Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

There were several break-out sessions on the second day of the [IBM System Storage Technical University 2011] related to Cloud Storage.

Storage for Cloud Computing

Clod Barrera is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Strategist for IBM System Storage. He predicts that by 2015, 10 percent of the servers and storage purchases, as well as 25 percent of the network gear purchases, will be related to Cloud deployments. Cloud Storage is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32 percent through 2015, compared to only 3.8 percent growth for non-Cloud storage.

Cloud Computing is allowing companies to rethink their IT infrastructure, and reinvent their business. Clod presented an interesting chart on the "Taxonomy" of storage in Cloud environments. On the left he had examples of Storage that was part of a Cloud Compute application. On the right he had storage that was accessed directly through protocols or APIs. Under each he had several examples for transactional data, stream data, backups and archives.

Clod feels the only difference between Private and Public clouds is a matter of ownership. In private clouds, these are owned by the company that uses them via their private Intranet network. Public clouds are owned by Cloud Service providers and are accessed over the public Internet. Clod presented IBM's strategy to deliver Cloud at five levels:

• Private Cloud: on-site equipment, behind company firewall, managed by IT staff
• Managed Private Cloud: on-site equipment, behind company firewall, managed by IBM or other Cloud Service provider
• Hosted Private Cloud: dedicated, off-premises equipment, located and managed by IBM or other Cloud Service Provider, and access through VPN
• Shared Cloud Services: shared, off-premises equipment, located at IBM or other Cloud Service Provider, managed by IBM or Cloud Service provider, and access through VPN. The facility is intended for enterprises only, on a contractual basis, and will be auditable for compliance to government regulations, etc.
• Public Cloud: shared, off-premises equipment, located and managed by IBM or other Cloud Service provider, targeted to offer cloud compute and storage resources, with standardized platforms of operating systems and middleware, for individuals, small and medium sized businesses.

As with storage in traditional data center deployments, storage in clouds will be tiered, with Tier 0 being the fastest tier, to Tier 4 for "deep and cheap" archive storage. IBM SONAS is an example of Cloud-ready storage that can help make these tiers accessible through standard Ethernet protocols. Cloud Service providers will use metering and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to offer different rates for different tiers of storage in the cloud.

Clod wrapped up his session explaining IBM's Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA). This is an all-encompassing diagram that shows how all of IBM's hardware, software and services fit into Cloud deployments.

SONAS and the Smart Business Storage Cloud

This is a presentation I often give at the [IBM Executive Briefing Center] in Tucson, Arizona. I cover the following points:

• IBM positioning between its two strategic NAS products: N series and SONAS
• The history of SONAS, from Storage Tank and SAN File System to the Scale-out File Services offering
• How SONAS is designed differently than N series GX Cluster mode and other mount-point aggregators
• Independent Scaling of performance and capacity, allowing companies to design a solution that fits their particular workload characteristics
• World Record Performance results for a moderately-sized SONAS deployment, for a single file system entirely on spinning disk, based on SPECsfs2008 benchmark
• IBM's Smart Business Storage Cloud, which combines the base SONAS product with IBM services to offer unique solutions optimized for specific industries, clients and workloads

These sessions served as a preview for later presentations in the week that got into more detail on SONAS specifically.

technorati tags: IBM, Clod Barrera, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage, SONAS, Smart Business Storage Cloud, SBSC, Storage University

My series last week on IBM Watson (which you can read [here], [here], [here], and [here]) brought attention to IBM's Scale-Out Network Attached Storage [SONAS]. IBM Watson used a customized version of SONAS technology for its internal storage, and like most of the components of IBM Watson, IBM SONAS is commercially available as a stand-alone product.

Like many IBM products, SONAS has gone through various name changes. First introduced by Linda Sanford at an IBM SHARE conference in 2000 under the IBM Research codename Storage Tank, it was then delivered as a software-only offering SAN File System, then as a services offering Scale-out File Services (SoFS), and now as an integrated system appliance, SONAS, in IBM's Cloud Services and Systems portfolio.

If you are not familiar with SONAS, here are a few of my previous posts that go into more detail:

• [Area Rugs versus Wall-to-Wall carpeting]
• [More details about IBM clustered scalable NAS]
• [ILM and HSM on Integrated Systems]
• [SONAS video from NAB 2010 Conference]
• [SONAS guest post by John Sing]
• [Was SAN File System really five years ahead of its time?]

This week, IBM announces that SONAS has set a world record benchmark for performance, [a whopping 403,326 IOPS for a single file system]. The results are based on comparisons of publicly available information from Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation [SPEC], a prominent performance standardization organization with more than 60 member companies. SPEC publishes hundreds of different performance results each quarter covering a wide range of system performance disciplines (CPU, memory, power, and many more). SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 is the industry-standard benchmark for NAS systems using the NFS protocol.

(Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary. As with any performance benchmark, the SPECsfs benchmark does not replicate any single workload or particular application. Rather, it encapsulates scores of typical activities on a NAS storage system. SPECsfs is based on a compilation of workload data submitted to the SPEC organization, aggregated from tens of thousands of fileservers, using a wide variety of environments and applications. As a result, it is comprised of typical workloads and with typical proportions of data and metadata use as seen in real production environments.)

The configuration tested involves SONAS Release 1.2 on 10 Interface Nodes and 8 Storage Pods, resulting a single file system over 900TB usable capacity. 10 Interface Nodes; each with: Maximum 144 GB of memory One active 10GbE port 8 Storage Pods; each with: 2 Storage nodes and 240 drives Drive type: 15K RPM SAS hard drives Data Protection using RAID-5 (8+P) ranks Six spare drives per Storage Pod

IBM wanted a realistic "no compromises" configuration to be tested, by choosing:

1. Regular 15K RPM SAS drives, rather than a silly configuration full of super-expensive Solid State Drives (SSD) to plump up the results.
2. Moderate size, typical of what clients are asking for today. The Goldilocks rule applies. This SONAS is not a small configuration under 100TB, and nowhere close to the maximum supported configuration of 7,200 disks across 30 Interface Nodes and 30 Storage Pods.
3. Single file system, often referred to as a global name space, rather than using an aggregate of smaller file systems added together that would be more complicated to manage. Having multiple file systems often requires changes to applications to take advantage of the aggregate peformance.  It is also more difficult to load-balance your performance and capacity across multiple file systems.  Of course, SONAS can support up to 256 separate file systems if you have a business need for this complexity.

The results are stunning. IBM SONAS handled three times more workload for a single file system than the next leading contender. All of the major players are there as well, including NetApp, EMC and HP.

Congratulations to the SONAS development and test teams! Scale-Out NAS is a competitive space. SONAS can handle not only large streaming files but also small random I/O workloads extraordinarily well. Just in the last two years, to compete against IBM's leadership in this realm, [HP acquired Ibrix], [EMC acquired Isilon] and [Dell has acquired what's left of Exanet's assets], THey have a lot of catching up to do!

technorati tags: IBM, SONAS, Watson, Storage Tank, SFS, SoFS, SBSC, SSD, SAS, , IOPS, SPEC, SPECsfs, SPECsfs2008, SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3, EMC, Isilon, HP, Ibrix, Dell, Exanet, Global Name Space, scale-out,, Watson, IBM Watson, benchmark, performance, record performance, world record, filesystem, file+system, nfs, EMC, NetApp, VNX, Isilon, storage, storage+system, NAS

Fellow master inventor and blogger Barry Whyte (IBM) recounts the past 20 years of history in IT storage from his perspective in a series of blog posts. They are certainly worth a read:

• [The Serial Storage Architecture Years - 1990-1998]
• [The "Shark" and FC-AL Years - 1998-present]
• [2000-2007 The "Virtual" Storage - SAN Virtualization Appliance Years]

In his last post in this series, he mentions that the amazingly successful IBM SAN Volume Controller was part of a set of projects:

"IBM was looking for "new horizon" projects to fund at the time, and three such projects were proposed and created the "Storage Software Group". Those three projects became know externally as TPC, (TotalStorage Productivity Center), SanFS (SAN File System - oh how this was just 5 years too early) and SVC (SAN Volume Controller). The fact that two out of the three of them still exist today is actually pretty good. All of these products came out of research, and its a sad state of affairs when research teams are measured against the percentage of the projects they work on, versus those that turn into revenue generating streams."

But this raises the question: Was SAN File System just five years too early?

IBM classifies products into three "horizons"; Horizon-1 for well-established mature products, Horizon-2 was for recently launched products, and Horizon-3 was for emerging business opportunities (EBO). Since I had some involvement with these other projects, I thought I would help fill out some of this history from my perspective.

Back in 2000, IBM executive [Linda Sanford] was in charge of IBM storage business and presented that IBM Research was working on the concept of "Storage Tank" which would hold Petabytes of data accessible to mainframes and distributed servers.

In 2001, I was the lead architect of DFSMS for the IBM z/OS operating system for mainframes, and was asked to be lead architect for the new "Horizon 3" project to be called IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC), which has since been renamed to IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

In 2002, I was asked to lead a team to port the "SANfs client" for SAN File System from Linux-x86 over to Linux on System z. How easy or difficult to port any code depends on how well it was written with the intent to be ported, and porting the "proof-of-concept" level code proved a bit too challenging for my team of relative new-hires. Once code written by research scientists is sufficiently complete to demonstrate proof of concept, it should be entirely discarded and written from scratch by professional software engineers that follow proper development and documentation procedures. We reminded management of this, and they decided not to make the necessary investment to add Linux on System z as a supported operating system for SAN file system.

In 2003, IBM launched Productivity Center, SAN File System and SAN Volume Controller. These would be lumped together with Horizon-1 product IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and the four products were promoted together as the inappropriately-named [TotalStorage Open Software Family]. We actually had long meetings debating whether SAN Volume Controller was hardware or software. While it is true that most of the features and functions of SAN Volume Controller is driven by its software, it was never packaged as a software-only offering.

The SAN File System was the productized version of the "Storage Tank" research project. While the SAN Volume Controller used industry standard Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) to allow support of a variety of operating system clients, the SAN File System required an installed "client" that was only available initially on AIX and Linux-x86. In keeping with the "open" concept, an "open source reference client" was made available so that the folks at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft could port this over to their respective HP-UX, Solaris and Windows operating systems. Not surprisingly, none were willing to voluntarily add yet another file system to their testing efforts.

Barry argues that SANfs was five years ahead of its time. SAN File System tried to bring policy-based management for information, which has been part of DFSMS for z/OS since the 1980s, over to distributed operating systems. The problem is that mainframe people who understand and appreciate the benefits of policy-based management already had it, and non-mainframe couldn't understand the benefits of something they have managed to survive without.

(Every time I see VMware presented as a new or clever idea, I have to remind people that this x86-based hypervisor basically implements the mainframe concept of server virtualization introduced by IBM in the 1970s. IBM is the leading reseller of VMware, and supports other server virtualization solutions including Linux KVM, Xen, Hyper-V and PowerVM.)

To address the various concerns about SAN File System, the proof-of-concept code from IBM Research was withdrawn from marketing, and new fresh code implementing these concepts were integrated into IBM's existing General Parallel File System (GPFS). This software would then be packaged with a server hardware cluster, exporting global file spaces with broad operating system reach. Initially offered as IBM Scale-out File Services (SoFS) service offering, this was later re-packaged as an appliance, the IBM Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) product, and as IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud (SBSC) cloud storage offering. These now offer clustered NAS storage using the industry standard NFS and CIFS clients that nearly all operating systems already have.

Today, these former Horizon-1 products are now Horizon-2 and Horizon-3. They have evolved. Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, GPFS and SAN Volume Controller are all market leaders in their respective areas. 

technorati tags: IBM, Barry Whyte, TPC, SANfs, SVC, EBO, Storage Tank, SoFS, SONAS, SBSC, cloud storage, NAS, storage, NFS, CIFS, HTTP

Continuing this week's discussion on IBM announcements, today I'll cover our integrated systems.

The problem with spreading out these announcements across several days' worth of blog posts is that others beat you to the punch. Fellow blogger Richard Swain (IBM) has his post [Move that File], and TechTarget's Dave Raffo has an article titled [ "IBM SONAS gains policy-driven tiering, gateway to IBM XIV Storage System"].

By combining multiple components into a single "integrated system", IBM can offer a blended disk-and-tape storage solutions. This provides the best of both worlds, high speed access using disk, while providing lower costs and more energy efficiency with tape. According to a study by the Clipper Group, tape can be 23 times less expensive than disk over a 5 year total cost of ownership (TCO).

The two we introduced recently were the [IBM Information Archive] and the Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS). This week, IBM announced some enhancements as SONAS v1.1.1 release. SONAS is the productized version of IBM's Scale-Out File Services (SoFS), which I discussed in my posts [Area Rugs versus Wall-to-Wall Carpeting] and [More details about IBM's Clustered Scalable NAS].

ILM and HSM data movement

I have covered Information Lifecycle Management several times in this post, including my posts [ILM for my iPod], [Times a Million], and [Using ILM to Save Trees], to name a few.

I've also covered Hierarchical Storage Management, such as my post [Seven Tiers of Storage at ABN Amro], and my role as lead architect for DFSMS on z/OS in general, and DFSMShsm in particular.

However, some explanation might be warranted in the use of these two terms in regards to SONAS. In this case, ILM refers to policy-based file placement, movement and expiration on internal disk pools. This is actually a GPFS feature that has existed for some time, and was tested to work in this new configuration. Files can be individually placed on either SAS (15K RPM) or SATA (7200 RPM) drives. Policies can be written to move them from SAS to SATA based on size, age and days non-referenced. HSM is also a form of ILM, in that it moves data from SONAS disk to external storage pools managed by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. A small stub is left behind in the GPFS file system indicating the file has been "migrated". Any reference to read or update this file will cause the file to be "recalled" back from TSM to SONAS for processing. The external storage pools can be disk, tape or any other media supported by TSM. Some estimate that as much as 60 to 80 percent of files on NAS have low reference and should be stored on tape instead of disk, and now SONAS with HSM makes that possible.

This distinction allows the ILM movement to be done internally, within GPFS, and the HSM movement to be done externally, via TSM. Both ILM and HSM movement take advantage of the GPFS high-speed policy engine, which can process 10 million files per node, run in parallel across all interface nodes. Note that TSM is not required for ILM movement. In effect, SONAS brings the policy-based management features of DFSMS for z/OS mainframe to all the rest of the operating systems that access SONAS.

HTTP and NIS support

In addition to NFS v2, NFS v3, and CIFS, the SONAS v1.1.1 adds the HTTP protocol. Over time, IBM plans to add more protocols in subsequent releases. Let me know which protocols you are interested in, so I can pass that along to the architects designing future releases!

SONAS v1.1.1 also adds support for Network Information Service (NIS), a client/server based model for user administration. In SONAS, NIS is used for netgroup and ID mapping only. Authentication is done via Active Directory, LDAP or Samba PDC.

Asynchronous Replication

SONAS already had synchronous replication, which was limited in distance. Now, SONAS v1.1.1 provides asynchronous replication, using rsync, at the file level. This is done over Wide Area Network (WAN) across to any other SONAS at any distance.

Hardware enhancements

Interface modules can now be configured with either 64GB or 128GB of cache. Storage now supports both 450GB and 600GB SAS (15K RPM) and both 1TB and 2TB SATA (7200 RPM) drives. However, at this time, an entire 60-drive drawer must be either all one type of SAS or all one type of SATA. I have been pushing the architects to allow each 10-pack RAID rank to be independently selectable. For now, a storage pod can have 240 drives, 60 drives of each type of disk, to provide four different tiers of storage. You can have up to 30 storage pods per SONAS, for a total of 7200 drives.

An alternative to internal drawers of disk is a new "Gateway" iRPQ that allows the two storage nodes of a SONAS storage pod to connect via Fibre Channel to one or two XIV disk systems. You cannot mix and match, a storage pod is either all internal disk, or all external XIV. A SONAS gateway combined with external XIV is referred to as a "Smart Business Storage Cloud" (SBSC), which can be configured off premises and managed by third-party personnel so your IT staff can focus on other things.

See the Announcement Letters for the SONAS [hardware] and [software] for more details.

For those who are wondering how this positions against IBM's other NAS solution, the IBM System Storage N series, the rule of thumb is simple. If your capacity needs can be satisfied with a single N series box per location, use that. If not, consider SONAS instead. For those with non-IBM NAS filers that realize now that SONAS is a better approach, IBM offers migration services.

Both the Information Archive and the SONAS can be accessed from z/OS or Linux on System z mainframe, from "IBM i", AIX and Linux on POWER systems, all x86-based operating systems that run on System x servers, as well as any non-IBM server that has a supported NAS client.

technorati tags: , IBM, Announcements, SONAS, SoFS, Information+Archive, Richard Swain, TechTarget, ILM, HSM, storage tiers, GPFS, TSM, HTTP, NIS, TSM, NAS, iRPQ, XIV, SBSC, z/OS, Linux, AIX