The Impact of Disruptive Technologies on the Professional Storage Market
by Johan De Gelas on August 5, 2013 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- SSDs
- Enterprise
- Enterprise SSDs
CloundFounders: Cloud Storage Router
The latency of DSS on top of slow SATA disks is of course pretty bad. CloudFounders solves this by using an intelligent flash cache that caches both reads and writes. The so-called “Storage Accelerator” is part of the Cloud Storage Router and runs on top of the DSS backend.
First of all, the typical 4KB writes are all stored on the SSD. The 4KB are aggregated into a Storage Container Object (SCO), typically 16MB in size. As a result, the flash cache is used for what it can do best (working with 4KB blocks) and the DSS SATA backend will only see sequential writes of 16MB. The large SATA magnetic disks perform a lot better with large sequential writes than small random ones.
A server with virtual machines can connect to several Cloud Storage Routers. Blocks of a virtual disk can be spread over several flash caches. The result is that performance can scale with the number of nodes where Cloud Storage Routers are active. The magic to make this work is that the metadata is distributed among all cloud storage routers (using a Paxos distributed database), so “hot blocks” can be transferred from several flash caches of several nodes at the same time. The metadata also contains a hash of each 4KB block. As hash codes of each 4KB block in the cache are compared, the cache is “deduped” and each 4KB block is written only once.
As the blocks of virtual disk are distributed over the DSS, the failure of compute or storage nodes does not need to be disruptive. Compute node failure can be solved by enabling VMware HA, storage nodes failures can be solved by configuring the DSS durability policy. As the metadata is distributed, the remaining cloud storage routers will be able to find the blocks on the DSS that belong to a certain virtual disk.
Last but not least, the Cloud Storage Routers can also distribute the check blocks over cloud storage like Amazon S3 or an Openstack Swift implementation. The data is also secure as the blocks are encoded and spread over many volumes. Only the Cloud Storage Routers know how to assemble the data.
Highly scalable, very reliable, and very flexible (e.g. when used with Amazon S3): the CloudFounder Storage Router sounds almost too good to be true. We have setup a Storage Router in our lab and can confirm that it can do some amazing things like replicating an ESXi VM across the globe and booting it as a Hyper-V VM. We are currently designing some benchmarks to compare it with traditional storage systems, so we hope to report back with some solid tests. But it is safe to say that the combination of Bitspread and the Cloud Storage Router is very different from the traditional RAID enabled SAN and storage gateway.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
60 Comments
View All Comments
pjkenned - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Hi Johan, one thing to be clear about is that the dollars you are quoting in this article are off by a huge margin. Enterprise storage is one of the most highly discounted areas of technology. Happy to chat more on this subject. Patrick @STHname99 - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Ahh, the never-ending whine of the Enterprise sale man, who desperately wants to have it both ways --- to be able to charge a fortune and simultaneously to claim that he's not charging a fortune. Good luck with that --- there is, after all, a sucker born every minute.But let's get one thing straight here. If your organization refuses to publish the actual prices at which it sells, then you STFU when people report the prices that ARE published, not the magic secret prices that you claim exist but neither you nor anyone else are ever allowed to actually mention them. You don't get to have it both ways.
AnandTech and similar blogs are not in the business of sustaining your obsolete business model and its never-ending lies about price...
enealDC - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Thank you!!! lolJohanAnandtech - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
You can not blame a company to do whatever they can to protect their business model, but your comment is on target. The list versus street price models reminds of techniques of salesman on the street in touristic areas: they charge 3 times too much, and you end up with a 50% discount. The end result is that you are still ripped off unless you have intimate knowledge.nafhan - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
My experience with stuff like this is that the low prices are geared towards locking you into their products and getting themselves in the door. As soon as these companies feel certain that changing to a different storage tech would be prohibitively expensive for you, the contract renewal price will go through the roof.In other words, that initial price may actually be very good and very competitive. Just don't expect to get the same deal when things come up for contract renewal.
equals42 - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
You shouldn't be making enterprise purchasing decisions unless you have intimate knowledge and have done the necessary research.pjkenned - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
So three perspectives:First - I have been advocating open storage projects for years. I do think we are moving to 90%+ of the market being 4TB drives and SSDs and SDS is a clear step in this direction. I don't sell storage but have been using open platforms for years precisely because of the value I can extract through the effort of sizing the underlying hardware.
Second - Most of the big vendors are public companies. It isn't hard to look at gross margin and figure out ballpark what average discounts are. Most organizations purchasing this type of storage have other needs. The market could push for lower margins so my sense is that the companies buying this class of storage are not just paying for raw storage.
Third - vendors are moving the direction of lower discounts at the low end. Published list prices there are much closer to actual as the discounting trend in the industry is towards lower list prices.
Not to say that pricing is just or logical, but then again, it is a large industry that is poised for a disruptive change. One key thing here is that I believe you can get pricing if you just get a quote. This is the same as other enterprise segments such as the ERP market.
equals42 - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
I'll not ask you to STFU as you eloquently abbreviated it. Though in general I believe people ultimately charge what they believe the market will pay.Yes, list prices are generously overpriced in the IT industry. But to ask EMC or IBM to tell you how much they really charge for things is stupid. That's a negotiated rate between them and their customer. BofA or WalMart isn't going to disclose how much they pay for services. Their low negotiated price helps drive efficiencies to better compete with rivals. Heck, ask Kelloggs how much Target pays per box for cereal vs WalMart. No way in hell they're going to tell you. You think a SMB is going to get the same price as Savvis or Bank of America? They can ask for it but good luck. I sense some naiveté in your response.
In essence you're complaining about how inflated the list is vs what the average customer pays. That's a game played out based on supply and demand, market expectations and the blended costs of delivering products.
prime2515103 - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
"Note that the study does not mention the percentage customer stuck in denial :-)."I don't mean to be a jerk or anything, but I can't believe I just read that on Anandtech. It's not the grammar either. A smiley? Good grief...
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
I fixed the sentence, but left the smiley in there. My prerogative ;-)