Ilja Coolen \ ICSS

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.

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.