Yesterday's announcement that IBM had acquired XIV to offer storage for Web 2.0 applicationsprompted a lot of discussion in both the media and the blogosphere. Several indicated thatit was about time that one of the major vendors stepped forward to provide this, and it madesense that IBM, the leader in storage hardware marketshare, would be the first. Others were perhaps confused on what is unique with Web 2.0 applications. What has changed?

I'll use this graphic to help explain how we have transitioned through three eras of storage.

The first era: Server-centric

In the 1950s, IBM introduced both tape and disk systems into a very server-centric environment.Dumb terminals and dumb storage devices were managed entirely by the brains inside the server.These machines were designed for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), everywhere from bookingflights on airlines to handling financial transfers.

The second era: Network-centric

In the 1980s and 1990s, dumb terminals were replaced with smarter workstations and personalcomputers; and dumb storage were replaced with smarter storage controllers. Local Area Networks (LANs)and Storage Area Networks (SANs) allowed more cooperative processing between users, servers andstorage. However, servers maintained their role as gatekeepers. Users had to go through aspecific server or server cluster to access the storage they had access to. These servers continuedtheir role in OLTP, but also manage informational databases, file sharing and web serving.

The third era: Information-centric

Today, we are entering a third era. Servers are no longer the gatekeepers. Smart workstationsand personal computers are now supplemented with even more intelligent handheld devices, Blackberryand iPhones, for example. Storage is more intelligent too, with some being able to offer file sharingand web serving directly, without the need of an intervening server. The roles of servers have changed,from gatekeepers, to ones that focuses on crunching the numbers, and making information presentableand useful.

Sam Palmisano, CEO and chairman of IBM, first introduced this in March 2006 as the [Globally Integrated Enterprise],but the concept applies to organizations of all sizes, from large multi-nationals to the local [Mom and Pop shops].

Here is where Web 2.0 applications, digital media and archives fits in. These are focused on unstructured data that don't require relational database management systems. So long as the useris authorized, subscribed and/or has made the appropriate payment, she can access the information. With the appropriate schemes in place, information can now be mashed-up in a variety of ways, combined with other information that can render insights and help drive new innovations.

Of course, we will still have databases and online transaction processing to book our flights andtransfer our funds, but this new era brings in new requirements for information storage, and newarchitectures that help optimize this new approach.

technorati tags: IBM, XIV, Web2.0, server-centric, network-centric, information-centric, OLTP, database, disk, tape, systems, dumb terminal, workstations, storage controller, LAN, SAN, digital media, archive, servers, handheld, devices, file sharing, web serving, insight, innovation

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Tags:  lifecycle san infrastructure disk

Wrapping up my week's theme on IBM's acquisition XIV, we have gotten hundreds of positive articles and reviews in the press, but has caused quite a stir with the[Not-Invented-Here] folks at EMC.We've heard already from EMC bloggers [Chuck Hollis] and [Mark Twomey].The latest is fellow EMC blogger BarryB's missive [Obligatory "IBM buys XIV" Post], which piles on the "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" [FUD], including this excerpt here:

In a block storage device, only the host file system or database engine "knows" what's actually stored in there. So in the Nextra case that Tony has described, if even only 7,500-15,000 of the 750,000 total 1MB blobs stored on a single 750GB drive (that's "only" 1 to 2%) suddenly become inaccessible because the drive that held the backup copy also failed, the impact on a file system could be devastating. That 1MB might be in the middle of a 13MB photograph (rendering the entire photo unusable). Or it might contain dozens of little files, now vanished without a trace. Or worst yet, it could actually contain the file system metadata, which describes the names and locations of all the rest of the files in the file system. Each 1MB lost to a double drive failure could mean the loss of an enormous percentage of the files in a file system.

And in fact, with Nextra, the impact will be across not just one, but more likely several dozens or even hundreds of file systems.

Worse still, the Nextra can't do anything to help recover the lost files.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If any disk drive module failed, the system would know exactly whichone it was, what blobs (binary large objects) were on it, and where the replicated copies of those blobs are located. In the event of a rare double-drive failure, the system would know exactly which unfortunate blobs were lost, and couldidentify them by host LUN and block address numbers, so that appropriate repair actions could be taken from remote mirrored copies or tape file backups.

Second, nobody is suggesting we are going to put a delicateFAT32-like Circa-1980 file system that breaks with the loss of a single block and requires tools like "fsck" to piece back together. Today's modern file systems--including Windows NTFS, Linux ext3, and AIX JFS2--are journaled and have sophisticated algorithms tohandle the loss of individual structure inode blocks. IBM has its own General Parallel File System [GPFS] and corresponding Scale out File Services[SOFS], and thus brings a lotof expertise to the table.Advanced distributed clustered file systems, like [Google File System] and Yahoo's [Hadoop project] take this one step further, recognizing that individual node and drive failures at the Petabyte-scale are inevitable.

In other words, XIV Nextra architecture is designed to eliminate or reduce recovery actions after disk failures, not make them worse. Back in 2003, when IBM introduced the new and innovative SAN Volume Controller (SVC), EMCclaimed this in-band architecture would slow down applications and "brain-damage" their EMC Symmetrix hardware.Reality has proved the opposite, SVC can improve application performance and help reduce wear-and-tear on the manageddevices. Since then, EMC acquired Kashya to offer its own in-band architecture in a product called EMC RecoverPoint, that offers some of the features that SVC offers.

If you thought fear mongering like this was unique to the IT industry, consider that 105years ago, [Edison electrocuted an elephant]. To understand this horrific event, you have to understand what was going on at the time.Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, wanted to power the entire city of New York with Direct Current(DC). Nikolas Tesla proposed a different, but more appropriate architecture,called Alternating Current(AC), that had lower losses over distances required for a city as large and spread out as New York. But Thomas Edison was heavily invested in DC technology, and would lose out on royalties if ACwas adopted.In an effort to show that AC was too dangerous to have in homes and businesses, Thomas Edison held a pressconference in front of 1500 witnesses, electrocuting an elephant named Topsy with 6600 volts, and filmed the event so that it could be shown later to other audiences (Edison invented the movie camera also).

Today's nationwide electric grid would not exist without Alternating Current.We enjoy both AC for what it is best used for, and DC for what it is best used for. Both are dangerous at high voltage levels if not handled properly. The same is the case for storage architectures. Traditional high-performance disk arrays, like the IBM System Storage DS8000, will continue to be used for large mainframe applications, online transaction processing and databases. New architectures,like IBM XIV Nextra, will be used for new Web 2.0 applications, where scalability, self-tuning, self-repair,and management simplicity are the key requirements.

(Update: Dear readers, this was meant as a metaphor only, relating the concerns expressed above thatthe use of new innovative technology may result in the loss or corruption of "several dozen or even hundreds of file systems" and thus too dangerous to use, with an analogy on the use of AC electricity was too dangerous to use in homes. To clarify, EMC did not re-enact Thomas Edison's event, no animalswere hurt by EMC, and I was not trying to make political commentary about the current controversy of electrocution as amethod of capital punishment. The opinions of individual bloggers do not necessarily reflect the official positions of EMC, and I am not implying that anyone at EMC enjoys torturing animals of any size, or their positions on capital punishment in general. This is not an attack on any of the above-mentioned EMC bloggers, but rather to point out faulty logic. Children should not put foil gum wrappers in electrical sockets. BarryB and I have apologized to each other over these posts for any feelings hurt, and discussion should focus instead on the technologies and architectures.)

While EMC might try to tell people today that nobody needs unique storage architectures for Web 2.0 applications, digital media and archive data, because their existing products support SATA disk and can be used instead for these workloads, they are probably working hard behind the scenes on their own "me, too" version.And with a bit of irony, Edison's film of the elephant is available on YouTube, one of the many Web 2.0 websites we are talking about. (Out of a sense of decency, I decided not to link to it here, so don't ask)

technorati tags: IBM, XIV, EMC, BarryB, FUD, Nextra, blob, Thomas Edison, Nikolas Tesla, Web2.0, scalability, Petabyte-scale, self-tuning, self-repair, DS8000, disk, systems, Topsy, elephant, light bulb, movie camera, invention, DC, AC, YouTube

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Tags:  infrastructure disk

On his The Storage Architect blog, Chris Evans wrote [Twofor the Price of One]. He asks: why use RAID-1 compared to say a 14+2 RAID-6 configuration which would be much cheaper in terms of the disk cost? Perhpaps without realizing it, answers itwith his post today [XIV part II]:

So, as a drive fails, all drives could be copying to all drives in an attempt to ensure the recreated lost mirrors are well distributed across the subsystem. If this is true, all drives would become busy for read/writes for the rebuild time, rather than rebuild overhead being isolated to just one RAID group.

Let me try to explain. (Note: This is an oversimplification of the actual algorithm in an effortto make it more accessible to most readers, based on written materials I have been provided as partof the acquisition.)

In a typical RAID environment, say 7+P RAID-5, you might have to read 7 drives to rebuild one drive, and in the case of a 14+2 RAID-6, reading 15 drives to rebuild one drive. It turns out the performance bottleneck is the one driveto write, and today's systems can rebuild faster Fibre Channel (FC) drives at about 50-55 MB/sec, and slower ATA disk at around 40-42 MB/sec. At these rates, a 750GB SATA rebuild would take at least 5 hours.

In the IBM XIV Nextra architecture, let's say we have 100 drives. We lose drive 13, and we need to re-replicate any at-risk 1MB objects.An object is at-risk if it is the last and only remaining copy on the system. A 750GB that is 90 percent full wouldhave 700,000 or so at-risk object re-replications to manage. These can be sorted by drive. Drive 1 might have about 7000 objects that need re-replication, drive 2might have slightly more, slightly less, and so on, up to drive 100. The re-replication of objects on these other 99 drives goes through three waves.

Wave 1

Select 49 drives as "source volumes", and pair each randomly with a "destination volume". For example, drive 1 mapped todrive 87, drive 2 to drive 59, and so on. Initiate 49 tasks in parallel, each will re-replicate the blocks thatneed to be copied from the source volume to the destination volume.

Wave 2

50 volumes left.Select another 49 drives as "source volumes", and pair each with a "destination volume". For example, drive 87 mapped todrive 15, drive 59 to drive 42, and so on. Initiate 49 tasks in parallel, each will re-replicate the blocks thatneed to be copied from the source volume to the destination volume.

Wave 3

Only one drive left. We select the last volume as the source volume, pair it off with a random destination volume,and complete the process.

Each wave can take as little as 3-5 minutes. The actual algorithm is more complicated than this, as tasks complete early the source and volumes drives are available for re-assignment to another task, but you get the idea. XIV hasdemonstrated the entire process, identifying all at-risk objects, sorting them by drive location, randomly selectingdrive pairs, and then performing most of these tasks in parallel, can be done in 15-20 minutes. Over 40 customershave been using this architecture over the past 2 years, and by now all have probably experienced at least adrive failure to validate this methodology.

In the unlikely event that a second drive fails during this short time, only one of the 99 task fails. The other 98 tasks continue to helpprotect the data. By comparison, in a RAID-5 rebuild, no data is protected until all the blocks are copied.

As for requiring spare capacity on each drive to handle this case, the best disks in production environments aretypically only 85-90 percent full, leaving plenty of spare capacity to handle re-replication process. On average,Linux, UNIX and Windows systems tend to only fill disks 30 to 50 percent full, so the fear there is not enough sparecapacity should not be an issue.

The difference in cost between RAID-1 and RAID-5 becomes minimal as hardware gets cheaper and cheaper. For every $1 dollar you spend on storage hardware, you spend $5-$8 dollars managing the environment. As hardware gets cheaper still, it might even be worth making three copies of every 1MB object, the parallel processto perform re-replications would be the same. This could be done using policy-based management, some data gets triple-copied, and other data gets only double-copied, based on whether the user selected "premium" or "basic" service.

The beauty of this approach is that it works with 100 drives, 1000 drives, or even a million drives. Parallel processingis how supercomputers are able to perform feats of amazing mathematical computations so quickly, and how Web 2.0services like Google and Yahoo can perform web searches so quickly. Spreading the re-replication process acrossmany drives in parallel, rather than performing them serially onto a single drive, is just one of the many uniquefeatures of this new architecture.

technorati tags: Chris Evans, RAID-1, RAID-5, RAID-6, performance, bottleneck, FC, SATA, disk, system, IBM, XIV, Nextra, objects, re-replication, spare capacity

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Tags:  disk

In my post yesterday [Spreading out the Re-Replication process], fellow blogger BarryB [aka The Storage Anarchist]raises some interesting points and questions in the comments section about the new IBM XIV Nextra architecture.I answer these below not just for the benefit of my friends at EMC, but also for my own colleagues within IBM,IBM Business Partners, Analysts and clients that might have similar questions.

If RAID 5/6 makes sense on every other platform, why not so on the Web 2.0 platform?

BarryB writes:

Your attempt to justify the expense of Mirrored vs. RAID 5 makes no sense to me. Buying two drives for every one drive's worth of usable capacity is expensive, even with SATA drives. Isn't that why you offer RAID 5 and RAID 6 on the storage arrays that you sell with SATA drives?

And if RAID 5/6 makes sense on every other platform, why not so on the (extremely cost-sensitive) Web 2.0 platform? Is faster rebuild really worth the cost of 40+% more spindles? Or is the overhead of RAID 6 really too much for those low-cost commodity servers to handle.

Let's take a look at various disk configurations, for example 3TB on 750GB SATA drives:

JBOD: 4 drives

JBOD here is industry slang for "Just a Bunch of Disks" and was invented as the term for "non-RAID".Each drive would be accessible independently, at native single-drive speed, with no data protection. Puttingfour drives in a single cabinet like this provides simplicity and convenience only over four separate drivesin their own enclosures.

RAID-10: 8 drives

RAID-10 is a combination of RAID-1 (mirroring) and RAID-0 (striping). In a 4x2 configuration, data is striped across disks 1-4,then these are mirrored across to disks 5-8. You get performance improvement and protection against a singledrive failure.

RAID-5: 5 drives

This would be a 4+P configuration, where there would be four drives' worth of data scattered across fivedrives. This gives you almost the same performance improvement as RAID-10, similar protection againstsingle drive failure, but with fewer drives per usable TB capacity.

RAID-6: 6 drives

This would be a 4+2P configuration, where the first P represents linear parity, and the second represents a diagonal parity. Similar in performance improvement as RAID-5, but protects against single and double drive failures, and still better than RAID-10 in terms of drives per TB usable capacity.

For all the RAID configurations, rebuild would require a spare drive, but often spares are shared among multiple RAID ranks, not dedicated to a single rank. To this end, you often have to have several spares per I/O loop, and a different set of spares for each kind of speed and capacity. If you had a mix of 15K/73GB, 10K/146GB, and 7200/500GB drives, then you would have three sets of spares to match.

In contrast, IBM XIV's innovative RAID-X approach doesn't requireany spare drives, just spare capacity on existing drives being used to hold data. The objects can be mirroredbetween any two types of drives, so no need to match one with another.

All of these RAID levels represent some trade-off between cost, protection and performance, and IBM offers each of theseon various disk systems platforms. Calculating parity is more complicated than just mirrored copies, but this can be done with specialized chips in cache memory to minimize performance impact.IBM generally recommends RAID-5 for high-performance FC disk, and RAID-6 for slower, large capacity SATA disk.

However, the questionassumes that the drive cost is a large portion of the overall "disk system" cost. It isn't. For example,Jon Toigo discusses the cost of EMC's new AX4 disk system in his post [National Storage Rip-Off Day]:

• EMC is releasing its low end Clariion AX4 SAS/SATA array with 3TB capacity for $8600. It ships with four 750GB SATA drives (which you and I could buy at list for $239 per unit). So, if the disk drives cost $956 (presumably far less for EMC), that means buyers of the EMC wares are paying about $7700 for a tin case, a controller/backplane, and a 4Gbps iSCSI or FC connector. Hmm.
• Dell is offering EMC’s AX4-5 with same configuration for $13,000 adding a 24/7 warranty.

(Note: I checked these numbers. $8599 is the list price that EMC has on its own website. External 750GB drivesavailable at my local Circuit City ranged from $189 to $329 list price. I could not find anything on Dell'sown website, but found [The Register] to confirm the $13,000 with 24x7 warranty figure.)

Disk capacity is a shrinking portion of the total cost of ownership (TCO). In addition to capacity, you are paying forcache, microcode and electronics of the system itself, along with software and services that are included in the mix,and your own storage administrators to deal with configuration and management. For more on this, see [XIV storage - Low Total Cost of Ownership].

EMC Centera has been doing this exact type of blob striping and protection since 2002

BarryB writes:

As I've noted before, there's nothing "magic" about it - Centera has been employing the same type of object-level replication for years. Only EMC's engineers have figured out how to do RAID protection instead of mirroring to keep the hardware costs low while not sacrificing availability.

I agree that IBM XIV was not the first to do an object-level architecture, but it was one of the first to apply object-level technologies to the particular "use case" and "intended workload" of Web 2.0 applications.

RAID-5 based EMC Centera was designed insteadto hold fixed-content data that needed to be protected for a specific period of time, such as to meet government regulatory compliance requirements. This is data that you most likelywill never look at again unless you are hit with a lawsuit or investigation. For this reason, it is important to get it on the cheapest storage configuration as possible. Before EMC Centera, customers stored this data on WORM tape and optical media, so EMC came up with a disk-only alternative offering.IBM System Storage DR550 offers disk-level access for themost recent archives, with the ability to migrate to much less expensive tape for the long term retention. The end result is that storing on a blended disk-plus-tape solution can help reduce the cost by a factor of 5x to 7x, making RAID level discussion meaningless in this environment. For moreon this, see my post [OptimizingData Retention and Archiving].

While both the Centera and DR550 are based on SATA, neither are designed for Web 2.0 platforms.When EMC comes out with their own "me, too" version, they will probably make a similar argument.

IBM XIV Nextra is not a DS8000 replacement

BarryB opines:

Nextra is anything but Enterprise-class storage, much less a DS8000 replacement. How silly of all those folks to suggest such a thing.

I did searches on the Web and could not find anybody, other than EMC employees, who suggested that IBM XIV Nextra architecture represented a replacement for IBM System Storage DS8000. The IBM XIV press release does not mentionor imply this, and certainly nobody I know at IBM has suggested this.

The DS8000 is designed for a different "use case" andset of "intended workloads" than what the IBM XIV was designed for. The DS8000 is the most popular disk systemfor our IBM System z mainframe platform, for activities like Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and large databases, supporting ESCON and FICON attachment to high-speed 15K RPM FC drives. Web 2.0 customers that might chooseIBM XIV Nextra for their digital content might run their financial operations or metadata search indexes on DS8000.Different storage for different purposes.

As for the opinion that this is not "enterprise class", there are a variety of definitions that refer to this phrase.Some analysts look at "price band" of units that cost over $300,000 US dollars. Other analysts define this as beingattachable to mainframe servers via ESCON or FICON. Others use the term to refer to five-nines reliability, havingless than 5 minutes downtime per year. In this regard, based on the past two years experience at 40 customer locations,I would argue that it meets this last definition, with non-disruptive upgrades, microcode updates and hot-swappable components.

By comparison, when EMC introduced its object-level Centera architecture, nobody suggested it was the replacement for their Symmetrix or CLARiiON devices. Was it supposed to be?

Given drive growth rates have slowed, improving utilization is mandatory to keep up with 60-70 percent CAGR

BarryB writes:

Look around you, Tony- all of your competitors are implementing thin provisioning specifically to drive physical utilization upwards towards 60-80%, and that's on top of RAID 5/RAID 6 storage and not RAID 1. Given that disk drive growth rates and $/GB cost savings have slowed significantly, improving utilization is mandatory just to keep up with the 60-70% CAGR of information growth.

Disk drive capacities have slowed for FC disk because much of the attention and investment has been re-directed to ATA technology. Dollar-per-GB price reduction is slowing for disks in general, as researchers are hitting physicallimitations to the amount of bits they can pack per square inch of disk media, and is now around 25 percent per year.The 60-70 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is real, and can be even growing faster for Web 2.0providers. While hardware costs drop, the big ticket items to watch will be software, services and storage administrator labor costs.

To this end, IBM XIV Nextra offers thin provisioning and differential space-efficient snapshots. It is designed for 60-90 percent utilization, and can be expanded to larger capacities non-disruptively in a very scalable manner.

Well, I hope that helps clear some things up.

technorati tags: IBM, XIV, Nextra, EMC, BarryB, RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-5, RAID-6, RAID-10, RAID-X, AX4, Dell, AX4-5, FC, SAS, SATA, iSCSI, TCO, blob, object-level, disk, storage, system, Centera, ESCON, FICON, Symmetrix, CLARiiON, ATA, CAGR, Web2.0

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Tags:  disk