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83: GreyBeards talk NVMeoF/TCP with Muli Ben-Yehuda, Co-founder & CTO and Kam Eshghi, VP Strategy & Bus. Dev., Lightbits Labs

This is the first time we’ve talked with Muli Ben-Yehuda (@Muliby), Co-founder & CTO and Kam Eshghi (@KamEshghi), VP of Strategy & Business Development, Lightbits Labs. Keith and I first saw them at Dell Tech World 2019, in Vegas as they are a Dell Ventures funded organization. The company has 70 (mostly engineering) employees and is based in Israel, with offices in NY and the Valley as well as elsewhere around the world. Kam was previously with (Dell) EMC DSSD and Muli’s spent years as a Master Inventor with IBM Research.

[This was Keith Townsend’s (@CTOAdvisor & The CTO Advisor), first time as a GreyBeard co-host and we had a great time with him on the show.]

I would have to say it was a far ranging discussion but focused on their software defined, NVMeoF/TCP storage. As you may recall we talked with Solarflare Communications last year who were also working on a NVMeoF/TCP, only in their case it was an accelerator board. After the recording, Muli said the hardware accelerator they have is their own design.

Why NVMeoF/TCP?

Most NVMeoF today, that uses Ethernet, requires RoCE or iWARP compatible NICs and switches. Lightbits Labs has long been active in the NVMeoF/RoCE-iWARP market place. Early on they noticed that enterprise and cloud service providers were reluctant to adopt NVMeoF technology because of the need to change out all their networking equipment to use it. This is what brought about their focus on NVMeoF/TCP.

The advantage of NVMeoF/TCP is that it can be run on any Ethernet NIC and switch available today. From Muli’s perspective, NVMeoF/TCP is going to become the next SAN of choice for the data center. They were active, early on, in the standards committee to push for NVMeoF/TCP adoption.

How does it work?

Their software defined solution runs LightOS® storage software, a Linux based package, and uses off the shelf, server hardware with persistent storage (Optane DC PM/SSDs, NV DIMMs, V-NAND, etc.). They use persistent memory for a FAST write buffer and a place where they can “mold” the written data into something that can be better written to backend NVMe SSDs.

One surprise about Lightbits solution is that it offers a decent set of data services. These include erasure coding, thin provisioning, wire-speed inline compression, QoS and wide striping. It seems like any of these can be disabled by a customers want. But they only add very little overhead. I think Muli mentioned one Lightbits customer with encrypted data that disabled compression.

Lightbits also offers a global FTL (flash translation layer), which means they control SSD addressing which maps data to physical/raw NAND locations at the storage system level. If done well, a global FTL can help improve flash endurance and may offer better write performance (through increased parallelism).

Lightbits claim to inline, wire speed data compression is premised on the use of more current CPUs with high (>=28) core counts in a storage server. If the storage server has older CPUs (<28 cores), they suggest you install their LightField™ hardware accelerator add in card. LightField offers a number of hardware based, performance accelerations in addition to compression speedups.

LightOS requires no host (client) software. Muli’s a long time Linux kernel contributor and indicated that the only thing LightOS needs is a current Linux Kernel (5.0 or later) which has the NVMeoF/TCP driver software (and persistent memory). Lightbits believes that it’s only a matter of time until other OSs also implement NVMeoF/TCP drivers.

Lightbits business considerations

Long term, Lightbits sees a need for compute-storage disaggregation in hyper scalar and enterprise cloud environments. Early on it was relatively easy to replicate servers with DAS storage but as NVMe SSDs came out the expense to do this throughout their >>1000 server environment starts to become exorbitant. If they only had an easy way to disaggregate their storage from compute and still enjoy all the performance advantages of DAS NVMe SSDS. With LightOS they can do that.

Lightbits can be sold today through Dell, as a partner solution, which means that Dell can integrate, test and validate their servers with LightField accelerator card and deliver that package to your data center. I believe you still need to purchase and install their LightOS software yourself.

Lightbits charges for LightOS software on a per storage node basis, but they have different charges based on the maximum number of NVMe SSD slots available is in a server. There is no capacity charge. They also offer worldwide service and support for LightOS software and LightField hardware.

It’s all about performance

From a performance perspective, one Fortune 500 hyper-scalar benchmarked their storage solution against a DAS NVMe server and found it added about 30 µsec to the IO latency as compare to DAS NVMe SSDs. From their perspective, the added data services, better endurance, and disaggregated compute-storage environment provided by LightOS more than made up for the additional overhead.

Finally, I asked about whether multiple LightOS storage servers could be clustered together. Muli intervened, after stating some legal stuff, said they were working on the next generation LightOS and it will support clustered storage servers, local data replication as well as distributed (across storage servers) erasure coding.

The podcast is a long one and runs over ~47 minutes. There was a lot to talk about and Kam and Muli seem to know it all. It was interesting to hear the history of their pivot to TCP. They seem to have the right technology to address the market. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Muli Ben-Yehuda, Co-founder and CTO, Lightbits Labs

Muli Ben-Yehuda is the CTO and Co-Founder of Lightbits Labs, where he leads technological developments.

Prior to founding Lightbits, he was chief scientist at Stratoscale and a researcher and Master Inventor at IBM Research.

He holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science (summa cum laude) from the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology and a B.A. (cum laude) from the Open University of Israel.

He is a long time Linux kernel contributor and his code and ideas are most likely included in an operating system or hypervisor running near you. He is also one of the authors of the NVMe/TCP standard and technology. 

Kam Eshghi, VP Strategy & Business Development, Lightbits Labs

Kam joined Lightbits Labs from Dell EMC and has over 20yrs of experience in strategic marketing and business development with startups and public companies.

Most recently as VP of strategic alliances at startup DSSD, Kam led business development with technology partners and developed DSSD’s partnership with EMC, leading to EMC’s acquisition of DSSD.

Previously as Sr. Director of Marketing & Business Development at IDT, Kam built their NVMe Controller business from scratch. Previous to that, Kam worked in data center storage, compute and networking markets at HP, Intel, and Crosslayer Networks. 

Kam is a U.C. Berkeley and MIT graduate with a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an MBA.

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75: GreyBeards talk persistent memory IO with Andy Grimes, Principal Technologist, NetApp

Sponsored By:  NetApp
In this episode we talk new persistent memory IO technology  with Andy Grimes, Principal Technologist, NetApp. Andy presented at the NetApp Insight 2018 TechFieldDay Extra (TFDx) event (video available here). If you get a chance we encourage you to watch the videos as Andy, did a great job describing their new MAX Data persistent memory IO solution.

The technology for MAX Data came from NetApp’s Plexistor acquisition. Prior to the acquisition, Plexistor had also presented at a SFD9 and TFD11.

Unlike NVMeoF storage systems, MAX Data is not sharing NVMe SSDs across servers. What MAX Data does is supply an application-neutral way to use persistent memory as a new, ultra fast, storage tier together with a backing store.

MAX Data performs a write or an “active” (Persistent Memory Tier) read in single digit µseconds for a single core/single thread server. Their software runs in user space and as such, for multi-core servers, it can take up to 40  µseconds.  Access times for backend storage reads is the same as NetApp AFF but once read, data is automatically promoted to persistent memory, and while there, reads ultra fast.

One of the secrets of MAX Data is that they have completely replaced the Linux Posix File IO stack with their own software. Their software is streamlined and bypasses a lot of the overhead present in today’s Linux File Stack. For example, MAX Data doesn’t support metadata-journaling.

MAX Data works with many different types of (persistent) memory, including DRAM (non-persistent memory), NVDIMMs (DRAM+NAND persistent memory) and Optane DIMMs (Intel 3D Xpoint memory, slated to be GA end of this year). We suspect it would work with anyone else’s persistent memory as soon as they come on the market.

Even though the (Optane and NVDIMM) memory is persistent, server issues can still lead to access loss. In order to provide data availability for server outages, MAX Data also supports MAX Snap and MAX Recovery. 

With MAX Snap, MAX Data will upload all persistent memory data to ONTAP backing storage and ONTAP snapshot it. This way you have a complete version of MAX Data storage that can then be backed up or SnapMirrored to other ONTAP storage.

With MAX Recovery, MAX Data will synchronously replicate persistent memory writes to a secondary MAX Data system. This way, if the primary MAX Data system goes down, you still have an RPO-0 copy of the data on another MAX Data system that can be used to restore the original data, if needed. Synchronous mirroring will add 3-4  µseconds to the access time for writes, quoted above.

Given the extreme performance of MAX Data, it’s opening up whole new set of customers to talking with NetApp. Specifically, high frequency traders (HFT) and high performance computing (HPC). HFT companies are attempting to reduce their stock transactions access time to as fast as humanly possible. HPC vendors have lots of data and processing all of it in a timely manner is almost impossible. Anything that can be done to improve throughput/access times should be very appealing to them.

To configure MAX Data, one uses a 1:25 ratio of persistent memory capacity to backing store. MAX Data also supports multiple LUNs.

MAX Data only operates on Linux OS and supports (IBM) RedHat and CentOS, But Andy said it’s not that difficult to add support for other versions of Linux Distros and customers will dictate which other ones are supported, over time.

As discussed above, MAX Data works with NetApp ONTAP storage, but it also works with SSD/NVMe SSDs as backend storage. In addition, MAX Data has been tested with NetApp HCI (with SolidFire storage, see our prior podcasts on NetApp HCI with Gabriel Chapman and Adam Carter) as well as E-Series storage. The Plexistor application has been already available on AWS Marketplace for use with EC2 DRAM and EBS backing store. It’s not much of a stretch to replace this with MAX Data.

MAX Data is expected to be GA released before the end of the year.

A key ability of the MAX Data solution is that it requires no application changes to use persistent memory for ultra-fast IO. This should help accelerate persistent memory adoption in data centers when the hardware becomes more available. Speaking to that, at Insight2018, Lenovo, Cisco and Intel were all on stage when NetApp announced MAX Data.

The podcast runs ~25 minutes. Andy’s an old storage hand (although no grey beard) and talks the talk, walks the walk of storage religion. Andy is new to TFD but we doubt it will be the last time we see him there. Andy was very conversant on the MAX Data technology and the market that it apparently is opening up for this new technology.  Listen to our podcast to learn more.

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Andy Grimes, Principal Technologiest, NetApp

Andy has been in the IT industry for 17 years, working in roles spanning development, technology architecture, strategic outsourcing and Healthcare..

For the past 4 years Andy has worked with NetApp on taking the NetApp Flash business from #5 to #1 in the industry (according to IDC). During this period NetApp also became the fastest growing Flash and SAN vendor in the market and regained leadership in the Gartner quadrant.

Andy also works with NetApp’s product vision, competitive analysis and future technology direction and working with the team bringing the MAX Data PMEM product to market.

Andy has a BS degree in psychology, a BPA in management information systems, and an MBA. He current works as a Principal Technologist for the NetApp Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit with a focus on PMEM, HCI and Cloud Strategy. Andy lives in Apex, NC with his beautiful wife and has 2 children, a 4 year old and a 22 year old (yes don’t let this happen to you). For fun Andy likes to Mountain Bike, Rock Climb, Hike and Scuba Dive.

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38: GreyBeards talk with Rob Peglar, Senior VP and CTO, Symbolic IO

In this episode, we talk with Rob Peglar (@PeglarR), Senior VP and CTO of Symbolic IO, a computationally defined storage vendor. Rob has been around almost as long as the GreyBeards (~40 years) and most recently was with Micron and prior to that, EMC Isilon. Rob is also on the board of SNIA.

Symbolic IO has emerged out of stealth earlier this year and intends to be shipping products by late this year/early next.  Rob joined Symbolic IO in July of 2016.

What’s computational storage?

It’s all about symbolic representation of bits. Symbolic IO has  come up with a way to encode bit streams into unique symbols that offer significant savings in memory space, beyond standard data compression techniques.

All that would be just fine if it was at the end of a storage interface and we would probably just call it a new form of data reduction. But Symbolic IO also incorporates persistent memory (NV-DIMMs, in the future 3D XPoint, RERam, others) and provides this symbolic data inside a server, directly through its processor data cache, in (decoded) raw data form.

Symbolic IO provides a translation layer between persistent memory and processor cache that decodes the symbolic representation of the data in persistent memory for data reads on the way into data cache and encodes the symbolic representation of the raw data for data writes on the way out of cache to persistent memory.

Rob says that the mathematics are there to show that Symbolic IO’s data reduction is significant and that the decode/encode functionality can be done in a matter of a few clock cycles per cache (line) access on modern (Intel) processors.

The system continually monitors the data it sees to determine what the optimum encoding should be and can change its symbolic table to provide more memory savings for new data written to persistent memory.

All this reminds the GreyBeards of Huffman encoding algorithms for data compression (which one of us helped deploy on a previous [unnamed] storage product). Huffman encoding transformed ASCII (8-bit) characters into variable length bit streams.

Symbolic IO will offer 3 products:,

  • IRIS™ Compute, which provides a persistent memory storage, accessed using something like the Linux pmem library and includes Symbolic StoreModules™ (persistent memory hardware);
  • IRIS Vault, which is an appliance with its own (IRIS) infused Linux (Symbolic’s SymCE™) OS plus Symbolic IO StoreModules, that can run any Linux application without change accessing the persistent memory and offers full data security, next generation snapshot-/clone-like capabilities with BLINK™ full storage backups, and offers enhanced physical security with the removable, IRIS Advanced EYE ASIC; and
  • IRIS Store, which extends the IRIS Vault and IRIS Compute above with more tiers of storage, using Symbolic IO StoreModules as Tier1, PCIe (flash) storage as Tier 2 and external SSD storage as Tier 3 storage.

For more information on Symbolic IO’s three products, so we would encourage you to read their website (linked above).

The podcast runs long, over 47 minutes, and was wide ranging, discussing some of the history of processor/memory/information technologies. It was very easy to talk with Rob and both Howard and I have known Rob for years, across multiple vendors & organizations.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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peglar_robert_160x200Rob Peglar, Senior VP and CTO, Symbolic IO

Rob Peglar is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Symbolic IO. Rob is a seasoned technology executive with 39 years of data storage, network and compute-related experience, is a published author and is active on many industry boards, providing insight and guidance. He brings a vast knowledge of strategy and industry trends to Symbolic IO. Rob is also on the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and an advisor for the Flash Memory Summit. His role at Symbolic IO will include working with the management team to help drive the future product portfolio, executive-level forecasting and customer/partner interaction from early-stage negotiations through implementation and deployment.

Prior to joining Symbolic IO, Rob was the Vice President, Advanced Storage at Micron Technology, where he led next-generation technology and architecture enablement efforts of Micron’s Storage Business Unit, driving storage solution development with strategic customers and partners. Previously he was the CTO, Americas for EMC where he led the entire CTO functions for the Americas. He has also held senior level positions at Xiotech Corporation, StorageTek and ETA Systems.

Rob’s extensive experience in data management, analytics, high-performance computing, non-volatile memory, distributed cluster architectures, filesystems, I/O performance optimization, cloud storage and replication and archiving, networking, virtualization makes him a sought after industry expert and board member. He was named an EMC Elect in 2014, 2015 and 2016. He was one of 25 senior executives worldwide selected for the CRN ‘Storage Superstars’ Award in 2010.