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.
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prime2515103 - Wednesday, August 7, 2013 - link
I know, it just seems unprofessional. It's a tech article, not a chat room.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
What is always missing from such essays (and this one reads more like a 'Seeking Alpha' pump piece) is a discussion of datastore structure. If you want speed and fewer bytes and your data isn't just videos, then an industrial strength RDBMS with a Organic Normal Form™ schema gets rid of the duplicate bytes. Too bad.DukeN - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
But has there actually been any disruptions to the top dogs?EMC, NetApp, storage from HP/Dell/IBM, Hitachi all have had significant earnings increases yet again.
So maybe a couple of new startups as well as FusionIO are making money now, but some of the big guys can probably just buy them out and shelf them.
davegraham - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Look at EMC's acquisition of XtremeI/O...that's a viable competitor that EMC has already been able to integrate as a mainstream product. Oh, and they're also using Virident PCIe cards for server-side flash. ;)DukeN - Wednesday, August 7, 2013 - link
But is that really disruptive, or business as usual? These guys usually buy up smaller technologies as needed and integrate them if needed. Most of their core business (spinning disks) has remained the same.bitpushr - Friday, August 9, 2013 - link
XtremIO is still not a shipping product. It is not generally-available. So, I do not think this qualifies as "integrate as a mainstream product".Likewise their server-side Flash sales (Project Lightning) have been extremely slow.
phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
If you ditch Windows on the desktop, you can do a lot more for a lot less.$22,000 for a Nutanix node to support a handful of virtual desktops? And you still need the VDI client systems on top of that? Pffft, for $3000 CDN we can support 200-odd diskless Linux workstations (diskless meaning they boot off the network, mount all their filesystems via NFS, and run all programs on the local system using local CPU, local RAM, local GPU, local sound, etc). The individual desktops are all under $200 (AMD Athlon-II X3 and X4, 2 GB of RAM, onboard everything; CPU fan is the only moving part) and treated like appliances (when one has issues, just swap it out for a spare).
No licensing fees for the OS, no licensing fees for 90+% of the software in use, no exorbitant markup on the hardware. And all staff and students are happy with the system. We've been running this setup in the local school district for just shy of 10 years now. Beats any thin-client/VDI setup, that's for sure.
turb0chrg - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Another vendor doing hybrid storage is Nimble Storage (http://www.nimblestorage.com/). I've looked at their solution and it is quite impressive. It's not cheap though.They also claim to be the fastest growing storage vendor!
dilidolo - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
I have 2 of them for VDI, they work fine, but I wouldn't call it enterprise storage.equals42 - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
It's only iSCSI so you better like that protocol.