Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

This week, I am in Las Vegas for [Edge 2016], IBM's Premiere IT Infrastructure conference of the year. Here is my recap of Day 3 Wednesday.

Become your own Storage Consultant

Gary Graham, IBM Field Technical Specialist for Storage, and Brian Pioreck, IBM Client Technical Specialist for Storage, co-presented this session. This session explained how to use IBM's 30-day free trial of IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights, a cloud-based services offering.

(Note: 15 years ago, I was the chief architect of version 1 of what we now call IBM Spectrum Control. I am pleased to see how well this product has evolved over the years.)

Storage Insights provides a reporting-only subset of the popular IBM Spectrum Control Standard and Advanced editions. It reports on IBM storage devices, as well as any non-IBM devices that are virtualized behind IBM Spectrum Virtualize products like SAN Volume Controller (SVC), Storwize, and FlashSystem V9000.

If you are a storage administrator, consider trying this out for 30 days, get some immediate results. Since it is cloud-based, you only need a Windows, Linux or AIX system to install a "collector" on site. This collector sends data up to the Cloud at one of IBM SoftLayer facilities. The installation process takes only 30 minutes, and you can download the code from the Internet.

If you find Storage Insights valuable, helping you reclaim some unused space, or provide other insight that saves your company money, consider buying the service, for only 250 US Dollars per 50 TB monitored. If you want more than just monitoring and reporting, consider one of the on-premise solutions like IBM Spectrum Control Standard, or IBM Spectrum Control Advanced edition, which provide provisioning and configuration capabilities as well.

Enhance your Security posture with At-Rest Encryption using the latest IBM Spectrum Virtualize

All of the IBM Spectrum Virtualize products support Data-at-Rest Encryption. For direct-attached storage, the 12Gb SAS controller performs hardware-assisted encryption.

For SAN-attached storage via FCP, FCoE or iSCSI back-end devices, IBM uses the [AES-NI instruction set] that comes included in certain Intel CPU processors.

For a basic understanding of encryption concepts, I highly recommend Jeff Moser's [A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)], presented in easy-to-understand cartoon format.

All Flash is not Created Equal - Contrasting IBM FlashSystem with Solid State Drives (SSD)

Since I packed the room with hundreds of attendees on Monday, the conference asked me to repeat this session again. See my blog post about [Edge2016 Monday breakout sessions] for more information.

IBM Cloud Object Storage System (powered by Cleversafe) and its Applications

Slides are available on IBM Expert
Network on [Slideshare.net]

Last November 2015, [IBM acquired Cleversafe] for $1.3 Billion US dollars because Cleversafe has the brand name recognition as the #1 Object Storage vendor the past two years in a row (2014 and 2015). On July 1 of this year, the transformation was complete, and their flagship product was officially renamed to the IBM Cloud Object Storage System, which some abbreviate informally as IBM COS.

Since then, IBM has been busy integrating IBM COS into the rest of the storage portfolio. I explained how IBM COS can be used for all kinds of static-and-stable data, but not suited for frequently changed data, such as Virtual machines or Databases.

Object storage can be access via NFS or SMB NAS-protocols using a gateway product, like IBM Spectrum Scale, or those from third-party partners like Ctera, Avere, Nasuni or Panzura. It can also be used as an alternative to tape for backup copies, and is already supported by the major backup software like IBM Spectrum Protect, Commvault Simpana, or Veritas NetBackup.

The Pendulum Swings Back

Slides are available on IBM Expert
Network on [Slideshare.net]

A few years ago, I explained to a client that Converged and Hyperconverged were like a pendulum swinging back. Over the past few decades, we have gone from internal disk, to externally attached disk, to SAN and LAN networks.

Each time, we gained more flexibility, greater connectivity and longer distances. Then I explained that Converged and Hyperconverged is like going backwards, the pendulum swinging back to the days of internal and direct-attached storage. The analogy was a hit, and thus this session was born!

IBM offers multiple Converged Systems. IBM PureSystems, PureData, PurePower and PureApplication solutions offer racks of compute, storage and network gear. Last year, IBM collaborated with Cisco to create VersaStack, a converged system that combines Cisco's x86 blade servers and switches with IBM FlashSystem and Storwize products.

IBM also offers Hyperconverged solutions. IBM Spectrum Accelerate allows the compute, storage and network functions run on 3 to 15 VMware ESXi hosts to form a cluster. The cluster can then make iSCSI-based volumes available to other virtual machines running on these same hosts. The volumes can also be made available to servers outside the cluster, such as bare metal servers or other Hypervisors. This is available as software-only, or you can get pre-built system called the Supermicro Hyperconvergence Appliance.

IBM Spectrum Scale provides a clustered file system that allows the compute, storage and network functions to run on 3 to 16,000 machines. Formerly called General Parallel File System (GPFS), IBM Spectrum Scale has been around for over 18 years. Over 200 of the world's largest "Top 500" supercomputers run IBM Spectrum Scale today.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM Storwize Birds-of-a-Feather

Barry Whyte, fellow blogger and IBM Master Inventor, presented an overview of the latest features, and where IBM is headed in 2017 for the IBM Spectrum Virtualize family of products. Barry now works in Advanced Technical Skills for Storage Virtualization Asia/Pacific Region.

The group then moved to another room offering delicious food and drink, as Eric Stouffer, IBM Director, Storwize Offering Manager and Business Line Exec, presented the future areas that IBM is consider for this product family.

All of this was done under Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA), preventing me from blogging any details. Back in 2003, Las Vegas started a marketing campaign ["What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas"]. Coincidentally, this is the same year IBM introduced the IBM SAN Volume Controller, the first product in the IBM Spectrum Virtualize family.

This was a long day, but was pleased with the large audiences I had at my sessions.

technorati tags: IBM, #IBMedge, #IBMstorage, #IBMcloud, Gary Graham, Brian Pioreck, Spectrum Control, Storage Insights, SoftLayer, security, data-at-rest encryption, SAN Volume Controller, SVC, Storwize, FlashSystem V9000, SAS, FCP, FCoE, iSCSI, Intel, AES, AES-NI, Jeff Moser, FlashSystem, SSD, PureSystems, PureData, PureApplication, PurePower, VersaStack, Cisco, Spectrum Accelerate, Spectrum Scale, GPFS, Converged Systems, Hyperconverged Systems, Birds-of-a-Feather, Spectrum Virtualize, Barry Whyte, Eric Stouffer, NDA, Las Vegas,

This week, I am in Las Vegas for [Edge 2016], IBM's Premiere IT Infrastructure conference of the year. Here is my recap of breakout sessions on Day 2.

Introducing IBM FlashSystem A9000 and A9000R: Grid Architecture Designed for the Hybrid Cloud

Tomer Carmeli, IBM Offering Manager for the A9000 and A9000R presented. Both models offer data-at-rest encryption, snapshots, remote mirroring, and data footprint reduction, assuming 5.26:1, a combination of pattern removal, data deduplication and hardware-assisted Real-time compression.

• The A9000 is an 8U high pod that can fit into existing racks. It comes in 60TB, 150TB and 300TB effective capacity.
   
• The A9000R includes its own 42U rack. The rack is organized as two to six "grid elements" combined with two InfiniBand switches. Grid elements come in 150TB and 300TB effective capacities, giving you up to a whopping 1.8 PB in a single rack!

Similar to the IBM XIV and IBM Spectrum Accelerate offerings, the A9000 and A9000R support Hyper-Scale features. Hyper-Scale Manager lets you manage up to 144 devices on a single pane of glass. Hyper-Scale Mobility lets you move volumes (LUNs) non-disruptively from one device to another.

Different data compresses or dedupes at different ratios. Your mileage may vary. Unless you are evaluating a JBOF (just a bunch of flash) device, there is a great difference between raw, usable, and effective capacity. Raw capacity can be calculated by the size of each chip, times the number of chips. Usable capacity factors out RAID, and any spare capacity set aside for RAID rebuild and garbage collection. Effective capacity indicates the amount of information that can be stored by taking advantage of data footprint reduction technologies, such as compression or data deduplication.

IBM offers three options:

• Measured Estimate -- IBM has a set of data reduction estimator tools that can scan your existing data, and estimate your reduction ratio, within 5 percent accuracy.
   
• Competitive Match -- If a competitor had run their own set of estimator tools, IBM might be able to match the reduction ratio, without repeating the analysis, by just reviewing the competitor results.
   
• "Sight unseen" -- without analyzing your actual data, reduction ratio is determine by the type of data (DB2, Oracle, SQL server, etc.), based on experience with similar data at other data centers.

Both A9000 and A9000R models are published at 250 microsecond latency, about 30 times faster than traditional spinning disk, although some workloads actually can run even faster than that. Assuming 5.26:1 reduction, these sell for about $1.50 per effective GB.

Flash Primer - Ready to move from disk storage?

Patricia Crowell, IBM Worldwide FlashSystem Enablement manager, presented. She presented an interesting time line:

1989

First Solid-State Drive (SSD)

1997

First Flash card, such as for digital cameras

2000

First USB stick

2009

Flash used in specialized IT appliances

2012

Flash for the enterprise - Microsoft and UCSD paper on SSD

2016

SSD-based vendors evaluating flash-optimized designs

In 2012, Microsoft Research and University of California San Diego published ["The Bleak Future of NAND Flash Memory"], 8 pages, by Laura M. Grupp, John D. Davis, and Steven Swanson. Here is an excerpt:

"The technology trends we have described put SSDs in an unusual position for a cutting-edge technology: SSDs will continue to improve by some metrics (notably density and cost per bit), but everything else about them is poised to get worse. This makes the future of SSDs cloudy: While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive in many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it difficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications"

IBM disagreed with this bleak assessment, announced it was investing $1 billion US Dollars into this technology, acquired Texas Memory Systems, and has deployed flash throughout its product line. For the past three years, IBM has been the #1 vendor for Flash storage systems.

Patricia offered the following example. What would it take to run 20 million IOPS? Here's a comparison:

Media	Racks	Energy
FlashSystem V9000	1	19 kW
Disk systems 15K rpm	315	2200 kW
Disk systems 7200 rpm	630	4500 kW

How to migrate from SONAS to IBM Spectrum Scale/ESS using Active File Manager

Paul Schena, IBM Senior IT Specialist, presented his experiences migrating existing SONAS data to new IBM Spectrum Scale or Elastic Storage Server (ESS) deployments. SONAS is going End-of-Service (EOS) on April 30, 2018, so it is never too soon to start this migration.

Paul gave two different methodologies. The first used Active File Management (AFM):

• Setup an IBM Spectrum Scale "Gateway Node" in "Independent-Writer" AFM mode. Paul recommends 10 threads per gateway node.
• Issue an AFM pre-fetch, disabling the "cache eviction" feature to ensure data remains. AFM transfers the directory structure, file data including sparse files, Access Control Lists (ACL), extended attributes.
• Define your exports with no-root-squash and move your user mounts to the new systems
• Once all the data is moved, convert the cache filesets to regular filesets
• Define your quotas, export settings, ILM policies and rules
• Decommision the SONAS

The second used Robocopy and Rsync, which may be required if there is high-latency, long-distance connection that prevents proper AFM connections:

• Configure IBM Spectrum Scale CES servers to appropriate NFS and/or SMB protocols
• Use Robocopy and/or Rsync as appropriate to move the data to the new system
• Decommision the SONAS

Having it all: Hybrid Cloud Storage Services for Block, Power and Backup

Clint Parish, Director of Enterprise Solutions and Services for VSS, and Marc The'berge, Business Development for Supermicro, co-presented this session.

VSS offers POWER8-based Cloud services. They consider themselves "boutique" with POWER8 servers, able to run AIX, IBM i and Linux on POWER applications, but not at the scale and size of larger x86-based clouds like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

For IBM i, they attach to IBM Storwize V7000. For AIX and Linux on POWER, they use IBM Storwize V7000 and/or Supermicro Hyperconverged Appliance, a pre-built system based on IBM Spectrum Accelerate.

Supermicro offers three "tee-shirt sizes", their small systems have six nodes, medium with 9 nodes, and large with 15 nodes. Unlike other Hyperconverged systems, the ones from Supermicro include a rack, and are pre-cabled with all the necessary Ethernet switches necessary to make a complete solution.

To offer backup services, VSS uses IBM Spectrum Protect with the Supermicro appliances.

In the evening, we were treated with a concert with Train, known for songs like "Meet Virginia", "Hey Soul Sister", "Calling all Angels" and "Drops of Jupiter". They played all of these, plus covered some songs by Led Zeppelin, Journey, Queen and Aerosmith,

technorati tags: IBM, #IBMedge, #IBMstorage, #IBMcloud, Tomer Carmeli, FlashSystem, FlashSystem A9000, FlashSystem A9000R, Hyper-Scale Manager, Hyper-Scale Mobility, effective capacity, Patricia Crowell, Microsoft Research, University of California, San Diego, UCSD, SONAS, Spectrum+Scale, Elastic Storage Server, ESS, Active File Management, AFM, Robocopy, Rsync, Paul Schena, Clint Parish, VSS, Marc The'berge, Supermicro, Spectrum Accelerate, Storwize V7000, POWER8, AIX, Linux, IBM i

This week, I am in Las Vegas for [Edge 2016], IBM's Premiere IT Infrastructure conference of the year. Here is my recap of breakout sessions for Monday, Sep 19, 2016:

How do you storage a Zettabyte? IBM and Microsoft Know...

A [Zettabyte] is a million Petabytes, or a billion Terabytes, of data. Most clients I deal with have less than 10 PB of centralized storage in their data center, but there are a few that have much larger data repositories.

 

Ed Childers, IBM STSM and manager for Tape and LTFS development, and Aaron Ogus, Microsoft Architect, discussed different solutions developed by IBM and Microsoft. IBM's solution has been productized, and is available as IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Spectrum Archive. Microsoft's solution is not productized, but is being "operationalized" to be used within Microsoft's Azure Cloud.

Not surprisingly, to be able to store a Zettabyte of data, you have to be creative and cost-effective with storage media. The current winner is magnetic tape, which continues to be 20 times less expensive than disk. IBM developed the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) and then shared it with other leading IT vendors. Ed also covered some future storage media developments, from using Macro-molecular strands of DNA, to Phase Change Memory (PCM).

All Flash is not Created Equal - Contrasting IBM FlashSystem with Solid State Drives (SSD)

Slides available on [SlideShare.net]

Many IBM FlashSystem presentations focus on the product, but don't explain the underlying technology, specifically what differentiates IBM FlashSystem from substantially slower competitive alternatives like EMC XtremIO and PureStorage that are based instead on fallible commodity Solid State Drives (SSD).

By working closely with our chip vendor, Micron, IBM was able to improve the write endurance of these Multi-level cell (MLC) chips by 9.4x, and reduce write amplification by 45 percent.

I explained IBM's clever asymmetrical wear-level balancing, heat segregation, read disturb mitigation, voltage level shifting, and health binning, all of which contribute to the performance and reliability of this solution. IBM's innovative Error Correcting Code provides LDPC-like correction strength but at much faster BCH-like latency speed.

This was a popular session. Despite being moved to a much larger room, they still had to turn people away, so I will be repeating this session on Wednesday, 11:00am.

Real-time Compression: Bendingo and Adelaide Bank's Perspective

James Harris, Senior Storage Systems Specialist for [Bendingo and Adelaide Bank], presented his success story with the use of Real-time Compression. Oracle RAC databases got 60-70 percent savings. SQL databases got 70-80 percent savings. VMware VMFS datastores average 50 percent savings. For IBM i, he is getting 60-70 percent savings for SYSBAS, and over 70 percent savings of the rest of his IBM i production data.

As a result, the bank has not had to make any Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) for disk for 2-3 years since they started compressing in 2014.

Storage Options for Big Data and Analytics: IBM FlashSystem or Traditional Disk Systems?

Eric Sperley, IBM Software Defined Storage Architect, presented the basics of Hadoop and the Hadoop File System (HDFS), then explained how IBM Spectrum Scale, when combined with the right tiers of flash and disk technology, could be used to optimize an environment for big data analytics.

Solutions EXPO

 

The Solutions EXPO is open all day, for people to visit the booths in between sessions. I stopped in for the evening reception. This is a great way to catch up on the latest products, re-connect with some clients or colleagues that I haven't seen in person for awhile, and meet new friends.

 

Shown here is Angie Welchert, who just started working for IBM a few years ago! I took her around to introduce her to some IBM executives at the Solutions EXPO.

It was a long and productive day.

technorati tags: IBM, #IBMedge, #IBMstorage, Ed Childers, IBM tape, LTFS, Aaron Ogus, Microsoft, Flash, FlashSystem, FlashSystem 900, FlashSystem V9000, FlashSystem A9000, FlashSystem A9000R, Solid State Drive, SSD, Micron, MLC, LDPC, BCH, James Harris, Real-time Compression, Eric Sperley, Hadoop, HDFS, Solutions EXPO, Angie Welchert

This week, I am in Las Vegas for [Edge 2016], IBM's Premiere IT Infrastructure conference of the year.

General Session - Outthink Status Quo

This week's motto is "Outthink the Status Quo.. Before the Status Quo disrupts your business!

Tom Rosamilia, IBM Senior VP for IBM Systems (and my fifth-line manager), kicked off the event. There are about 5,500 people at this event. He mentioned that just like a picture is worth a thousand words, "a prototype is worth a thousand meetings."

He showed a video of our client "Plenty of Fish" [POF], which is a dating site. They have 100 million members, of which 4 million access their site every day. IBM FlashSystem paid for itself, with an ROI payback period of 2 months.

Next, he talked about Wells Fargo, showing a video that discussed how the future deployment of "Blockchain" [will help detect and prevent fraud].

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of [MIT Technology Review], mentioned three major areas to watch:

• Explosive innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including IBM Watson, machine learning, etc.
• Pervasive computing, including augmented reality or virtual reality, what IBM calls Internet of Things (IoT)
• Re-writing life, directly editing genomes for healthcare and agriculture

Jason feels there are two major challenges for humans. First, what is the "future of work"? People are no longer working for the same company for their entire career. Rather, they come and go, moving in and out of companies. Second, how will we deliver food and water to the 9.6 billion population expected to exist by 2050, with added challenge of climate change. Ed Walsh, IBM General Manager for Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure, presented next. Last year, I was asked to throw my hat in the ring to be the next General Manager of IBM Storage. I was up against some strong competition, and in the end upper management selected Ed Walsh instead. He is a good choice, and I support his efforts.

Matt Cadieux, CIO for [Red Bull Racing], presented on the IT challenges of designing, building and racing Formula One racing cars. They have 21 races per year, and each race has slightly different specifications, forcing Red Bull Racing to break down and rebuild their cars for each race.

Michael Lawley, Senior IT Vice President for [HealthPlan Services], explained how his business grew 300 percent in the past four years. Their workloads are very "spiky", so it is good that they can scale up or down their IT infrastructure 3-4x as needed, within minutes.

Jacob Yundt, CIO for University of Pittsburgh Medical Center [UPMC], explained the importance of genomics as the next frontier of medicine. Genomics allows for more accurate cancer determinations, which helps target specific treatments. They moved from x86-based clusters to those based on Power LC models from IBM. For analytics, they chose IBM Power8 S822L servers with Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and the Hadoop Transparency Layer.

Lastly, Terri Virnig hosted two technology partners to the stage for some major announcements. First, Jim Totton from Red Hat, announced that RHEV v4 (based on Linux KVM) is announced for POWER platform. Secondly, Scott Gnau, CTO for [Hortonworks], announced that Hortonworks will run on the POWER platform, as part of IBM and Hortonworks Open Data Platform [ODP] initiative.

Trends & Directions: The Future of Storage in the Cloud and Cognitive Era

Eric Herzog, IBM Vice President, Product Marketing and Management Software Defined Infrastructure, served as emcee for this session.

Ed Walsh, IBM General Manager for IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure, marveled at IBM's "storied history in storage innovation". He suggests clients should modernize and transform their business with IBM broadest storage portfolio in the IT industry.

Clod Barrera, IBM Engineer and the Chief Technical Strategist for IBM Systems Storage, explained that in the past 60 years of disk systems, areal density has improved by a factor of one billion. Unfortunately, that is slowing down, and we won't see such improvements anymore.

Bina Hallman, IBM Vice President, Software Defined Storage Solutions Offering Management, hosted a panel of clients, including:

• Bob Osterlin, from [Nuance], that has 5-10 PB of data using IBM Spectrum Scale for voice recognition software.
• Rich Spurlock, from [Cobalt Iron], that provides Backup-as-a-Service using IBM Spectrum Protect. Their clients experience an 80 percent reduction in operating expenditures (OPEX) using Spectrum Protect.
• Moshe Perez, from [RR Media], that provides television channel distribution like ESPN and BBC to other countries. They use IBM Spectrum Accelerate to handle the demand peaks, such as the Olympics.

Mike Kuhn, IBM Vice President for Storage Solutions Offering Management, also hosted a panel of clients, including:

• Kevin Muha, from [UPMC], managing 13 PB of storage, across a variety of IBM storage devices, including 700 TB of FlashSystem V9000.
• Bill Reed, CTO for [Arizona State Land Department], that uses VersaStack with IBM FlashSystem V9000 for geographic information system [GIS] applications. They manage over 9.2 million acres to help fund K-12 schools in Arizona.
• Owen Morley, from Plenty of Fish [POF] dating website, evaluated nearly every flash device in the market, and chose IBM FlashSystem. "The one metric that matters is Latency!"

These were the two main keynote sessions on Monday morning. During the rest of the week there will be over 285 storage-related breakout sessions, dozens of labs, and 7 panels.

technorati tags: IBM, #IBMedge, #IBMstorage, #IBMcloud, Tom Rosamilia, Plenty of Fish, POF, Wells Fargo, Matt Cadieux, Red Bull, Red Bull Racing, Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review, Artificial Intelligence, AI, augmented reality, virtual reality, Ed Walsh, Michael Lawley, HealthPlan Services, Jacob Yundt, UPMC, Terri Virnig, Jim Totton, RedHat, RHEL, RHEV, Scott Gnau, Hortonworks, Eric Herzog, Clod Barrera, Bina Hallman, Bob Osterlin, Nuance, Rich Spurlock, Cobalt Iron, Moshe Perez, RR Media, Mike Kuhn, Kevin Muha, Bill Reed, Arizona State Land Department, Owen Morley, FlashSystem