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How to stop El Capitan’s thousands of blades from overwhelming the SAN

By
Chris Mellor
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The El Capitan exascale supercomputer will use HPE-designed ‘Rabbit’ near node local storage to get data faster to its many processing cores from a backend SAN.

The $600m 2 exaFLOPs El Capitan will be housed at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and is slated for delivery by HPE and its Cray unit by early 2023.

The number of compute nodes in El Capitan has not been revealed. However, in a prior 1.5 exaflops El Capitan iteration, the compute blades would form a line 10,800 feet long if laid end-to-end. If each blade is three-feet long that adds up to 3,600 blades.

Hence El Capitan will have several thousand compute blades and it would be impractical to have all of these connect directly to the SAN. Instead the Rabbit nodes function as SAN gateways or access concentrators. Without the Rabbit nodes the SAN would be overwhelmed.

The supercomputer incorporates AMD Epyc CPUs and Radeon GPUs linked across AMD’s Infinity interconnect fabric with CPU boards, chassis, storage, Slingshot networks and software organised under Cray’s EX architecture.

El Capitan supercomputer racks

Bronis de Supinksi, Lawrence Livermore Computing CTO, revealed in a presentation at the Riken-CCS International Symposium last week (reported by HPCWire), that the Rabbit storage boxes are 4U in size and house SSDs controlled by software using an Epyc storage CPU.

Supinski presentation slide

The enclosure has two boards, a Rabbit-S storage board with 16 SSDs plus 2 spares plugged into it. It hooks up to a Rabbit-P processor board which carries the Epyc CPU. The Rabbit-S SSDs connect to eight El Capitan compute blades across PCIe. Each compute blade has two sets of resources, each comprising a Zen 4-based Genoa Epyc CPU and four GPUs, interconnected by AMD’s Infinity Fabric technology, according to a diagram from the Supinski presentation. Thee GPUS and the CPU will share a unified memory structure.

A diagram shows the Rabbit-P processor hooking up to the nearby compute blades and the SAN. It is unclear from the diagram if it connects to other El Capitan components. That means the Rabbit flash can be accessed as direct-attached storage by the PCIe-connected El Capitan compute blades and also as network-attached storage by other parts of the system.

Rabbit storage use cases.

The Rabbit P processor runs containerised software and this can operate on (analyse) the data in the Rabbit-S SSDs. These SSDs cache operating system files and hold extended memory and swap files for the attached compute blades.

The Rabbit flash enclosure plugs into Cray XE racks housing El Capitan switch modules. They connect to an El Capitan SAN via the XE rack switches and gateway nodes. The SAN will be built from Cray ClusterStor E1000Lustre parallel storage systems which combines NVMe-accessed SSDs and disk drives with PCIe Gen 4 access. The E1000 runs up to 1.6 terabytes per second and delivers 50 million IOPS per rack.

Thus we have flash storage locally adjacent to a bunch of El Capitan compute blades, and acting as an all-flash front end to a flash+disk SAN. The SAN does not connect direct to the compute blades. Instead it acts as a backing store.

We might enquire if future exabyte-scale storage repositories will also need gateway/concentrator storage nodes to provide access from thousands of CPU cores. HPE’s Rabbit could be a forerunner of things to come.

Nutanix increases ransomware resistance

By
Chris Mellor
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Nutanix has hardened ransomware defences cross its hybrid multicloud software stack. The company has made Flow, Files, Objects and Mine more resistant to ransomware, signed up for Microsoft’s Credential Guard and gained independent certification for its immutability.

Rajiv Mirani

“CIOs and CISOs know that there is no one solution that provides 100 per cent protection against ransomware or other types of malware attacks, and the current remote and hybrid work models widen an enterprise’s attack surface,” Nutanix CTO Rajiv Mirani said yesterday.

“Enterprises need a defence in depth approach to security, starting with their IT infrastructure. … Nutanix delivers a strengthened cloud platform out of the box, with an even richer set of ransomware protections available now.”

Nutanix Cloud Platform

Under the hood

By ‘cloud platform’, Nutanix is referring to its entire software stack. Flow is the network security part of that stack and its Security Central component uses machine learning and IP reputation services to identify known attack vectors, including potential ransomware, at the network level. It monitors networks for anomalies, malicious behaviour, and common network attacks. The software checks endpoints, such as VDI installations, to identify traffic, such as ransomware infection, coming from disreputable locations.

The File Analytics part of Nutanix Files now:

  • Detects abnormal and suspicious access patterns and identifies known ransomware signatures to block data access in real-time, 
  • Identifies file shares where replication and snapshots have not been configured appropriately and alerts IT administrators,
  • Provides immutable snapshots preventing tampering and deletion. 
  • Accelerates ransomware recovery via native snapshot capabilities when enabled on file shares.

Nutanix Objects has more granular permissions to access object data:

  • Configure Write Once Read Many (WORM) policies for individual files and objects to help guard against unauthorised deletion or encryption of data,
  • Automated WORM protections by classifying data under a “legal hold” to prevent tampering or malicious destruction, 
  • Data access permissions at a bucket level so IT administrators can better secure multi-tenant environments.

Nutanix said Cohasset Associates has reviewed Objects’ locking features and confirmed they meet the non-rewritable, and non-erasable storage requirements for electronic records specified by SEC, FINRA, and CFTC regulations.

Nutanix Mine, the company’s secondary data backup offering, now provides direct backup to Objects when using Mine in conjunction with HYCU data protection software. All ransomware protection that is natively available in Objects, such as immutability and WORM, will also be applied to backed up Mine data.

Nutanix has qualified Veeam Object Immutability and certified other backup vendors to extend its ransomware protections to backups.

The company now supports Microsoft Windows Credential Guard for virtual machines and virtual desktops running on the AHV hypervisor. This adds protection from malware using credential theft attacks on Microsoft OS environments.

Xilinx makes smarter, faster SmartNIC

By
Chris Mellor
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Xilinx has announced a smarter and faster SN1000 SmartNIC that offloads more work from a host server CPU and can be programmed for specific functions.

A SmartNIC is a network interface card that offloads network and storage processing from the host server CPU, thus enabling more application work such as running more virtual machines or containers.

Salil Raje, Xilinx EVP and Data Centre Group GM,msupplied a statement: “Data centres are transforming to increase networking bandwidth and optimize for workloads like artificial intelligence and real time analytics. These complex, compute-intensive and constantly-evolving workloads are… driving the need for fully composable, software-defined hardware accelerators that provide the adaptability to optimise today’s most demanding applications.”

In March 2020 Xilinx announced the Alveo U25 SmartNIC, featuring dual PCIe gen 3 interfaces and twin 25Gbit/s Ethernet ports plus separate data and control planes. This is based on Zynq FPGA SoC technology, assisted by a Solarflare ASIC, and provides network, storage and compute acceleration functions for cloud service providers, telcos, and private cloud data centre operators.

Supported workloads include SDN, virtual switching, NFV, NVMe-oF, electronic trading, AI inference, video transcoding, and data analytics.

Xilinx Alveo SN1000

The newer SN1000 supports PCIe Gen 4, and 10- 25- and 100GbitE. The SN1000 has 100 million packets per second (pps) rate, compared to the U25’s maximum of 32 million pps. There is an XCU26 FPGA, an ASIC plus and 16-core Arm CPU. All the programmable logic is in the FPGA.

Although the U25 has separate control and data planes, the control plane is processed by the host CPU. In the SN1000 the Arm CPU on the SmartNIC adapter carries out this work itself, fully freeing the host CPU from NIC control plane duties.

The SN1000 provides acceleration for Open Virtual Switch (OVS), Virtio.net, Virtio.blk, vDPA, IPsec, kTLS and CEPH. There is a composable data path for custom programmability and and Vitis development library support for P4 programming. (P4 is an open source coding language used to control packet forwarding in routers and switches and other networking devices.)

The Alveo SN1000 SmartNIC is currently sampling with early access customers. General availability is expected by March 31, 2021. 

Smart World analytics

Xilinx today also launched Smart World, an AI video analytics platform that pairs Alveo SmartNICs with applications inside Xilinx’s Video Machine-learning Streaming Server (VMSS) framework. VMSS targets facial recognition, virtual fencing, crowd statistics, traffic monitoring, and object detection workloads.mXilinx partners include:

  • Aupera with a turnkey Smart Cities appliance that combines its intelligent, cloud-based video processing with Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA multi-processor system in a chip (MPSOC) and Alveo accelerators. 
  • Mipsology with a migration toolset to move existing AI applications from GPU-based architectures to the Alveo platform, and AI inference acceleration. 
  • DeepAI is delivering AI training at the edge on Alveo accelerators.

Xilinx is introducing an Accelerated Algorithmic Trading (ATT) system based on its FPGAs, that will enable traders to be competitive in high-frequency trading. It has also launched the industry’s first FPGA App Store with ready-to-go applications such as Smart World AI video analytics, anti-money laundering and live video transcoding.

AWS largest storage vendor? By this logic Hilton is one of the largest home builders in the world

By
Chris Mellor
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Last week we reported IT Brand Pulse’s estimates placing AWS as the world’s biggest – or second biggest – enterprise storage supplier. This raised the hackles of an HPE exec who thinks the comparison rests on flawed logic.

In response to our article, Neil Fleming, HPE’s Senior Manager of WorldWide PM, Sales, Presales and Alliances for HPE Cloud Data Services, responded via Twitter: “Late to the party but a few issues with this. AWS doesn’t sell storage they rent it. This is like looking at a town with an Avis car rental, a Ford dealership and a Chevy dealership and concluding Avis are the number 1 car dealer because they have more cars leaving the lot and ignoring the difference between a car being rented and sold.”

He followed this train of thought with a second idea: “It’s then concluding that as the revenue on renting a car is higher than selling it to a user that equates to more car sales. By this logic Hilton is one of the largest home builders in the world.”

Fleming hammered his points home with another example: “Raspberry Pis are used for server tasks (DNS etc). They sell about 600,000 units a month. [The] No 1 server vendor globally is not Dell/HPE but Raspberry Pi by a landslide (about +1.2m units). Comparing very different businesses like this is meaningless.”

But is AWS storage actually like renting a car, I asked Fleming: “I’d argue that public cloud storage is more akin to leasing a car than renting it. Someone leasing a car is doing so instead of purchasing it. So car leases should be added to the car sales total. Is this right?”

“Actually no,” He replied. “Car leases are already counted in car sales as the sale is counted to the leasing company. Same as ODM sales are counted to the CSPs – so this would be another issue. CSPs provide services akin to leasing (reserved services) I grant you, and car renting (spot prices).“

We are contacting Gartner and IDC to find out what they think about measuring public cloud enterprise storage revenues.

ScaleFlux: Our computational storage drives are bigger, faster and cheaper than ordinary SSDs

By
Chris Mellor
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SCaleFlux CSD componentrey

Interview: ScaleFlux computational storage flash drives offer quadruple the capacity, double the performance and halve the flash costs of ordinary SSDs – so says CEO Hao Zhong.

The startup has developed its CSD 2000 series computational storage drives with on-board processing to carry out processing directly on the stored data. Over 40 data centres are working with the drives, Zhong told us in a recent interview.

Hao Zhong.

The capacity increases comes from ScaleFlux compression algorithms and its way of mapping data in the drive. The second generation ScaleFlux CSD 2000 drives use an FPGA to provide the computation. ScaleFlux is developing its own Arm-powered SoC (System-on-Chip) for third generation drives. These will have much higher speed, lower power draw, lower costs, and significantly more features than ScaleFlux can fit in into the FPGA.

The gen 3 drive, possibly called a CSD3000, may arrive later in the second half of this year.

B&F: How are computational storage drives positioned against storage processing units from suppliers like Nebulon and DPUs from Fungible?

Hao Zhong: I think this is pretty simple. What do we do is we try to reduce data movement in the serve and connection fabric. So Nebulon or a DPU type of product is a good idea, however,  … this will cost a lot of data movement and this means out of the gate intrusive integration for most data centre or enterprise customers to be able to use the SPU/DPU; a significant programming and software integration.

For the CSD we encapsulate all the complexity under the NVMe device protocol. So there’s no change for any application.

[See Nebulon note below.]

B&F: Is a computational storage standard coming? 

Hao Zhong: There are two industry organisation are working on this. One is SNIA and the other is an NVMe one. Regarding SNIA, a working group was set up in 2018, and we were one of the founding members of that working group.

We were the first member to be able to come up with a product and start shipping from June 2019. Last year, Intel and Amazon partnered and  also invested in SNIA. But for them, SNIA is a general industry standard process. Intel and AWS want to speed up the process and so they bring this to the NVMe working group.

I think that there has been significant progress made since then. Now I would say computational storage will definitely be part of any NVMe standard in the future. Computational storage will be some kind of extension of the general NVMe standard.

CSD 2000

B&F: What partners are you working with?

Hao Zhong: We’re not only working with data centre customers, but also the server OEMs, because, you know, most of the data centres want us to quantify with server vendors, for example, HPE, Dell, Lenovo, and Inspur.

B&F: What are the benefits of using your CSD product?

Hao Zhong: Number one is the cost saving. We increase capacity by using transparent, inline compression. By doing that, we are increasing the usable capacity for customers, and we also improve the performance and the latency by reducing the number of data writes into the flash media. That’s how we significantly improve the performance and endurance.

B&F: Do you have any numbers for that?

Hao Zhong: We can improve the endurance by three to six times. The performance increase depends on whether it is a read or write. For the random read, we know we can improve the average latency, but for the random write we have from over 200 per cent to as much as 600 per cent.

If you are talking about comparing to the average SSDs – let’s say the QLC drive from Intel – they have 34,000 random write IOPS. We can pump it up to all the way to 180,000. So this is nearly six times, which is almost 600 per cent, over Intel’s drive.

B&F: There’s a difference between reads and writes?

Hao Zhong: Right, For the random read as as mentioned, there’s not much we can save because, the latency and speed is dominated by the read latency from the NAND media. But with light writes is different, because you can avoid the standard write process.

B&F: So if you increase the capacity, and you increase the performance as well, then a server could have say 10 x 15 terabyte SSD to get 150 terabytes of capacity. But if you increase the effective capacity enough that server would only need half the number of SSDs and they’d probably go faster. 

Hao Zhong: Yes, right. Yes.

B&F: How do you build your CSD products?

Hao Zhong: We take a standard U.2 NVMe SSD and replace the controller chip. 

ScaleFlux CSD2000 components

B&F: Do you support the M.2 form factor 

Hao Zhong:  No, we’re no supporting M.2 yet, because M.2 has some limitations in terms of power consumption as well as how much footprint that we can get into this small form factor.

B&F. And ruler form factors?

Hao Zhong:  Yes, we can fit in that as well. But it’s just the volume is not there yet. 

B&F: Do you think that Western Digital with its zoned SSD (ZNS) idea is moving slightly towards computational storage, or do you think the zoning is so trivial from a computational point of view that it doesn’t represent any future competition?

Hao Zhong:  I think they are orthogonal and also complementary to each other. Zoning space is something like the namespace that NVMe has been working on as well. So, I think computational storage can dramatically help the namespace of ZNS by providing more capacity for the user.

Comment

ScaleFlux says it provides 5:1 compression for Aerospike, 4.2:1 with MySQL and 4:1 with Oracle databases. It claims its on-board compressed flash capacity comes at less than half the cost of commodity SSDs, while performing twice as fast at writes and lasting longer. 

ScaleFlux chart showing cost saving from compression.

If ScaleFlux can deliver further increases in write speed and endurance with its third generation product the attractions of its plug-and-play technology should increase further.

Nebulon Note

Nebulon CEO Siamak Nazari pointed out that, with Nebulon Cloud-Defined storage, “application, programming or software integration is … virtually non-existent,” being “equal to using a SAS array or RAID card.”

Seagate: Why SSDs will not kill disk drives

By
Chris Mellor
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We recently reported technology analyst firm Wikibon’s thesis that SSDs will replace disk drives in enterprise data centres. So what do the hard drive makers have to say for themselves?

Let’s find out from Dr. John Morris, CTO at Seagate, the world’s biggest HDD maker. He notes that currently there is a 7-10x difference in raw cost per bit between flash and disk. Furthermore, raw cost per bit is the “dominant factor in a total cost of ownership equation today”.

Morris in a phone interview expressed confidence that the “economics [of flash vs HDD] are going to stay roughly in equilibrium, and the architectures that we see today are going to be the preferred architectures for the next five or 10 years.”

Dr. John Morris

He thinks that proponents of “SSDs will kill disks” fail to factor in the role of large data centre demand in driving storage capacity growth. “Maybe one or two years ago, we hit a point where about 50 per cent of the data is in a large data centre and about 50 per cent is everywhere else.” 

“Large data centre growth rate is in the 30 per cent per year range, whereas any of the other use cases are kind of flat from an exabyte perspective and over time. Our expectation is that over the next five years we’re going to see 90 per cent of the data in this large data centre use case. – whether it’s public or private is kind of irrelevant.”

In these large, exabyte-scale data centres there will be a “fairly robust mix of flash and disk – something on the order of 90 per cent on disk and approximately 10 per cent on flash”.

So, the two storage mediums will continue to co-exist. “Flash and disk actually have a symbiotic relationship,” he said. “Today, you can’t scale a storage system without both. They both have a unique value proposition. And it’s the combination of those unique value propositions that they offer that allows you to create the massive data centre that we all benefit from today.”

Raw capacity cost comparisons

The flash and hard disk industries are both forecasting cost per bit improvements of about 20 per cent a year, according to Morris. If those expectations pan out, “we’re going to stay roughly in equilibrium in terms of rough cost per bit for the foreseeable future.” This view is shared publicly by some of the large cloud companies, he adds.

Wikibon chart showing SSDs becoming lower cost than disk drives.

Smaller data centres

Flash will not takeover from disk in smaller, petabyte-scale data centres either, according to Morris.

“It comes down to what is the use case dominated by – a performance-centric metric or a cost-centric metric? I think there’s both. In those infrastructure that have an extreme sensitivity to cost people are going to exploit the capabilities of of hard disk. whereas if your performance or power-sensitive, I think you’re going to see a gravitation towards a flash architecture.”

Asymmetric IO

Morris points to the asymmetric IO profiles of data in large repositories: “At any given point in time, the IO into that volume storage; up to 10 per cent of the total storage has active IO and 80 to 90 per cent of that storage volume does not have active IO.”

“Active IPOs are tiered or cached on flash, providing a very good … random IO capability, and everything else is committed to a lower cost infrastructure which is on hard disk.”

The data held on disk is not inert: “It’s also a little bit of a misnomer, to think that there’s no IO happening on everything else, it is happening, but it can be done in a way that is able to efficiently use the disk drive architecture so you’ll see relatively large block IO happening on the disk. You’ll see 10s of megabytes per second of bandwidth, on every disk in that architecture and you’ll see good utilisation of all the disks. It’s that very good IO capability that you get out of that large pool of disk that actually makes the whole work well together.”

Influence of QLC flash

The arrival of QLC (4bits/cell) flash will not change flash-HDD dynamics, according to Morris. He thinks supporters of a QLC SSD takeover of disk drives base their argument on data reduction: “They’ll use data reduction and make a statement like because flash has orders of magnitude more random capability, you can do on the fly dedupe and compression with QLC; you can’t do that with hard disk. Therefore, I’m going to apply a 4 x or better multiplier on the effective capacity of flash and I won’t apply that to disk. If I do that in five years there’s parity of costs.”

In other words the raw cost per bit of disk is being compared to the effective cost per bit of flash, after data reduction. However, cost comparisons should be made on a raw capacity basis for both mediums, he argues.

“It is true that flash is able to do on the fly dedupe and compression very effectively. It’s actually not true that you can’t do it with hard disk. In fact, it is done with the hyperscale architectures today. Dedupe and compression are done higher up in the stack. and when data is ultimately committed to the media it’s already been deduped and compressed and in many cases encrypted.”

This week in storage with Backblaze, Kioxia, Index Engines and more

By
Chris Mellor
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Storage pod
Storage pod

Our IPO sensing organ is twitching strongly following a couple of Backblaze announcements. NAND and SSD fabber Kioxia has made a loss in its latest quarter. Index Engines has announced APIs so third-party storage and backup supplies can add automated ransomware attack detection into their software.

Backblaze gussying up for IPO?

Cloud storage supplier Backblaze has recruited three independent non-exec board directors to serve on compensation, audit, and nominating and governance committees, and a specialist financial PR firm, the San Francisco-based Blueshirt Group.

This month it announced the hiring of Frank Patchel as CFO and Tom MacMitchell as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer. Interestingly, to me at least, they were actually hired in Spring 2020. MacMitchell came on board in April 2020 according to his LinkedIn profile and Patchel left his previous job in February last year.

This all looks like BackBlaze is laying the groundwork for an IPO.

Kioxia attributes Q3 loss to weak enterprise demand and smartphones fallback

Kioxia’s third fiscal 2020 sales ended Dec. 31 were ¥287.2bn ($2.72bn) with a loss of ¥13.2bn ($130m). This compares to the year-ago sales of ¥254.4bn ($2.41bn) and ¥25.3bn ($240m) loss. The numbers are going in the right direction, with a 13 per cent sales rise Y/Y.

Kioxia said smartphone-related shipments decreased from previous high levels and enterprise demand was weak, But it reported solid growth in gaming devices, PCs and data centres, which enable modest positive bit growth in the quarter.

However average selling prices declined driven by a supply/demand imbalance. In other words, A NAND glut has been driving down prices. Kioxia said this was primarily caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and China-US trade friction. The general consensus is that the NAND market will stabilise towards the second half of CY2021 as demand for data center SSDs, client SSDs and smartphones is expected to remain strong, and demand for enterprise SSDs is expected to recover steadily.

Index Engines opens APIs to protect backup vendors from ransomware attacks

Index Engines has released an API-based developer kit to enable third-party backup and storage vendors to integration of CyberSense analytics and reporting software into their products.

The company says its CyberSense software provides advanced integrity analysis of data to detect signs of corruption due to a ransomware attack on backup and storage data.  The new APIs enable third parties to hook into full-content indexing of data, alerts if suspect corruption is detected, post-attack forensic reporting that allows rapid diagnosis and recovery from an attack. 

APIs are available to initiate indexing jobs for data in both primary and backup storage environments via NFS/CIFS or NDMP protocols.  CyberSense can directly index files in backup images, including Dell EMC NetWorker/Avamar, Veritas NetBackup, IBM Spectrum Protect, and Commvault without the need to rehydrate the data. 

Shorts

Ctera‘s global file system is now supported on HPE Nimble Storage dHCI systems. Nimble Storage dHCI users can visit www.ctera.com/hpe-hci to get their free download for the CTERA virtual filer with public and private cloud service extension options.The software is already available on HPE SimpliVity HCI systems.

Search company Elastic has announced the general availability of searchable snapshots and a new cold data tier to enable customers to retain and search more data on low-cost object stores without compromising performance. Customers discover new data and new workflows by creating a schema on the fly with the beta launch of schema on read with runtime fields. There is also  a web crawler for Elastic App Search to make content from publicly accessible websites easily searchable.

One fifth of the UK public does not know how to permanently erase data from a device, according to a Kaspersky survey. The research, which included a data retrieval experiment on second-hand devices, found that 90 per cent contained traces of private and business data, including company emails.

UK-based digital archiving specialist Arkivum, in partnership with Google Cloud, have been selected for the second prototyping phase of the €4.8m multinational ARCHIVER project led by CERN. The team were awarded a role in the pilot phase, announced in June 2020. This phase will run for eight months.

Quantum‘s ActiveScale S3-compatible object storage system has achieved Veeam Ready qualification for Object and Object with Immutability, meaning it now has ransomware protection. Quantum said it is ensuring that all its products have a built-in option for ransomware protection.

Redis Labs has announced RediSearch 2.0 which allows users to create secondary indexes to support their queries instead of writing manual indexes. It scales to query and index billions of documents, and use sRedis Enterprise’s Active-Active technology to deliver five-nines (99.999 per cent) availability across geo-distributed read replicas.

Data lake query tech supplier Varada has a new feature that enables a 10x-100x queries speed increase when running on Trino clusters (formerly known as PrestoSQL) directly on the data lake. Varada can now be deployed alongside existing Trino clusters and apply its dynamic and adaptive indexing-based acceleration technology. It is available on AWS and is compatible with all Trino and previous PrestoSQL versions.

Appointment setting

Commvault has appointed Jamie Farrelly, formerly at Veritas, as EMEA VP for Channel and Alliances.

Druva has appointed Scott Morris as VP Sales or Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) based in Singapore. Most recently, he served as vice president and GM for Asia-Pacific at HPE.

Edge computing company Fastly has recruiteed Brett Shirk as Chief Revenue Officer. Shirk was previously Rubrik’s Chief Revenue Officer and left abruptly earlier this month.

Database supplier SingleStore has hired Paul Forte as chief revenue officer (CRO). Forte comes to SingleStore from data management company Actifio (recently acquired by Google) where he served as the president of global field operations, including sales, marketing, customer service and post-sales.

Kioxia and Western Digital build 162-layer 3D NAND

By
Chris Mellor
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Kioxia and Western Digital have announced the sixth generation of their BiCS 3D NAND technology, with 162-layers and a 40 per cent smaller die than their gen 5 BiCS 112-layer technology.

Each new BiCS (Bit Cost Scaling) generation should have a lower cost per bit than its predecessor. The two suppliers did not disclose how much this is reduced in Gen 6, but they revealed that manufactured bits per wafer are increased by 70 per cent over gen 5.

Siva Sivatram

Dr. Siva Sivaram, Western Digital’s President of Technology & Strategy, cited performance, reliability and cost benefits for Gen 6. He said the new generation introduces “innovations in vertical as well as lateral scaling to achieve greater capacity in a smaller die with fewer layers”.

We think product will announced and available by the first 2022 quarter – but note the companies did not say what capacity dies could be built using gen 6 BiCS NAND or when SSDs using the technology might appear.

Gen 6 BiCS NAND improves various parameters compared to gen 5:

  • Up to 10 per cent greater lateral cell array density
  • Nearly 2.4x program performance improvement through 4-plane operation
  • 10 per cent lower read latency
  • 66 per cent IO speed increase

The 162-layer count represents a 44 per cent increase on gen 5, which is a larger increase than in previous BICS generations. The companies are not saying if the die is built by string stacking, where two 81-layer components one above the other.

Three NAND suppliers have developed 3D NAND with greater layer counts than Kioxia and Western Digital. Micron, SK hynix and Samsung have each achieved 176, leaving Intel at the 144-layer level and YMTC trailing with 128. Intel’s future development is moving into the hands of SK hynix, as that company is buying Intel’s NAND operation.

SK hynix revealed a roadmap to 500+ and even 800+ layers in August 2019. Other suppliers are understood to have similar internal roadmaps. Kioxia and Western Digital announced the 112-layer BiCS in January 2020. Based on the industry trend to add more layers and on Kioxia and Western Digital’s actual layer count increases, we could anticipate a potential BiCS 7 announcement with 250+layers in 2022.

Red Hat supports high-availability apps in AWS and Azure

By
Chris Mellor
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Red hat logo on building
Red hat logo on building

Red Hat Linux running in the AWS and Azure public clouds now supports high-availability and clustered applications with its Resilient Storage Add-On (RSAO) software. This means apps like SAS, TIBCO MQ, IBM Websphere MQ, and Red Hat AMQ can all run on Red Hat Linux in AWS and Azure for the first time.

Announcing the update in a company blog post, Red Hat Enterprise Linux product manager Bob Handlin wrote: “This moment provides new opportunities to safely run clustered applications on cloud servers that, until recently, would have needed to run in your data centre. This is a big change.”

No cloud block sharing – until now

AWS and Azure did not support shared block storage devices in their clouds until recently. One and only one virtual machine instance, such as EC2 in AWS, could access an Elastic Block Storage (EBS) device at a time. That meant high-availability applications, which guard against server (node) failure by failing over to a second node which can access the same storage device, were not supported.

Typically, enterprise high-availability applications such as IBM WebSphere MQ have servers accessing a SAN to provide the shared storage. These applications could not be moved to the public cloud without having shared block storage there.

Azure announced shared block storage with an Azure shared disks feature in July 2020. And AWS announced support for clustered applications using shared (multi-attach) EBS volumes in January this year. The company said customers could now lift-and-shift their existing on-premises SAN architecture to AWS and Azure without refactoring cluster-aware file systems such as RSAO or Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS2).

Blocks & Files RSAO diagram.

RSAO

Red Hat’s Resilient Storage Add-On lets virtual machines access the same storage device from each server in a group through Global File System 2 (GFS2). This has no single point of failure and supports a shared namespace and full cluster coherency which enables concurrent access, and cluster-wide locking to arbitrate storage access. RSAO also features a POSIX-compliant file system across 16 nodes, and Clustered Samba or Common Internet File System for Windows environments.

AWS and Azure ‘s shared block storage developments have enabled Red Hat to port RSAO software to their environments. RSAO uses the GFS2 clustered filesystem and it passes Fibre Channel LUN or iSCSI SAN data IO requests to either an AWS shared EBS volume or Azure shared disk as appropriate.

Handlin said Red Hat will test RSAO on the Alibaba Cloud “and likely other cloud offerings as they announce shared block devices.”

StorCentric gets out its first Violin, an entry-level NVMe all-flash array

By
Chris Mellor
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StorCentric, the mini data storage conglomerate, has launched its first Violin-branded system since buying the company’s assets last October.

This is the Violin QV1020, an entry level NVMe drive all-flash array, which has basically the same chassis, software and performance as the current QV2020.

However, it starts at a lower capacity and can have fewer Fibre Channel ports, thus lowering its ticket price. A StorCentric spokesperson told us there is an up to 25 per cent cost savings on the QV1020, compared with the older version of the QV2020.

StorCentric CTO Surya Varanasi said in a press statement: “NVMe has taken hold in the enterprise, driven by the demands of high-performance applications such as big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, OLTP and data warehousing and their need for high-speed, low-latency access to storage media. The Violin QV1020 answers the call for these exact same NVMe capabilities, but for companies that have smaller capacity requirements with corresponding pricing.”

The QV1020 keeps the active-active QV2020 controller design and all its software. The QV1020 has a 15TB to 116TB usable capacity range (60TB to 464TB after data reduction), while the QV2020 usable capacity range is 116TB to 479TB (464TB to 1.7PB effective). There are two or four QV1020 Fibre Channel ports; the QV2020 has up to eight.

StorCentric QV2020 graphic

The Violin QV2020 launched in February 2020 in a 2RU chassis with 24 x NVMe hot-swap and encrypted SSDs, dual active-active controllers, 8 x 16Gbit/s FC ports and 10/25GbitE support. The capacity range was then 15TB to 479TB and a 4:1 data reduction ratio made the effective capacity range 60TB to 1.7PB. To avoid overlap with the QV1020, the capacity start point has been bumped up to 116TB.

QV software includes data deduplication, applicable at a volume level, snapshots and synchronous replication. Data writes are balanced across the SSDs to prolong their endurance. Both QV arrays have up to 7.1GB/sec bandwidth and sub-millisecond latency at 500,000 IOPS.

Toshiba poised to join ranks of the 18TB HDD makers

By
Chris Mellor
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Toshiba is using energy assist technology in its first 18TB disk drive. The MG09 – out later this year – will be its highest capacity HDD to date, but rivals Seagate and Western Digital are already shipping 20TB drives.

The MG09 is a 9-platter design in a 3.5-inch format helium-filled enclosure. It comes in 16TB and 18TB capacities, has a Marvell controller and preamplifier, spins at 7,200rpm, has a 550TB/year workload rating and features either a 12Gbit/s SAS or 6Gbit/s SATA interface.

The drive is an evolution of Toshiba’s MG08 series which tops out at 16TB. The MG09 data transfer speed is 268MiB/s (281MB/sec) – better than the MG08’s 262MiB/s (274MB/s).

Toshiba MG09

The drive uses flux control – microwave assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) energy assistance – to overcome the difficulty of writing data bits to a recording medium that strongly retains magnetic polarity at room temperature. This is similar to Western Digital’s microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology.

We note that WD has not yet actually launched a drive that uses full MAMR technology. The company’s 18TB uses a precursor of MAMR called partial microwave-assisted magnetic recording technology (ePMR) to increase write efficacy with a write bias current.

For its 20TB drive, Western Digital uses ePMR plus shingling. Shingled magnetic recording crams more read tracks on a platter than conventional disks and so increases drive capacity. However, this technique slows write performance compared to the conventional recording used in the Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba 18TB drives, and Seagate’s 20TB drive.

Seagate has taken a different tack for its 20TB drives, using HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording), using heat to overcome the same difficulty (which is technically known as high coercivity).

Sample shipments of Toshiba’s 18TB MG09 Series disk drive are expected to start at the end of March 2021.

Zadara buys NeoKarm, jumps full stack into the private cloud

By
Chris Mellor
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Zadara, the enterprise storage as a service vendor, has gone full-stack by acquiring a compute-as-a-service startup called NeoKarm.

Zadara first teamed up with NeoKarm, a one year-old Tel-Aviv based company, in October, in order to provide a turnkey compute-as-a-service for managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprises. MSPs could equip their data centres with servers without any CAPEX spending. Customers could get on-demand compute and storage services in an existing on-premises data centre, in a private colocation facility, or in a Zadara cloud location.

Now Zadara finds it likes the NeoKarm technology so much that it is buying the company. The price has not been revealed but is being paid with Zadara cash. NeoKarm CEO Simon Grinberg, and some DevOps and engineering colleagues will join Zadara to continue the development of the technology and drive new compute-focused initiatives.

Nelson Nahum

Nelson Nahum, Zadara’s CEO, said in a statement: “The NeoKarm technology seamlessly integrates with our storage solution and offers a vastly improved performance for our customers and partners. I am thrilled to welcome the NeoKarm team to Zadara.”

Simon Grinberg

Simon Grinberg said the companies share a “vision of offering a competitive on-demand cloud for service providers. I am excited to join the team at Zadara to continue developing our seamless on-demand private cloud for providers, available at existing data centers, collocations or other cloud locations, built and fully-managed by Zadara.”

Added NeoKarm

Zadara graphic.

The Zadara cloud services platform with added NeoKarm provides automated end-to-end infrastructure provisioning of compute, storage and networking resources. The service features AWS-compatible APIs, which enables customers to deploy applications via the same scripts they use to deploy in AWS.

MSP and enterprise users can self-provision multiple VMs. Zadara says its cloud service platform is good for edge locations, perhaps anticipating continual public cloud erosion of core on-premises data centre use.

As of today Zadara has more than 300 MSP customers for its storage and compute-as-a-service offerings. The company said it has deployed more than 20 private compute clouds using the NeoKarm software.

Chasing clouds

NeoKarm was formed from the ashes of Stratoscale, a Tel Aviv-based company that crashed in December 2019. Stratoscale had developed private cloud hyperconverged system software. This turned an HCI system into an AWS-compatible region capable of running supporting EC2, S3, EBS, and RDS instances, and supporting Kubernetes. 

Stratoscale’s software IP assets were obtained by newly-founded NeoKarm, in February 2020. NeoKarm’s founder and CEO was Simon Grinberg, the ex-VP for Product and Cloud Architecture at Stratoscale.

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