It’s spring, and a young man’s fancy turns to Las Vegas and the National Association of Broadcasters annual price-is-no-object tech toy fair. Shaking off a long winter’s chills the StorageMojo analyst army is getting ready to ride off into the hills to see the bright lights of the LVCC.

Arriving Wednesday on the show floor and leaving Thursday afternoon. Will you be there? Let’s meet up. Comment below.

The StorageMojo take
NAB is a favorite show because it is further upstream than CES: no consumption without production; and this is where you find out about what can be produced. Plus the toys are more fun, even if many are priced for mega-corps, not small producers.

As a video producer playing with – and writing about – the storage intensive tech is both fun and profitable. The changes the industry has gone through in the last 10 years are amazing, and I suspect the fun is just beginning!

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

Over 3 years ago StorageMojo saw that Violin Memory was “. . . on the winning architectural track.” Well, it took a lot of time and money, but Violin is making good on that early promise.

StorageMojo’s enthusiasm was kindled by Violin’s unique architecture. Here’s a short video that shows how Violin’s architecture addresses key problems with flash:

Full screen mode recommended.

The StorageMojo take
The industry is still in the early days of digesting the implications of fast persistent solid state storage. We’ve built up 50 years of cruft to deal with disk’s many issues. It will take a few more years for flash’s new options to ripple through the entire storage, server and application stack.

Take, for example, failover. If all apps and monitoring software could declare a failure in 10 seconds rather than, say, a minute, how much smoother would major apps run? How much better would be the perception of system uptime and response times be?

There are many other possibilities – what about metadata? – that flash and its successor technologies will affect. I’ll be offering more detail in my keynote at the Solid State Storage Symposium on Wednesday, April 25 in Silicon Valley. S4 is free and you can register here.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. The other flash company I liked in 2009 was Fusion-io, and they’ve done OK. And yes, Violin paid StorageMojo to produce the video white paper, but the opinions are my own.

Several readers have written in lately with roughly the same question: what’s the best way to build cheap home bulk storage?

Here’s how 1 writer put it:

I was hoping you could provide me with some advice. I have so many external drives that I have to swap. I have almost 10 Terabytes of data – mostly movies that I would like to consolidate into one “volume”. I was thinking about building a 5-bay JBOD Raid (a cheap enclosure) and was also thinking of using MacZFS to handle the storage pool part.

Price is important. Performance isn’t.

How would readers propose to do this on their favorite OS? The folks asking this question aren’t full time sysadmins – they already have their ideas – so let’s not get too esoteric.

The StorageMojo take
This question has been vexing me as well. I have a small Thunderbolt array – a Promise Pegasus R4 – hooked up to a new iMac for video editing. I’d like to reconfigure it from RAID 5 to multiple RAID 0 stripes for speed and capacity. The question is how to back up those vulnerable RAID 0 partitions.

It’s looking like large FireWire drives are the right answer. But maybe you have a better one.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

I sat down with Nimble Storage co-founder and VP of engineering Varun Mehta to discuss their architecture – and shoot some video. Varun has been part of several Valley success stories – NetApp, Sun, Data Domain – and has a first hand perspective on disruptive technologies.

Varun and co-founder Umesh Maheshwari – a brilliant architect and a very nice guy – designed the Nimble product that he discusses. Take 4 minutes to learn more about Innovations in Storage Architecture at Nimble Storage:

Or you can see it in HD on YouTube.

The StorageMojo take
The Nimble guys have great technology, but they’ve also put together a compelling value proposition: collapse 3 time-consuming and complex workflows – primary storage, backup and archiving – into 1 appliance. Include all the needed software, price it well, target under-served mid-sized companies and you have a recipe for another Valley success.

The tech trends they’re riding will only get better. But the business trends are in their favor as well. SMB’s today have many TB of data and little staff to manage it – or capital to invest. With Congress ensuring that America operates well below capacity for years to come, the times favor thrifty solutions like Nimble’s.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.
Nimble bought my time for this video, but I made all editorial decisions.

Cloud computing gets a bad rap because it can’t replace corporate data centers for mission critical apps. But new computing paradigms never do that: it is the new capabilities they enable that drive adoption. Case in point: transcoding.

Why?
Anyone who shoots video soon discovers that changing from, say, AVCHD to an editing-friendly codec and then to H.264 for distribution takes a lot of compute cycles. Conversion from one codec to another is called transcoding. It is the price we pay for high quality compressed content.

Compression and format conversion are necessary because highly compressed video – the kind most camcorders shoot – isn’t easy to edit. And the stuff that’s easy to edit has large files that chew up bandwidth and storage.

So we transcode. Add to that the number of formats we use – ranging from iPhones to flash to SD and 1080p – and transcoding is a major CPU cycle sink.

Fortunately, transcoding can be a highly parallel operation. A frame – or a series of frames – can be divided and split among multiple cores and CPUs.

Where?
Where can you find a lot of CPUs for a quick job? Right, the cloud. Which is why there are a number of online services that front-end Amazon Web Services to provide transcoding.

I spoke to the CEO of startup Zencoder, Jon Dahl to learn more.

Zencoder
Zencoder is a transcoding service provider that uses Amazon as a cloud provider. The Zencoder team has developed transcoding infrastructure for several startups and finally decided to build a general-purpose service.

While they use open source software in their stack – as do most transcoding providers – their major value-add is in a high-performance scalable interface. Handling 100,000 concurrent transcodes is non-trivial.

They also look out for problems common in transcoding such as audio/video getting out of sync and aspect ratio distortion. They can transcode 1080p faster than real time. And they’ve licensed the proprietary formats as well.

Amazon offers Linux as a service and a file service. S3′s files are limited to 5 GB, but that isn’t a problem for Zencoder: customers can specify input and output locations, bypassing Amazon storage.

Also they don’t transcode Mac ProRes – Final Cut Pro’s preferred editing format – today. But they do handle QuickTime movies.

The StorageMojo take
So the glass house doesn’t want to outsource cloud infrastructure. Who cares? They’re the last to adopt new technology anyway.

It is apps like transcoding that drive the business. In 5 years much, perhaps most, transcoding will be cloud-based.

Before the digital video craze in the last 5 years there wasn’t much demand for transcoding. But today, with HD video smartphones, millions are producing videos that they want to share and save.

Your smartphone won’t have the cycles to do it, but the cloud does. Expect transcoding vendors to add new features, such as noise-reduction or sharpening.

Business units are discovering the power of short videos to inform, train, persuade and excite. All at a fraction of the cost of 4-color brochures.

The outlook for storage vendors is mixed. Yes, much more storage will be sold – but cost-conscious cloud managers will be buying it. And as more new services develop on the cloud, consumers will be as hazy about “local” and “cloud” as they are about “memory” and “disk” today. Branding nightmare, but that’s where those petabytes will be.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

Harmonic is acquiring video production infrastructure and storage provider Omneon for $274 million. They’d raised about $100M since their founding.

Omneon Video Networks is a specialized storage company that provides broadcast quality storage for digital media, along with the gear needed to convert video streams to bits. They do clustering, in their MediaGrid product, a sophisticated architecture that can handle a 7×24 beating.

Founded in 1998, venture-backed Omneon started offering storage in response to customer demand. They chose a commodity-based cluster and built their own storage software, MediaGrid, whose architecture hews to the post-array Google-style storage model:

• No RAID – slices are replicated one or more times based on policy or demand
• Single global namespace
• Out-of-band meta-data servers manage content servers

Omneon’s content servers do more than serve content. They put their unused CPU power to work doing jobs like transcoding – translating content from one format like HD to iPhone-suitable QuickTime.

The StorageMojo take
Omneon is more than a storage company, but their storage made them a competitor to Isilon in the broadcast market. Harmonic is big in the rest of the video workflow, especially distribution in multiple formats. It looks like the 2 firms complement each other nicely.

Omneon was not a pure play storage company. But the fact that they were able to build a competitive storage product as an adjunct to their main business points up how low the barriers to entry are in scale-out storage.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I’m still at EMC World. YottaYotta’s technology is front and center in the VPLEX product. More on that later.

The video folks have an interesting set of problems: large needs; major bandwidth; time-critical collaboration; lots of metadata; and more. Like budgets. I do some video production myself and empathize.

They are today where most of us will be in 10 years: lots of large files; local and remote sharing; processor and bandwidth intensive operations; large archives of wanted and rarely accessed files. Today high-end video folks are working at 2k, 4k and, sometimes, 8k video resolutions – and 10 years from now I wouldn’t be surprised if home users weren’t too.

What prompts this is a note I received from, well, I’ll let him introduce himself.

I have a boutique post-production company and I’m a filmmaker. We are small, under a dozen, but swell to a few times that size with freelancers on a project-by-project basis. Because we work with very high resolution media, we need a lot of space, and very high throughput to each user. . . . [W]e’re all working with 2K and 4K media (300 and 1200MBps respectively to EACH user) and 3D animation rendering. . . . We use a mix of Linux, Windows, and OS X clients. In total, we could easily make use of 100TB+ right now, and prefer to stop archiving everything to tape and deleting it, but rather migrate to another tier of storage but keep in one global namespace with the tape just for disaster recovery. We also need security administration.

I can’t find a storage system that does all this. DataDirect Networks seems to be the du jour high-end storage for my industry, and supposing I’m willing to finance that big-ticket brand, they still don’t have a filing system answer. They’re suggesting StorNext or CXFS, and I know the multi-user scalability and expansion limitations well (can anybody say “forklift”?).

The closest I’ve come is Lustre. It seems like it would fit the bill nicely, especially since we’re savvy to integrate in-house, except that it is Linux only, and NFS/CIFS gateways don’t seem like a great idea. I keep hearing they’re working on at least a Windows client, but who knows when it will be ready?

Can you help at all? What have I overlooked? Doesn’t anyone make what I’m looking for?

Short answer to last question:
No.

Longer answer:
No. But there are workarounds.

For those new to video, here’s an abbreviated chart of some video rates in megabytes per second:
[Adapted from Integrity Data Systems which offers the whole chart. Aspect ratios and frame rates left out.]
Update: Larry Jordan, a writer and trainer in video editing, graciously wrote to let me know that the above data rates are uncompressed – and that most production houses would use compressed data. The amount of compression varies based on the codec as Larry explains in this informative post. End update.

Issue 1: Interconnects
GigE won’t even handle 32-bit RGB standard def video. And when you get into HD video it gets hairier fast. Trunk multiple GigE’s? 10GbE? 4x Infiniband? FC? eSATA or PCI-e direct attached storage?

Issue 2: Virtualization
A single address space is a wonderful thing. You’ll need a software layer that clusters multiple boxes. You’ll also probably want to build an archive infrastructure that is distinct from your higher performance working set storage, but some vendors will disagree.

Likely software suspects include IBRIX, Parascale, Caringo, MatrixStore, Bycast and Permabit.

On the combined HW/SW side there’s Panasas and Isilon. Something tells me there are some other options, like HP’s Extreme Data Storage 9100, that are also applicable.

Lustre is not a product I would recommend since it was designed for HPC, a market where PhDs work as sysadmins. Sun may have tamed it since they bought it, but it is a non-trivial piece of software.

Come one, come all
StorageMojo readers are invited to offer their 2¢ worth. Architecting is non-trivial, especially if money is an object.

Update:
Our interlocutor wrote in to add some detail:

thanks for the response. Here’s some answers:

– We can manage expensive interfaces like 10GigE and Infiniband QDR. We’ve been paying for dual-channel 4Gb FC for the past few years, after all. I just want to also allow standard Gigabit connections to the cheap seats without a lot of complexity. So I guess the jargon for that would be “multiprotocol” switching?

– The large naming space might be a luxury. The fact is that jobs come in one of three general sizes, and we could have volumes of that size waiting to take on new jobs as they come in, so at least there is one namespace per job. As you said, capacity is cheap…

– Truth is I am pretty savvy, but other than that we have a lot of power desktop users but not sysadmin types. I contract some people with steady part-time work, but it has been our business model to try to keep as many of our full-time people on the creative and producing side as possible, and not in support/administration.

The one thing I don’t understand is what you say about Infiniband not being so great when there’s lots of node churn?

I know what you mean about DAS, but I think I’ve ruled out distributing the data through push/pull from a central repository. The fact is jobs just move to fast through here for that, and we often have about two seconds notice that we need to bring a certain job’s data to System X, Y or Z to do work on it. It’s very dynamic.

I see some brands in your blog post I haven’t checked on yet.

What turned me onto Lustre is that Frantic Films in London has deployed it. They’re the only ones AFAIK.
End update.

The StorageMojo take
Some thoughts on the infrastructure issues.

Capacity is cheap, network bandwidth is expensive. Raw SATA disk is less than $0.10/GB. 10GbE switch ports are over a grand apiece. Infiniband is better from a price/performance perspective, but not as friendly for networks where there is much node churn – unless that’s been fixed in the last few years.

Direct attached storage will give you the best performance – especially with 4k. The new PCI-e attached arrays from JMR and others can offer up to 4,000 MB/sec bandwidth. Stripe across 4 of those and you’ll be able to handle 8k.

Transaction processing is well on its way to niche status, like mainframes and hierarchical databases that once ruled the earth. It is a big file world out there and the files are getting bigger every year.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I’ve done work for many of these folks – but not all – at one time or another.

The current economic free fall makes one thing clear: the days of solid gold enterprise IT are numbered. Successful IT architects and managers must be expert in wringing the maximum business value from IT architecture and product choices.

But how, exactly, do you do that? The solid-gold strategy is easy: all the kit is the best money can buy; vendor service techs and SE’s are on-site; everything is over-configured; redundancy everywhere; and the sales team is golfing with the CIO.

But in tough economic times – which look to last a while thanks to Congressional economic illiteracy – the focus moves to getting the most bang for the buck. The problem is measuring that and convincing gimlet-eyed CFOs.

How about a little Clarity?
That’s where Clarity AP (Assessment & Planning) comes in. It uses Bayesian probability calculus to quantify system availability and recovery times.

The net net: you can calculate the availability of a system of discrete elements that each have their own availability probabilities. For example you can compare the availability – and the inverse, downtime – of a RAID 5 array to a RAID 6 array. Or an infrastructure composed of Big Iron arrays to one of clustered commodity boxes.

Compare a Tier IV data center to a Tier I. Add remote backup into the mix. Even, good heavens, cloud storage.

They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play!
Of course, the problem isn’t the math, it’s getting the data to feed the model. Most such IT “tools” are designed by consultants to extract money, not data.

The general pitch is “great tool, now hire us for 3 weeks to gather the data on your infrastructure.” That $100,000 “study” is mostly guys counting boxes in racks – with a little analysis tacked on.

Clarity AP is different. It’s got a catalog of storage devices from EMC, HP, IBM and others that you can drag and drop into a configuration. Then there’s a long list of processes – LTO backup to remote replication – as well.

In a few minutes you can build a model of a storage infrastructure. Then start changing elements and see the impact – financial as well as operational.

With very little effort you can show senior managers in charts and graphs where you are today, where you’d like to go, and how much it will reduce downtime and data loss.

Here’s a 4 minute StorageMojo Video White Paper on Clarity AP:

If you go to YouTube you can watch it in what they call HD. Click on the “watch in HD” link at the lower right corner of the player.

Brought to you by. . .
TwinStrata is a Boston-based startup whose 2 co-founders, Nicos Vekiarides and John Bates, have several decades of storage and DR experience between them. They co-founded StorageApps, which was acquired by HP in 200l.

The StorageMojo take
Everybody exhorts IT pros to be “business partners” to the LOBs, but nobody ever explains how. Clarity AP is a powerful tool for turning arcane technical details into dollars and cents.

All the business guys want to know is what they will get and how much will it cost. The civilians will thank you for, finally, speaking their language.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Yes, TwinStrata hired me to make the video. But I didn’t agree to it until I saw that they had something cool. Try it out yourself and let me – and them – know what you think.

Funny and provocative video (thanks David!) from Sun demonstrating 2 things:

• 15k drives are vibration sensitive – in this case to a shout a couple of inches away.
• That Sun’s Fishworks analysis suite enables realtime analysis of storage behavior.

Bad, bad, bad vibrations. . . .
Vibration issues are old news to the mechanical engineers who design enclosures. The Tsunami Harddisk Detector uses that fact for earthquake detection.

A commenter on Brendan Gregg’s Fishworks engineering blog claims that replacing fans with bad bearings improved array throughput. That can’t look good to civilians.

The StorageMojo take
With any luck at all we should see a spate of competing videos proclaiming that Brand X enclosures pass the “shout test.” Of course, they’ll probably have to use Fishworks for the demos, which is all to Sun’s good.

I left Sun a decade ago. This reminds me that many of Sun’s best promo ideas come from the techies, not the marketers.

Fishworks is the kind of great technology that has always been at the root of Sun’s appeal. Translating that appeal into sales is Sun’s marketing challenge.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Fishworks includes Bryan Cantrill’s brilliant Dtrace which I’ve been a fan of for years. Update: The too-often-right-for-his-own-good Wes says the drives aren’t 15k drives. I couldn’t find an RPM citation so I struck the 15k out above. A citation would be appreciated, eagle-eyed readers. End update.

Garth Gibson, is one of the authors of the original RAID paper (pdf), CMU professor, founder of the Parallel Data Lab, founder and head of the Petascale Data Storage Institute and founder and CTO of Panasas, a maker of parallel clustered NAS systems. I caught up with him at the Seattle Scalability Conference in June and taped about 40 minutes of conversation.

After much procrastination I got the videos edited and up on YouTube a month ago. In 16.5 minutes Garth covers large scale file systems, massively parallel supercomputer failure modes and backup strategy. Panasas provides the back-end storage file server for 6 of LANL’s supercomputers, including the world’s fastest: a 1 petaflop sustained machine named Roadrunner.

Here is part I:

And here is part II:

The StorageMojo take
The problems that LANL is having today will be much more common in 10 years. Not that we’ll all be running huge informatics apps or 6 month simulations of nuclear weapon decay, but if they can figure out the software, many of us will have 64 core – or more – desktop systems equal to a respectable commercial HPC installation today.

Maybe we’ll be running personal informatics jobs, looking for nascent trends in, oh, I don’t know, fantasy sports or parallel NFS. Or hosting virtual 3D game worlds that keep evolving even when we’re away. Somebody will think of something cool to eat those cycles and terabytes.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I did some work for Panasas last year. I also like their leadership on parallel NFS and object-based storage.

A video networking company in StorageMojo?
Omneon isn’t new to StorageMojo. Their price list has been on price list page since January 2007.

Their booth was about 50 yards from Isilon’s and EMC’s and it was a madhouse each time I walked by. Partly that was because they were holding all their meetings there, but it also seemed like there was lots of traffic.

Building storage into an app
Founded in 1998, Omneon started offering storage in response to customer demand. They decided on a commodity-based cluster and built their own storage software, MediaGrid.

Their architecture hews to the post-array Google-style storage model:

• No RAID – slices are replicated one or more times based on policy or demand
• Single global namespace
• Out-of-band meta-data servers manage content servers

<strike>They can rebuild a failed 1 TB drive in less than an hour.</strike> They can replicate the data from a failed 1 TB drive in less than an hour.  Just add 4 or 24 drive content servers to scale capacity. <strong>Update:</strong> My original wording was incorrect. Thanks to Bill Todd for elucidating Omneon’s mechanism.<strong> End update.</strong>

But that’s not all!
Omneon’s content servers do more than serve content. They put their unused CPU power to work doing jobs like transcoding – translating content from one format like HD to iPhone-suitable QuickTime.

Given the growth in multi-core processors that will become a more important part of their market appeal over time. Since they process files, not blocks, they have many more opportunities to add value than a modular array.

The StorageMojo take
Omneon made a lot of smart choices with their MediaGrid architecture. It shows how a company with a few bright engineers can build a basic storage utility to take advantage of low commodity costs.

Where they win is their integration with the application and the workflow. They’ve created a video utility that integrates ingest, post, media management and playout with the smart and scalable storage needed to make it all work.

Application specific storage writ large. They’ve taken the same storage the rest of us use and wrapped broadcast interfaces around it that broadcasters already know.

Comments welcome, of course.

Isilon at NAB
Stopped by the Isilon booth a couple of times. Traffic seemed steady. Isilon held their meetings away from the booth, so it didn’t have the level of activity of, say, Omneon’s booth.

NAB is their biggest show of the year and the market where they have the biggest footprint. Their booth was the same size as EMC’s nearby – and much quieter booth – despite a Hulk display that looked like an embarrassed afterthought.

Personnel changes at Isilon
Isilon CEO Sujal Patel was there. We discussed my theory that Peter van Oppen had joined the board as a prelude to becoming CEO. Sujal assured me I’d gotten it wrong – that he was in it for the long haul, with Peter as a senior and trusted advisor.

Looking at him I believed. Sujal has developed the gravitas of a leader. Watching his company almost die – and his net worth drop from $75 million to $12 million – seems to have concentrated his mind.

He’s also hired a CTO. Looks like Sujal has moved on for good.

The StorageMojo take
Anyone waiting for Isilon to lay down and die has a long wait. While they may have alienated Wall Street – for good reason – customers seem to like what they have. They’re coming through the storm.

Comments welcome, of course. Isilon was also doing the “shown but not announced” thing with some products due later this year. Sujal asked that I not write about them and I said I wouldn’t. But the engineers have been busy.

On the occasion of announcing a new HPC modular array, the Engenio-based 4600, SGI commissioned me to do a StorageMojo video for them.

Some interesting comments about modular vs cluster storage and CXFS. And I got to practice my radio voice.

We spoke for about an hour and I boiled down the comments of Raj Das of SGI and LSI’s Flavio Santoni – before putting the StorageMojo take on it.

Must get video page up soon
One thing about video: every syllable counts. This one gets into Apple’s Motion for the first time. Nothing wild though.

Update: The video came down for a couple of modest tweaks. Now it’s back – new and improved.
End update.

The StorageMojo take
Video is another way to reach people who aren’t going to plow through a white paper. In 4 minutes you meet some people, get exposed to some new ideas and maybe learn something. And you can be drinking coffee in your bathrobe at the same time!

Comments welcome, of course.