Ilja Coolen \ ICSS

I wasn’t aware of all the stuff F5 does, so I am glad to have been part of this, because the things they showed us were quite impressive. The online vMotion of a virtual machine between data centers is what really made the biggest impression if you ask me.

Not all live demo’s done by presenters go without flaw. That’s the biggest danger of doing live demo’s in front of an IT crowd. If something should go wrong, the IT crowd is sure to notice it. You might end up looking like a fool. But not here at the F5 Tech Field Day session. F5 could proudly rely on their own equipment and knowledge to pull of their demo without a problem.

For all the stuff we got to see, the data was hosted on a NFS share, so these demo’s certainly do not apply to all VMware installations. F5 strengths are not in the Fibre channel arena, but in the IP arena. In there, they are able to kick some serious IP ass.

I was shown some impressive network (WAN) optimization products like the BIG-IP  Local Traffic Managers and Global Traffic Managers. Load balancing and IP fail-over, all done, all working. I am not a networking guy, so I was actually more into the ARX series device. If you are more of IP guy or gall, try some of the other Tech Field Day blog posts.

ARX Series.

This device is a NAS virtualization product, a technology F5  acquired by buying Acopia in 2007. You can put this in front of one or more file serving devices, either CIFS or NFS based, and have all of this virtualized.

The applications and users in your environment will talk to the ARX device, which in turn will serve your data from it’s backend NAS devices like NetApp, HP PolyServ, Dell NX series or regular file servers.

With the ARX device you can define a whole bung of policies which control the management of your file data. Based on age, file extensions, or what ever policy you might want to set, the data can get moved to another file storage tier in your environment. You could move all your employees mp3 files to a low cost SATA array with no protection for instance. Many scenarios are possible, only limited by your imagination and wallet I guess.

Some additional features you would probably like to have in your environment, like virus scanning, is not available. You will still be relying on the methods in place on the file serving gear you are already using. Data protection of the files you are storing is also not a feature provided by the ARX. It is what it is. File virtualization. If you want data protection, you still would want to use the features your NAS devices provides, or rely on the more traditional methods like file based backup or NDMP. This product can help in reducing your backup volume though, by moving unused (or almost never used) data off to a tier that has different backup schemes, or maybe no backup at all (not my recommendation though).

The next step in tiering your data would be to put it into the ” cloud ” (here’s that term again) so you would no longer have to operationally manage this data in your infrastructure, including backup handling. The ARX has several API interfaces to the currently biggest cloud storage vendors ready to go. F5 showed us another successful demo in which they were able to show us just how seamless the integration works. From an end-user perspective there was no difference noticeable as to where the file was actually stored. With large files, you might experience some delay however. This was not shown in the demo, because it could take up a lot of our precious time.

The file will remain in the cloud, even if it is updated. The update of a file will not result in the file being stored on a local tier. This can cause some delay in the file manipulation transaction. Only new files will be matched to a policy to store it on a local tier. I have some reservations whether or not this is a good way to work. I would think storing the updated file locally would be the better way to go. I might be missing some detailed information on the policy options here. That’s because the session wasn’t long enough to go into it in that much detail. Feel free to comment on this post if you can offer more detailed info on the policies or have any other remark on this post.

The ARX box comes in three sizes.

1. ARX500
   1. Entry level, single power supply.
   2. 800 Mbps throughput.
   3. 2 x 1Gb/s.
   4. Supporting up to 600 users.
2. ARX2000
   1. A redundantly powered device.
   2. 4Gbps throughput.
   3. 12 x 1Gb/s.
   4. Supporting up to 6000 users.
3. ARX4000
   1. Like the ARX2000, a redundantly powered device.
   2. 12Gbps throughput.
   3. 2 x 10Gb/s.
   4. 12 x 1Gb/s.
   5. Supporting up to 12000 users.

There is a question I have about the maximum number of users it supports. The numbers are very high obviously, but are they based on -1- active session per user, or not? It is very rare for a user to have just -1- active session to a file server.

The device in itself is a single point of failure, no matter how robust the hardware and software is. If you want a high-availability solution, your should buy at least two, and put them in a cluster configuration. I wasn’t able to determine whether or not you could make it a stretched cluster to span two data centers to provide availability and disaster tolerance.

Data Manager

In case you might be curious on how much file data you have and how much of it is actually used, you could go discover your file data using the F5 Data Manager. You can try it for free for 90 days. That’s actually quite a long trial period.
Data Manager gives you some elaborate reports on your file data and profiles.

More on Data Manager…

This morning, I saw a tweet about a x86 blade being shoved into a zSeries frame.
It appeared to be an IBM Press release introducing new developments in IBM zSeries land. Like tape, mainframe is dead for years (so they say). There are not many analysts that believe this statement, and mainframe is long from being dead. I do see fewer of them however. Only the very large (mostly financial) companies seem to be able to run zSeries workloads because of the expertise and cost involved with running zSeries.

Over the last years, IBM has done a lot of development in mainframe equipment and really has brought down cost of running mainframe gear. For most IT folks, the mainframe has lost its sexiness (if it ever was sexy), and it has gotten really hard to find decent staff to operate mainframe gear and workloads. So in a technical and financial sense, the mainframe might be long from dead, but without good staff, who can run mainframe gear in their shops? I have been seeing a lot of new faces in the IT industry, none of which seem to be developing skills in the mainframe arena.

The open systems world seems to be more exciting because the development is done much faster and cheaper (although I myself might not agree with the cheaper part). Many new developments in the various IT stacks like networking, storage, systems and software are solely targeted at open systems worlds, completely ignoring the mainframe world. The vendors we spoke last week at Tech Field Day also have no plans on developing for mainframe. Part of which is the mainframe vendors own fault, since they have really closed down access to mainframe development resources for everyone.

zEnterprise (z196)

The new zEnterpise will be available later this year, and will hold 96 of the worlds fastest CPU’s running at 5.2 Ghz. It has water-cooling enablement. Funny, because water-cooling was removed around the time I was introduced to the mainframe world, back in 1996. This system is going to have 60% more capacity then its predecessor “System z10″, while consuming about the same amount of energy.

Introducing the BladeCenter Extension.

IBM is also developing gear which is supposed to simplify the data-center. The’d be stupid not to obviously. The BladeCenter extension is a frame that can be attached to the new IBM zEnterprise “main”-frame which will be able to hold a number of “open systems” blades.

” The IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension allows supports purpose IBM POWER7 and System x BladeCenter systems as well as blades optimized for specific workloads, such as analytics and managing Web infrastructure.”

• Later this year IBM will be introducing the Power7 blades to run IBM AIX
• Next year, xSeries blades will be running Linux OS in this extension.

Using the new Unified Resource Management software, IBM claims to be able to run over a 100,000 virtual machines on a fully configured zEnterprise system.

The mainframe software has a very well deserved reputation of being extremely manageable and configurable and is well known for its stability and predictability. My life in IT once started as a MVS operator, so I always have had a weakness for mainframe environments.

What this will hold for us in the future, who knows, but if IBM manages to gets the virtualization part of the ground including Microsoft Windows workloads, this might be another player in the UCS and VCE arena worth watching, although I sure hope there is a way to run this zEnterprise system without the need of mainframe system engineering skills. If these skills are required to operate this system, I think the market is limited to the current mainframe shops and will pose no threat to the UCS and VCE solutions.

My opinion on this is, unless IBM manages to run this system with the server virtualization features a la VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V they will have a hard time selling this. Even in the shops that already deploy mainframe gear.

The data center convergence question I have for IBM is; when will you join in convergence with “Ficon over Ethernet (FioE)” or in accordance with recent Tech Field Day developments FCoTR?

But I love to be educated on the markets IBM is targeting and how they would be doing that.

This post actually is more of a summary of notes I took during Tech Field Day in Seattle 2010.

• NEC is very environmentally aware and has some very strickt rules about every innovation has to be more environmentally friendly than the product it replaces.
• NEC is active in very many industries, from space engineering to construction.

Mini HYDRAstor

The Mini HYDRAstor is the same as a regular HYDRAstor, but the storage and accelerator nodes are both in one chassis.

• GA’d June 30th 2010
• Same code base as it’s bigger brother.

HYDRAstor

• Two tier approach
  • Accelerator nodes (XEON based arch)
  • Storage nodes
• Unrestricted expandability.
• Each tier is independently expandable, so we have scale-up and scale-out.
• Each node can be independently replaced by new equipment if available, without disruption. NEC calls this Adaptive Grid Storage.
• All the modern techniques are available, like Thin provisioning (not sure about zero-page-reclaims though.
• All nodes are interconnected through 1Gbs interfaces. The SN have 4 ports each.
• Global Inline De-Dupe
• Application aware De-Dupe (based on profiles selected during creation of the share). The SN knows what part of the incoming data is user data and what part is meta data. After separating this data, the dedupe only is done on the user data. This enables better De-Dupe ratios.
• HYDRAstor comes with 1 Storage Node for every 2 Accelerator Nodes.
• Filesystem size is 256PB by default.
• Shares can be on NFS or CIFS (SMB1 though).
• CIFS and NFS mountpoints can not be the same filesystem. They have to be separate filesystems.
• WORM FS (HYDRAlock)
• Licencing is based on the feature and the number of accelerator nodes it is configured on.
• RepliGrid – allows for data to be sent offsite for DR purposes (aSYNC).
• HYDRAstor architecture features: 1) support multiple generations of node hardware in one grid.
• HYDRAstor architecture features: 2) non-disruptively add multiple generations of nodes to existing grid.
• HYDRAstor architecture features: 3) capacity automatically discovered WITHOUT provisioning.
• HYDRAstor architecture features: 4) existing data auto load balanced across nodes.
• HYDRAstor architecture features: 5) data resiliency level automatically maintained via Distributed Resilient Data.
• There are no virus scanning features.
• Many-to-one and many-to-many replication (at this time, there is a 16:1 fan-in ration).
• In-flight encryption.
• HYDRAstor-Netbackup OpenStorage Integration.
  • Dynamic IO        (free of charge)
  • Optimized Copy
• Snapshot and replication are not charged extra.

Storage Nodes

• Automated aggregations of scattered fragments.
• storage nodes scale from 10TB to 20PB with all storage managed as 1 logical pool of capacity.

Accelerator Nodes

• 20 AN’s achieve 10GB/s
• 500MB/s per NEC Accelerator Node
• 36TB/Hour on a 4 rack system (20 AN / 40 SN config)
• An 11-rack HYDRAstor delivers over 25 GB per second or 90 TB per hour of throughput.
• Takes care of the chunk based De-Duped replication, based on a filesystem level.

Erasure Coding

• User determines the level of resiliency. You can enable protection to up to 6 disk failures.
• Data chunks are variable in size.
• No RAID, therefore no penalty in RAID rebuilds after failing disks.
• Chunk is broken down in fragments, this technique is called Distributed Resilient Data (DRD).
• Recovery of failed disks is always performed on the remaining storage, and is not postponed until the failed disk is replaced.
• Minimum of 9 chunks are required to reconstruct the fragments into user data. The first 9 received chunks are used, therefore not being impacted by busy SN having a high latency/delay.

Availability

• Europe / EMEA region is not yet on the roadmap.
• Just Japan and Northern US.

Pricing

• Smallest config :
  • $40,000.- Starting at 4TB (listprice)
  • $25,000.- per additional 4TB (max 12TB raw cap)
• Largest config :
  • Minimum $120,000.-

What’s missing

• Cloud-> add REST interface to enable cloud services.
• SMB2.0 or higher would greatly enhance performance for CIFS enabled backup applications or end-users storing files on it directly.
• Virus Scanning (for customers that would like to store files on it directly)
• For long term archiving a MAID implementation would be the GREEN option.
• EMEA availability.

References

• Reference customers get support costs discount.
• Case Studies

The last couple of days were a blast. It deserves a special note that the organisation of the “Seattle 2010 Tech Field Day” was
phenomenal. Everything was taken care of. The delegates had nothing to worry about, except maybe trying to look good on camera. After a while you actually didn’t notice the camera crew anymore and you wouldn’t worry about your appearance anymore.

We gathered at the Cedarbrook Lodge (which was a stunningly beautiful place to stay at actually) and had a welcoming dinner on Wednesday. This dinner was intended to get to know each other a bit better. There were a couple of newbies (like me) among the delegates, so this was quite a nice way to get introduced.

A shuttle bus took us from one conference location to the other. The schedule was tight, but given the live discussion we had during the sessions, this was actually a good thing, otherwise this conference would take a week. The locations were absolutely great. We get to spend some time at the “Microsoft Partner Center” two days in a row, and we went to the Microsoft on campus shop. Some of you who know me, would probably think “what the heck is he doing in a Microsoft shop”, but I would actually have bought a outdoor type jacket. The dumb thing however was, there was no clothing in my size. Most of the stuff was in 2XL to 6XL (US size charts), were I am only an XL in the European size chart. This is somewhere like a US medium size . Hey, I am just saying….

We also visited the F5 Networks HQ, and the NEC America site in Seattle. We were welcomed and treated with much hospitality everywhere we went. NEC might not have the most fancy office interior, their presentation to me was actually one of the best. I can’t explain why exactly I feel like that, but I think it has something to do with the way Gideon Senderov (NEC Director, Product Management & Technical Marketing of Advanced Storage Products) showed his knowledge of the NEC gear we went to see. His in depth knowledge was absolutely astounding. I don’t mean to say the other vendor’s presenters didn’t know their stuff, the absolutely did, but Gideon rose way above them. NEC, like F5, Compellent, Veeam and NimbleStorage did some live demo’s on their gear. They made it all happen, not a single glitch. Another impression I had during the NEC session, was they were a bit more open and honest about what their gear could and could not do. Most other vendors try to avoid answering questions that lead to an answer that points out that their gear cannot do a specific thing. Mostly it’s not a big deal.

The launch of the Nimble Storage company and their product introduction was also a very great experience. I think it takes  courage to launch a product in front of a bunch of tech analysts and critics. But Nimble pulled it of just great, and the product made a great impression.

Looking back on those days, there is absolutely nothing negative to say about the organisation and effort that was put into this event by the organizers, Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett) and Claire Chaplais (@-I-Dont-Twitter) and the sponsors. It was a great experience and a big thank you is in order. It was great meeting you all and thank you for making me part of it.

TIP: For all you guys that read this blog, if you ever get to go to Seattle WA, make sure you take the Seattle Underground tour to get to know the Seattle history a little better. It costs about $15 (US) and takes some 90minutes, but this is so worth it. You’ll love. Be sure to leave a comment if you do though.

OK, I know you guys are expecting more on the other “Gestalt IT – Tech Field Day sessions”. Please be patient. I have a bunch of notes I will work through, but I am going to work on them on my way home in the plane. Got plenty of time then. I am going to spend Saturday and a part of Sunday enjoying myself in Seattle WA.

What you can expect to be here soon ;

• DAY 1 - F5 Networks
• DAY 1 – Compellent
• DAY 2 - NEC HYDRAstor

During these past presentations at Tech Field Day, the overall notion I got was that all (new) storage vendors announcing new products are putting the focus of connectivity at IP based storage primarily. Some are still putting in Fibre Channel as a method of connectivity, it isn’t their most important one anymore.
You can definitely notice the adoption of CEE (Converged Enhanced Ethernet) or DCB (Data Center Bridging) and it might still enable vendors to put in the FC protocol, but iSCSI and NFS/CIFS is actually getting much more attention than I would have anticipated. In the list of products we have discussed the last two days, there’s actually just one that has FC on board.

• NEC HYDRAstor (CIFS/NFS)
• Compellent, iSCSI and FC (Series 20, 30 and 40)
• Compellent NAS head
• NimbleStorage CS Series (iSCSI)
• F5 Networks (actually only file service virtualization as a storage product, but definitely IP based)

I know there’s way more vendors out there, but I just wanted to illustrate my observations of the last couple of days. For a complete list, I might be putting up a new post.

The 10Gb Ethernet is definitely changing the arena here, and FC might lose the dominance in the data-center after a renewal cycle or two.

The delegates had a peek at the local datacenter (demo center actually). That was fun, as it appeared to be a windtunnel. We had to hold on to the racks to not get blown away.

Although the industry is working on FCoE as a convergence the specialists and analysts all seem the be thinking Fibre Channel over Token Ring will really be the spinner this year.

I wanted to make sure you guys don’t miss out on this new emerging technology.

• http://fctr.blogspot.com/
• http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/07/16/fibre-channel-token-ring-fcotr/

The TechFieldDay success must be huge, when a company decides to use TFD as a platform to announce it’s launch. The delegates are all witnessing this launch. It is a great experience to be able to be part of an event like TFD, especially when you also get to be part of a new companies launch.

The introduction

The new company is called NimbleStorage, was founded in 2008 and is based in San Jose.  Nimble Storage offers a hybrid of flash and SATA storage array. The 3U high box services iSCSI storage and has a fixed size, no scale-up. Nimble Storage claims to achieve 60% cost reduction than existing solutions. Nimble’s storage architecture is “log-structured file system” which was created by Mendel Rosenblum (VMware founder).

• Varun Mentha (CEO & Co-Founder) kicks off by introducing his crew.
• Umesh Maheshwari (CTO & Co-Founder and filesystem expert)
• Dan Leary (VP Marketing)
• Ajay (Former Netapp)

Nimble Storage will be selling through VAR channels exclusively. At first they will be selling in the US only, but expansion to Europe will be in the works for 2011.

The technology

• (MLC) Flash and Low-cost High-capacity SATA disks iSCSI based storage targeted at the mid-sized enterprises.
• Point in time snapshot primary Replication based DR
• Capacity optimized snapshots in stead of traditional backup to eliminate backup windows.
• Listpricing < $3/GB
• Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL Highlists)
  • LZ-ish based inline compression reduces data 2-4x (no dedupe)
  • Flash caters to high-performance for all active data
  • SATA disk cost-effectively stores all primary data and 90 days worth of snapshots
  • WAN efficient offsite replication
• Application aware snapshots/backups (Microsoft VSS and VMware integration)
• Nimble Storage says they are 35x time more space efficient than leading vendors in this market (eg:Dell/Equalogic)
• Different retentions periods for local and remote data
• Bi-directional replication
  • System many-to-one replication.
  • Volume is one-to-one replication. This means many systems can replicate to one, but a single volume only has a single replication relationship.
• Rapid fail-over between sites (including flexible iqn identities)
• Version 1.0 is not cascaded replication, but it will be there in future releases
• Application templates
  • Predifined application aware storage and data protection configuration
  • LUN Blocksizes are matched to the application
  • LUN Caching is matched to the application
• Zero-copy hypervisor integrated cloning (included in the package)
• Web based GUI, and SSH based full featured CLI interface
• Full autosupport feature built-in (Real-Time Phone Home Support)
• MPIO is used for fail-over, no network based LACP

The flash storage is used as an intelligent cache that holds all the active data. What is active data is determined by the use frequency (and more). The cache is indexed. All data is written to SATA disks, so the flash disks are really only used as cache. All incoming data is compressed inline. Due to compression, the actual blocksize of the written data can vary. Because all the data is written sequentially to the SATA disks, the various blocksizes pose no real issue, and they are all supported. This also enables an application specific blocksize. By using templates in the definition for volumes, you can match the blocksize to match the blocksize to for example an Microsoft Exchange database volume, and another volume for it’s logs where both have different blocksizes.

All volumes can have their own snapshot schedules, or they can be grouped together in Protection Sets, which can be considered consistency groups (volume groups, not hosts groups).

You might be affraid that the SATA disk would provide bad performance, but the sequential reads and writes are actually something SATA disks can do pretty well. So this performance risk is mitigated by the compression-sequential-write (full blocks) part of the array’s code.

The flash cache is made up out of SSD’s, and are hot-replaceable and are shared between the controllers. All data is already on disk and therefore there is no need for any means of protection for these cache disks.

Products

• 3RU Units, large flash layer, multicore Intel Xeon processors
• Comes with 2 x quad GbE NICs
• Everything is redundant (controllers are active/passive)
• All drives are hot swapable
• peer-to-peer clustering
  • CS220: 9TB primary + 108TB backup
  • CS240: 18TB primary + 216TB backup ($99.900.-)
    • 1.3TB flash capacity based on 2x compression
    • 12 x 2TB disks (1x hot-spare/2x parity)
• Annual maintenance between $4000 and $6000 .

Roadmap

Although NimbleStorage wasn’t going to give us any formal roadmap intel at the moment, the following features are surely being introduced in upcoming upgrades/updates.

• Cascaded replication                        
• VMware SRM integration
• 10GbE NICs
• V1.1 Scale out, LUN’s can be striped across arrays.
• Role based access.
• QoS for replication sessions (including time of day based policies)
• SNMP alerting
• FCoE

Overall impression

Curtis W. Preston asked (and I was pondering on it) “why not NAS?”. The midsize customer segment doesn’t use a lot of NFS and for CIFS, the tend to use a regular Windows file server with (iSCSI) block storage from the SAN. The context to me was actually that it was not a need-to-have feature for the product launch. There might be a different view on the file services option in the future.

I am very impressed by these guys. They bring a ton of experience into the company which is transfered into their products. It is clear the products are functional and quite complete, but a couple of relevant features are still missing. The relevance is dependent on the size and level of operations of the client looking into this product. Smaller customer might not be depending on SNMP alerting or 10GbE interfaces. These features and the aforementioned features are sure to be introduced shortly after this launch.

The Nimble Storage guys presenting at Tech Field Day are brave in my book. They come in to present a new company and new products to a group of tech guys that could give them a really hard time, but they stood tall, and gave us a very great presentation. They definitely believe in their product, and at the same time respect their competition.

I will be watching them closely.

Resources

• Nimble Storage
• In The News (Gestalt IT)
• Twitter @NimbleStorage
• Facebook

Hey all,

I am trying to set up some live streaming here, like @Kiwi_si dit last event. Hopefully it will work. If my webcam is not capable of delivering proper audio and video, I will check @Rodos‘s new pocketcam.

Live stream:
Watch live video from TechFieldDat Seattle 2010 brought to you by Ilja Coolen on Justin.tv