data. The SSD is used for ingest caching and metadata. Data is triple mirrored across SATA disks in different nodes.

The latest release of Rubrik supports (compressed/deduped) data replication to other Rubrik clusters located up to asynchronous distances away.

This months edition runs just under 42 minutes and gets somewhat technical in places. We had fun with Chris on our call and hope you enjoy the podcast.

Chris Wahl, Tech Evangelist, Rubrik

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Chris Wahl, author of the award winning Wahl Network blog and Technical Evangelist at Rubrik, focuses on creating content that revolves around virtualization, automation, infrastructure, and evangelizing products and services that benefit the technology community.

In addition to co-authoring “Networking for VMware Administrators” for VMware Press, he has published hundreds of articles and was voted the “Favorite Independent Blogger” by vSphere-Land three years in a row (2013 – 2015).

Chris also travels globally to speak at industry events, provide subject matter expertise, and offer perspectives to startups and investors as a technical adviser.

Greybeards talk about Storage Trends in our 2014 Yearend Podcast-part 3

In this our end of year video podcast Howard and I discuss some of the trends impacting the storage industry today.  Which include Cloud, SSD/Flash, software defined storage and converged server-storage systems and object storage.

The video comes in at a little more than 43 minutes and is available to be streamed, from Vimeo

or as a downloadable podcast in as a 3 videos.

Part 3 (~8 minutes) discusses the state of object storage and some of the trends impacting it’s adoption.

Graybeards talk object storage with Russ Kennedy, Sr. VP Prod. Strategy & Cust. Solutions Cleversafe

In our 15th podcast we talk object storage with Russ Kennedy Senior V.P. Product Strategy and Customer Solutions, Cleversafe. Cleversafe is a 10 year old  company sellinge scale out, object storage solutions with a number of interesting characteristics. Howard and I had the chance to talk with Cleversafe at SFD4 (we suggest you view the video if you want to learn more), just about a year ago. But we have both known Russ for a number of years and Ray has done work for Cleversafe in the past.

We haven’t talked about objects storage in the past so this podcast goes over some foundational information about it. Object storage is starting to become more mainstream and general purpose as more interfaces become available and as the amount of data being stored grows out of sight.  Object storage has a flat name space, rich metadata, and relatively rudimentary, native storage access methods. But on top of this one can build sophisticated PB storage environments that can handle high amounts of data throughput, spread this data across multiple sites, and provide highly fault tolerant/highly available storage environments. Object storage will never replace OLTP block oriented storage but for environments with massive unstructured data repositories, it’s probably the best solution out there today.

Cleversafe has some unique characteristics namely their ability to split object storage elements over multiple disparate locations and use erase coding to supply data availability in the event of storage, server, or site failures. Some other object storage systems use 2- or 3-way replication to protect against data loss. But Russ makes the apt comment that when you are talking about PBs of data, replication can cause your storage costs to go up quite fast. Someone mentioned that there are Cleversafe customers that have 15-9’s data availability using erasure coding with only 150% of the original capacity. This is significantly more reliability than what could be obtained by dual or even triple redundancy alone. However, I always find that the weak link in data reliability  discussions such as these is always the software that implements the solution, not the data integrity architecture of the system.

Currently, Cleversafe has many multi-PB installations some of which span continents and others of which are looking to breach an EB (10**21 bytes of storage) of object data. We asked what these customers look like and Russ said lots of Accessors®  (stateless on- and off-ramps for object data) and a lots more Slicestors® (servers holding the statefull storage).

One of the significant barriers to higher object storage adoption has always been their unique, native object storage access protocols. But these days, it turns out that Amazon’s S3 protocol has become the defacto standard for object storage and this is helping accelerate object storage adoption.  In the podcast we discuss how historically, defacto standards have been a successful approach used to introduce new storage access protocols. Cleversafe offers its native RESTful access protocol, S3 and a smattering of others but you can also use other partner solutions if you need standard file access to the object store.

Cleversafe also offers HDFS as another access protocol. With Cleversafe HDFS, Hadoop can access all of it’s data from the Cleversafe object repository. In addition, you can run Hadoop MapReduce on its Slicestor nodes, if you want. Apparently, moving PB of data to analyze it and then deleting it is an expensive and very time consuming proposition, and of course native HDFS uses triple redundancy…

In the podcast, we get into object storage, some of Cleversafe’s advanced functionality, access protocol evolution and more. Listen to the podcast to learn more…

This months episode comes in at a little more than 47 minutes.

Russ Kennedy

Russ Kennedy, Sr VP Product Strategy & Customer Solutions

Russ Kennedy brings more than 20 years experience in the storage industry to Cleversafe as the company’s Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Customer Solutions. Having rolled up his sleeves working on automated tape libraries, Russ is still attracted to the technological challenges that have shaped the industry and particularly to the innovative approach that Cleversafe delivers to storage.

Russ joined the company initially in 2007 and left in 2009, staying on in an advisory role. In 2011, Russ rejoined the company seeing a clear opportunity to solve the storage needs surrounding the exponential growth of big data and the unique impact that Cleversafe delivers over traditional systems.

Previously, Russ served as the Vice President of Competitive Intelligence at CA Technologies, and was the Senior Director of Engineering and Product Management at Thin Identity Corporation. Russ has an MBA from the University of Colorado at Denver and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Colorado State University.