NoSQL in the metadata engine room

by Robin Harris on Monday, 3 October, 2011

One more datapoint and we’ll have a trend: NoSQL databases managing metadata. It’s obvious in retrospect: use a scalable big data tool to handle scale-out metadata. Maybe not a requirement today, but surely will be with even bigger data tomorrow.

Metadata is a fraction of the user data set, but it gets hammered much more. As more metadata is found useful the hammering will get more insistent.

Nutanix
Nutanix, whose CTO and co-founder, Mohit Aron, was a developer of the Google File System, uses MapReduce. Nutanix achieves it scale due to its distributed metadata, masterless architecture – powered by MapReduce jobs that run in the background.

Druva
Druva, a backup company for mobile devices, also uses a NoSQL database to manage storage metadata. They say they’ve found that NoSQL scales over an order of magnitude better than relational in similar applications.

Somebody else
A company that shall remain nameless is porting Hadoop to their backend. The customer won’t be able to access Hadoop for their work – it is strictly for the system’s internal use.

It is a proof of concept so it isn’t a 3rd data point, but they see the potential advantages. Call it data point 2½.

The StorageMojo take
Small advances are the building blocks of disruption. RAID made it possible to build available storage using cheap disks. Consumer adoption of PCs made disks even cheaper. Moore’s Law made RAID controllers cheaper and faster, or faster and more capable.

A virtuous circle of disruption.

The basic architecture of scale-out storage systems – purpose-built software on clustered commodity hardware – has been stable. But this is the beginning of scale-out storage 2.0: taking scale-out technology developed for users and incorporating it into the storage infrastructure itself.

These ideas are bubbling up among the latest startups and among the establishment players. At some point the old RAID architectures will be well and truly broken, able to compete in smaller and smaller niches until the revenue can’t justify more investment.

Of course vendors have been making RAID controllers out of servers for years now, and those servers can run any software they want. But at some point the explicit and implicit assumptions in the old architecture crash into current realities – either in cost, development time, feature completeness or management overhead – and then we move on.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I learned about Nutanix at the last Tech Field Day “The Independent IT Influencer Event” which paid for my travel expenses to Silicon Valley.

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Storage @VMworld 2011

by Robin Harris on Monday, 12 September, 2011

VMworld is the best storage show I’ve seen in years. VMware’s severe storage problems leave users hungry for solutions – and your friendly neighborhood storage industry is happy to oblige.

It’s almost as if VMware were owned by a storage company.

Flash everywhere
Fusion-io, Nimble Storage, Nimbus Data, Avere, Pure and more were talking about how well flash supports VMware. Fixes VDI boot storms, deduped VMDKs, I/O bound servers and much more.

Pure Storage
Here is Pure’s Matt Kixmoeller giving a nifty demo in this 50 second video:

Not exactly sure what those thousand VMs were doing. Maybe Pure will comment.

Falconstor
I lost track of Falconstor due to their OEM focus and sprawling product line. New CEO Jim McNiel has refocused the company – with the help of former Cheyenne teammates – on backup, business continuity/DR, dedup and virtualization.

Their clustered Network Storage Server turns all of Fstor’s products into tin-wrapped software suitable for channel partners. Takeaway: forget what you knew about them; they are a new company.

Virsto
While the release of their storage hypervisor for VMware makes them seem like a new company, Virsto has been shipping product for over a year, but on Hyper-V, not VMware. Microsoft lost interest in server virtualization and Virsto moved on.

Their product is a virtual appliance that:

. . . runs in each host, creating a transparent virtual storage layer that is thin provisioned, fully cluster-aware, supports very rapid snapshot and clone creation, and scales to support tens of thousands of high performance snapshots and clones.

Virsto . . . decouple[s] application performance from any dependence on the rotational latencies and seek times of underlying disk associated with random writes. All random writes are sequentialized and written directly to a transparent logging device . . . and then asynchronously de-staged to primary storage. . . .

Net/net: high performance virtual storage regardless of underlying physical storage. Virsto offers a free trial – if you try it, let me know how it works.

But wait! There’s more!
Cloud-related products from StorSimple, AMAX and Raidundant continue to pick at the problem of how/when/where cloud integrates with the enterprise.

The StorageMojo take
Many cool products and ideas. The storage problems of many virtual machines are not unlike those of earlier time-shared virtual memory systems, but the scale is much greater.

And when the scale is greater the problem is fundamentally different. As virtualization grows we’ll need to see more creative answers beyond deduplication and flash.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Message to SNIA: storage networking is passé. Time to retool for the world of virtual machines, noSQL databases, scale-out storage and flash-enabled architectures. New name would be a start.

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Flash cheaper than disk? Really?

by Robin Harris on Monday, 29 August, 2011

Pure Storage, a well-funded ($55M) valley startup, came out of hiding last week with a startling claim: enterprise flash that is cheaper1,2,3 than disk.

1Cheaper after compressing and deduping the data.

2Cheaper after using almost all the flash capacity, which you can’t do with disks because performance suffers.

3Cheaper compared to the most expensive disk-based enterprise storage you can buy.

Your mileage will vary
4 years ago an EMC VP predicted that flash would replace high-end disks in 2010. That didn’t happen. Why?

After 5 years of hype, enterprises are still leery of flash. Endurance, reliability, data integrity, security, integration – all unanswered questions. At least by the other IT guys in town, even if vendors think they’ve nailed it.

So people buy the known quantity: high-end drives.

The StorageMojo take
Kudos to Pure’s marketing for making a bold, attention-grabbing statement. Too often marketing falls back on the trite-and-true “faster, better, cheaper.”

But IT wants to solve old problems while not introducing new ones. The 10x performance boost would be enough, if IT believed.

Pure’s challenge – as well as other companies with similar products – is to convince IT that not only is flash ready for primetime – but that compression and dedup are too.

And once they do that, why not use them with disks, as well? As Nimble Storage has found, inline compression is now easily handled in software on multi-core chips.

With raw SATA drives down to 3¢/GB, storage vendors have ample opportunity to squeeze costs out. The flash/disk competition will be good for all of us.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. The storage high-end is more active than its been in 15 years. Good!

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StorageMojo @ VMworld

by Robin Harris on Wednesday, 17 August, 2011

A shout out to all ‘worlders: the StorageMojo analyst team will be descending en masse on the lush Nevada desert (yes, in Phoenix real estate people often tout the “lush desert” – don’t they know what desert means?) to take in our 1st VMworld.

We’re arriving the 29th & departing the 31st. Hope to learn a lot more about storage in the virtual world.

The StorageMojo take
Data storage is hard enough when your CPUs aren’t VMotioning across the globe. Dealing with the related issues of concurrency, consistency and limited network bandwidth makes it even more challenging.

I’m interested in seeing what Virsto is announcing as well as what is coming from companies I haven’t yet heard of. Do readers have any suggestions for vendors that shouldn’t be missed?

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Even though it is a hike to the Venetian and the Wynn, I’m going to stay in one of the new City Center hotels.

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Dear StorageMojo: cheap home bulk storage?

by Robin Harris on Monday, 8 August, 2011

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.

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Beta hunt: Java Platform as a Service

by Robin Harris on Friday, 5 August, 2011

Running – or planning to run – some bigtime Java apps? A Silicon Valley startup named Cumulogic is looking for a few good beta testers to help them wring out their Java Paas.

Their ideal tester can use a Java PaaS running on either vSphere, Eucalyptus or Cloud.com private clouds or Amazon’s EC2. They currently support Ngnix 0.8, Apache 2.x, Tomcat 7.x, JBoss 4.x-6.x, and MySQL 5.x, MongoDB as well as connections to an Oracle database.

They know that a lot of people run WebLogic or Websphere and have those on their roadmap, but this is where they are today. If you have a Websphere cloud license they can support that.

Their control panel seemed reasonably complete in the demo I saw, but that’s the point of demos, isn’t it? If everything worked perfectly it wouldn’t be a beta.

The StorageMojo take
PaaS is a sweet spot: apps + data + computes all in one place. Is Java on PaaS an even sweeter spot? You tell me.

But the beta tester has an important role because development teams don’t know what they don’t know. The model user they have in mind is, in my experience, rarely seen in the wild.

It is that rawest market feedback dev teams get. If Java is important to you please register for the beta. Click around and you can find out more about them

If you do beta it I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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Nimble Storage architecture video

by Robin Harris on Wednesday, 3 August, 2011

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.

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Careers@StorageMojo kicks off

by Robin Harris on Monday, 1 August, 2011

Non-RSS readers of StorageMojo may have noticed something new today: job listings. This is a partial answer to the question “how can StorageMojo do more for the smartest audience in the storage industry (while doing a little something for StorageMojo)?

StorageMojo has teamed up with Ray Holley, a dynamic tech recruiter, to offer startups and emerging companies – the big guys have plenty of people working for them – flexible and cost-effective recruiting services. In a small company every hire matters. One wrong hire can poison a team and set you back months – if you can afford months. And the right hire can supercharge you.

Which is where StorageMojo’s smart and passionate cohort comes in. If you’re doing something new and different in storage, monstrous job boards aren’t where the talent is. StorageMojo is.

And if you’re looking to do something new and different in storage, the startup scene is zestier than ever. Between flash, cloud, scale-out, consumerization and virtualization there are more degrees of freedom in storage than anytime in the last 30 years. And the growing storage needs of customers ensure that new niches and markets will be spawning.

Learn more at StorageMojo careers. Or click on the listed jobs.

The StorageMojo take
Hiring is one of the toughest jobs in a startup, right after raising money. I know from experience that good people make all the difference.

In a big company you can hire someone – even an executive – who doesn’t know what he’s doing and ease them out after a year or so with no great damage. But not in a small company.

So I wish every hiring manager the best of luck – whether they work with us or not – because it’s the people that make your company go.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Feel free to share hiring stories – good and bad – in the comments.

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