Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Where does the future of enterprise storage lie?

I've talked about how traditional block and NAS storage isn't going away for small businesses. So what about enterprise storage? In the past few years, we've seen the death of multiple vendors of scale-out block storage, two of which were of interest to me being Coraid and Intransa, both of which allowed chaining together large numbers of Ethernet-connected nodes to scale out storage across a very large array (the biggest cluster we built at Intransa had 16 nodes and a total of 1.5 petabytes of storage but the theoretical limits of the technology were significantly higher). Reality is that they had been on life support for years because the 1990's and 2000's were the decades of NAS, not of block storage. Oh, EMC was still heaving lots of big iron block storage over the wall to power big databases, but most applications of storage other than those big corporate data marts were NAS applications, whether it was Windows and Linux NAS servers at the low end or NetApp NAS servers at the high end.

NAS was pretty much a necessity back in the era of desktops and individual servers. You could mount people's home directories on a CIFS or NFS share (depending on their OS). People could share their files with each other by simply copying them to a shared directory. You saw block storage devices being exported to these desktops via iSCSI sometimes, but usually block storage devices were attached to physical servers in the back room on dedicated storage networks that were much faster than floor networks. The floor networks were fast enough to carry CIFS, but CIFS at its core is just putting and getting objects, not blocks, and can operate much more asynchronously than a block device and thus wasn't killed by latency the way iSCSI is.

But there's problems too. For one thing, every single device has to be part of a single login realm or domain of some sort, because that's how you secure connections to the NAS. Furthermore, people have to be put into groups, and access set on portions of the overall NAS cloud based on what groups a person belongs to. That was difficult enough in the days when you just had to worry about Linux servers and Windows desktops. But now you have all these devices

Which brings up the second issue with NAS -- it simply doesn't fit into a device-oriented world. Devices typically operate in a cloud world. They know how to push and pull objects via http, but they don't speak CIFS or NFS, and never will. What we are seeing is that increasingly we are operating in a world that isn't file based, it's object based. When you go into Google Docs to edit a spreadsheet, you aren't reading and writing a file. You're reading and writing an object. When you are running an internal business application, you are no longer loading a physical program and reading and writing files. You're going to a URL for a web app that most likely is talking to a back end database of some kind to load and store objects.

Now, finally, add in what has happened in the server room. You'll still see the big physical iron for things like database servers. But by and large the remainder of the server room has gone away, replaced by a private cloud, or pushed into a public cloud like Amazon's cloud. Now when people want to put up a server to run some service they don't call IT and work up a budget and wait months for an actual server to be procured etc., they work at the speed of the cloud -- they spin up a virtual machine, they attach block storage to it for the base image and for any database they need beyond object storage, and they implement whatever app they need to implement.

What this means is that block storage and object storage integrated with cloud management systems like OpenStack are the future of enterprise storage, a future that alas did not arrive soon enough for the vendors of scale-out block storage that survived the previous decade, who ended up without enough capital to enter this brave new world. NAS won't go away entirely, but it will increasingly be a departmental thing feeding desktops on the floor, not something that anything in the server room uses. And that is, in fact, what you see happening in the marketplace today. You see traditional Big Iron vendors like HDS increasingly pushing object storage, and the new solid-state storage vendors such as Pure Storage and Solidfire are predominantly block storage vendors selling into cloud environments.

So what does the future hold? For one thing, lower latencies via hypervisor integration. Exporting a share via iSCSI then mounting it via the hypervisor has all of the usual latency issues of iSCSI. Even with 10 gigabit networking now hitting affordability and 25 to 100 gigabit Ethernet in the future, latency is a killer if you're expecting a full round trip. What if writes were cached on a local SSD array, in order, and applied in order? For 99% of the applications out there this provides all the write consistency that you need. The cache will have to be turned off prior to migrating the virtual machine to a different box, of course -- thus the need for hypervisor integration -- but other than a catastrophic failure (where the virtual machine will go lights out also and thus not have inconsistent data when it is restarted on another node) you will, at best, have some minor data loss -- much better than inconsistent data.

So: Block storage with hypervisor and cloud management integration, and object storage. The question then becomes: Is there a place for the traditional dedicated storage device (or cluster of devices) in this brave new world? Maybe I'll talk about that next, because it's an interesting question, with issues of data density, storage usage, power consumption, and then what about that new buzzword, "software defined storage"? Is storage really going to be a commodity in the future where everybody's machine room has a bunch of generic server boxes loaded with someone's software? And what impact, exactly, is solid state storage having? Interesting things to think about there...

-ELG

Saturday, August 1, 2015

The quest for an integrated storage stack

In prior posts I've mentioned the multitude of problems with the standard Linux storage stack. It's inflexible -- once you've set up a stack (usually LV->VG->PV->MD->BLOCK) and opened a filesystem on it, you cannot modify it to, e.g., add a replication layer to the stac. It lacks the ability to do geographic replication in any reasonable fashion. The RAID layer in particular lacks the ability to write to (and replay) a battery-backed RAM cache to deal with the RAID 5 write hole (which, despite its name, also applies to other RAID levels and results in silently corrupted data). Throw iSCSI into this equation to provide block devices to virtual machines and, potentially, to do replication to block devices on other physical machines, and things get even more complex.

One method that has been proposed to deal with these issues is to simply not use a storage stack at all. Thus we have ZFS and BTRFS, which attempt to move the RAID layer and logical volume layers into the filesystem. This certainly solves the problem of corrupted data, but at a significant penalty in terms of performance, especially on magnetic media where the filesystem swiftly becomes fragmented. As a result running virtual machines using "block devices" that are actually files on a BTRFS filesystem results in extremely poor "disk" performance on the virtual machines. A file on a log-based subsystem is simply a poor substitute for an extent on a block device. Furthermore, use of these filesystems for databases has proven to be woefully slow compared to using a normal filesystem like XFS on top of a RAID-10 layer.

The other method that has been to abandon the Linux storage stack except as a provider of individual block devices and instead layer a distributed system like Ceph on top of it. My tests with Ceph have not been particularly promising. Performance of Ceph block devices at an individual virtual machine level were abysmal. There appears to be three reasons for this: 1) Overly pessimistic assumptions about writes on the part of Ceph, 2) The inherent latencies involved in a distributed storage stack, and 3) the fact that Ceph reads/writes via XFS filesystems layered on top of block devices, rather than to extents on raw block devices. For the latter, in my experience you will see *at least* a 10% degradation in virtual machine block device performance if the block device is implemented as a file on top of XFS rather than directly to a LVM extent.

In both cases, I wonder if we are throwing out the cart because the horse has asthma. I've worked as a software engineer for two of the pioneers of Linux-based storage -- Agami Systems, which did a NAS device with an integrated storage system, and Intransa Inc., which did scalable iSCSI storage systems with an integrated block storage subsystem. Both suffered the usual fate of pioneers -- i.e., face down dead with arrows in the back, though it took longer with Intransa than with Agami. Both wrote storage stacks for Linux which solved most of the problems of the current Linux storage stack, though each solved a different subset of those problems. There are still a significant number of businesses which do not need the expense and complexity of a full OpenStack data center in order to solve their problems, but which do need things like, e.g., logged geographic replication to replicate their data to an offsite location, something which Intransa solved ten years ago (but which, alas, died with Intransa), or real-time snapshots of virtual machine block devices at the host device level, or ...

In short: Despite the creation of distributed systems like CEPH and integrated storage management filesystems like BTRFS, there is a significant need for an integrated storage stack for Linux -- one that allows flexibility in configuring both block devices and network filesystems, which allows for easy scalability and management, which has modern features such as logged geographic replication, battery backed RAM cache support (or at least fast SSD log device support at the MD layer), and allows dynamic insertion of components into the software stack much as you could create a replication layer in the Intransa StorStac and have it sync then replicate to a remote device without ever unmounting any filesystem or making the iSCSI target inaccessible. There is simply a large number of businesses which just don't need the expense and complexity of a full OpenStack data center, which indeed don't need more than a pair of iSCSI / NAS storage appliances (a pair in order to handle replication and snapshotting), and the current Linux storage stack lacks fundamental functionality that was implemented over a decade ago but never integrated into Linux itself. It may not be possible to bring all the concepts that Agami and Intransa created into Linux (though I'll point out that all of Intransa's patents are now owned by a patent entity that allows free use for Open Source software), but we should attempt to bring as many of them as possible into the standard Linux storage stack -- because the cloud is the cloud, but most smaller businesses have no need for the cloud, they just need reliable local storage for their local physical and virtual machines.

-ELG