Category: Ethernet Data Storage

General topics related to Ethernet-connected data storage solutions.

File vs. Block vs. Object Storage – Are Worlds Colliding?

John Kim Leave a comment

When it comes to storage, a byte is a byte is a byte, isn’t it?

One of the enduring truths about simplicity is that scale makes everything hard, and with that comes complexity. And when we’re not processing the data, how do we store it and access it?

The only way to manage large quantities of data is to make it addressable in larger pieces, above the byte level. For that, we’ve designed sets of data management protocols that help us do several things: address large lumps of data by some kind of name or handle, organize it for storage on external storage devices with different characteristics, and provide protocols that allow us to programmatically write, find, and read it.

On April 17th, the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum will host another of its “Great Debates” webcasts. This time, it’s “File vs. Block vs. Object Storage.” In this live webcast, our experts, Mark Carlson, Alex McDonald and Saqib Jang will compare three types of data organization: file, block and object storage, and the access methods that support them. Each has its own set of use cases, advantages and disadvantages. Each provides data management ranging from simple to sophisticated, and each makes different demands on storage devices and programming technologies.

Perhaps you’re comfortable with block and file, but are interested in investigating the more recent class of object storage and access. Perhaps you’re happy with your understanding of objects, but would really like to understand files a bit better. Or perhaps you want to understand how file, block and object are implemented on the underlying storage systems – and how one can be made to look like the other, depending on how the storage is accessed. Join us as we discuss and debate:

  • Storage devices
    • How different types of storage drive different management & access solutions
    • Which use cases tend to favor block, file or object
  • Block
    • Where everything is in fixed-size chunks
    • SCSI and SCSI-based protocols, and how FC and iSCSI fit in
  • Files
    • When everything is a stream of bytes
    • NFS and SMB
  • Objects
    • When everything is a BLOB
    • HTTP, key value and RESTful interfaces
  • Altogether…
    • When files, blocks and objects collide, it will rock your world!

I will be moderating this “friendly debate” where there won’t be winners or losers, just more information on these three popular data storage technologies. We hope you will register today to come join the debate on April 17th.

And if you missed our first hugely popular “Great Debate” – Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI, it’s now available on-demand.

The Great Debates – Our Next Webcast Series

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

The SNIA ESF is announcing a new series of webcasts, following our hugely successful “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcasts. Those focussed on explaining storage technology from the ground up, and while they were pretty all encompassing in their storage technology coverage, they didn’t compare or contrast similar technologies that perform broadly similar functions.

That’s what we’re going to do in our new “Great Debates” series, the first of which was “FC vs. iSCSI.” It’s now available on-demand. I encourage you to check it out. It’s a great debate with experts who really know their stuff.

But wait… FC vs. iSCSI? That “versus” sounds more like an argument than a discussion. Was there a winner? Was this a technology fight, with a clear-cut winner and a loser? The answer is an emphatic “No!” Read More

Storage Performance Benchmarking: Workloads

Tim Lustig Leave a comment

The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum is very pleased to announce that the hugely popular “Storage Performance Benchmarking” webcast series continues with a 5th installment! Join us on February 14th at 10:00 am PT for “Storage Performance Benchmarking: Workloads.”

Benchmarking storage performance is both an art and a science. In this 5th installment, our experts, Mark Rogov and Chris Conniff, take on optimizing performance for various workloads. Attendees will gain an understanding of workload profiles and their characteristics for common Independent Software Vendor (ISV) applications and learn how to identify application workloads based on I/O profiles to better understand the implications on storage architectures and design patterns. This webcast will cover:

  • An introduction to benchmarking storage performance of workloads
  • Workload characteristics
  • Common Workloads (OLTP, OLAP, VMware, etc.)
  • Graph fun!

Did you notice this webcast is on February 14th? We did that on purpose, because we know you’ll love it! So, register now and spend an hour of your Valentine’s Day with us. We hope to see you there.

And if you have not yet had a chance to watch any of our previous “Storage Performance Benchmarking” webcasts, they are all available on-demand.

 

 

 

Why is Blockchain Storage Different?

J Metz Leave a comment

The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF), specifically ESF Vice Chair, Alex McDonald, spent Halloween explaining storage requirements for modern transactions in our webcast, “Transactional Models & Their Storage Requirements.” Starting with the fascinating history of the first transactional system in a bakery in 1951 (really!), to a discussion on Bitcoin, it was an insightful look at the changing role of storage amid modern transactions. If you missed it, you can watch it on-demand at your convenience. We received some great questions during the live event. Here are answers to them all:

Q. How many nodes are typical in the blockchain ledger? Read More

A Q&A on Storage Management – These Folks Weren’t Too Proud to Ask!

J Metz Leave a comment

The most recent installment of our SNIA ESF webcast series “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” took on a broad topic – storage management. Our experts, Richelle Ahlvers, Mark Rogov and Alex McDonald did a great job explaining the basics and have now answered the questions that attendees asked here in this blog. If you missed the live webcast, check it out on-demand and download a copy of the slides if you’d like to take notes.

Q: What is the difference between storage and a database? Could a database be considered storage?

A: The short answer is no. The long answer relies on the fact that a database doesn’t just store data: it modifies the data to fit into its schema (table, index, etc.) A storage solution doesn’t mutate the data in any shape—the data is always preserved as is.

Q: Doesn’t provisioning a storage array mean setting it up?

A: Within the storage community, provisioning is akin to serving a cake  at a party. To provision storage to a server means cutting a slice of usable capacity and allocating it to a very specific server. The record of the particular pairing is carefully recorded.

Q: Does deduplication fall into Configuration? Even when it is done only on cold data?

A: Great question! Deduplication is one of the services that a storage array may offer, therefore enabling it is configuring such service. To further clarify your question, the point of deduplication is irrelevant: it may happen with cold data (the data that is stored on the array but applications haven’t accessed it in a long time); it may happen to hot or in-flight data (frequently accessed data or data inside cache).

Q. Do Hyperscale vendors (like AWS) use any of the storage management?

A. Hyperscale vendors, like all consumers of storage, use storage management to configure their storage. They use a combination of vendor device tools and custom development scripts/tools, but are not heavy consumers of industry standard storage interfaces today. Swordfish’s RESTful interface will provide an easy-to-consume API for hyperscale vendors to integrate into their management ecosystem as vendors start delivering Swordfish-based solutions.

Q. It was mentioned that there was a ‘steep learning curve’ for previous SNIA storage management  model. Any idea how much easier this is to learn?

A. One of the major advantages for Swordfish is that the RESTful API’s are standardized and can take advantage of readily available tools and infrastructure. With the JSON-based payload, you can use standard plug-ins for browsers, as well as Python scripting languages to immediately interact with the Swordfish API’s. This is a distinct difference from the SMI-S API’s, which although they are also XML-based APIs, required custom or third-party tools to interact with the SMI-S providers.

Q. You talked about how Swordfish is being designed as more user and client centric.   How are you doing this?    

A. We are starting with very specific use cases and scenarios  (rather than looking at “what is all the functionality we could expose”) as we build both the structure of the API and the amount of information returned.     We’ve also documented a lot of the basic use cases, and who might like to do them, in a user’s guide, and published that alongside the Swordfish specification.   You can find links to this at the SNIA Swordfish page:  snia.org/swordfish

Q. You weren’t specific on storage management tools, and I was expecting more detail. I’m wondering why you did this at such a high level, as this really hasn’t helped me.

A. We were primarily referring to ITIL –(The Information Technology Infrastructure Library). It’s a framework designed to standardize the selection, planning, delivery and support of IT services to a business.  Learn more here.

Q. While most of the products today support SMI-S, it’s not something that DevOps or Storage Admins use directly.   How, or is, Swordfish going to be different?

A. There are two primary ways we see the Swordfish API being much more accessible directly to the individual admins.   First, as a RESTful interface, it is very easy to access and traverse with the tools that they use daily – from web browsers directly, to REST plugins, to simple (or complex) python scripts.   The learning curve to start interacting with Swordfish is extremely small.   You can get a sense by going to an online “mockup” site here:   http://swordfishmockups.com  – there are some simple instructions to either browse the system directly or some standard clients to make it easier.   That will give you an idea of how easy it will be to start interacting with Swordfish (plus security for a real system, of course).

Remember the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” is a series. We’ve covered 8 storage topics to date and have a library of on-demand webcasts you can watch at your convenience. Happy viewing!

Storage for Transactional Systems: From Banking to Facebook

J Metz Leave a comment

We’re all accustomed to transferring money from one bank account to another; a credit to the payer becomes a debit to the payee. But that model uses a specific set of sophisticated techniques to accomplish what appears to be a simple transaction. Today, we’re also well acquainted with ordering goods online, reserving an airline seat over the Internet, or simply updating a photograph on Facebook. Can these applications use the same banking models, or are new techniques required? It’s a question we’ll tackle at our next Ethernet Storage Forum webcast on October 31st “Transactional Models & Their Storage Requirements.”

One of the more important concepts in storage is the notion of  transactions,  which are used in databases, financials, and other mission critical workloads. However, in the age of cloud and distributed systems, we need to update our thinking about what constitutes a transaction. We need to understand how new theories and techniques allow us to undertake transactional work in the face of unreliable and physically dispersed systems. It’s a topic full of interesting concepts (and lots of acronyms!). In this webcast, we’ll provide a brief tour of traditional transactional systems and their use of storage, we’ll explain new application techniques and transaction models, and we’ll discuss what storage systems need to look like to support these new advances. And yes, we’ll decode all the acronyms and nomenclature too.

You will learn:

  • A brief history of transactional systems from banking to Facebook
  • How the Internet and distributed systems have changed and how we view transactions
  • An explanation of the terminology, from ACID to CAP and beyond
  • How applications, networks & particularly storage have changed to meet these demands

You may have noticed this webcast is on Halloween, October 31st. We promise it will be a treat not a trick! I encourage you to register today.

Comparing iSCSI, iSER, and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF): Ecosystem, Interoperability, Performance, and Use Cases

Saqib Jang 1 Comment

iSCSI is one of the most broadly supported storage protocols, but traditionally has not been associated with the highest performance. Newer protocols like iSER and NVMe over Fabrics promise extreme performance but are still maturing and lack the broad feature and platform support of iSCSI. Storage vendors and customers face interesting tradeoffs and options when evaluating how to achieve the highest block storage performance on Ethernet networks, while preserving the major software and hardware investment in iSCSI. Read More

Too Proud to Ask Webcast Series Opens Pandora’s Box – Storage Management

J Metz Leave a comment

Storage can be something of a “black box,” a monolithic entity that is at once mysterious and scary. That’s why we created “The Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask” webcast series. So far, we’ve explored various and sundry aspects of storage, focusing on “the naming of the parts.” Our goal has been to break down some of the components of storage and explain how they fit into the greater whole. Read More

Q&A – When Compute, Networking and Storage Intersect

J Metz Leave a comment

In Part Vermillion of our SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcast series – we examined the terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. That’s why we called it “What if Programming and Networking Had a Storage Baby” If you missed the live webcast, you can watch it on-demand.

The discussion from our panel of experts generated a lot of good questions. As promised, here are answers to them all. Read More

The Too Proud to Ask Train Makes Another Stop: Where Does My Data Go?

Chad Hintz Leave a comment

By now, we at the SNIA Storage Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) hope you are familiar with (perhaps even a loyal fan of) the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series. On August 1st, the “Too Proud to Ask” train will make another stop. In this seventh session, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Turquoise – Where Does My Data Go?, we will take a look into the mysticism and magic of what happens when you send your data off into the wilderness. Once you click “save,” for example, where does it actually go?

When we start to dig deeper beyond the application layer, we often don’t understand what happens behind the scenes. It’s important to understand multiple aspects of the type of storage our data goes to along with their associated benefits and drawbacks as well as some of the protocols used to transport it.

In this webcast we will explain:

  • Volatile v Non-Volatile v Persistent Memory
  • NVDIMM v RAM v DRAM v SLC v MLC v TLC v NAND v 3D NAND v Flash v SSDs v NVMe
  • NVMe (the protocol)

Many people get nervous when they see that many acronyms, but all too often they come up in conversation, and you’re expected to know all of them? Worse, you’re expected to know the differences between them, and the consequences of using them? Even worse, you’re expected to know what happens when you use the wrong one?

We’re here to help.

It’s an ambitious project, but these terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. Having a good grasp of these concepts ties in with which type of storage networking to use, and how data is actually stored behind the scenes.

Register today to join us for this edition of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, as we work towards making you feel more comfortable in the strange, mystical world of storage. And don’t let pride get in the way of asking any and all questions on this great topic. We will be there on August 1st to answer them!

Update: If you missed the live event, it’s now available  on-demand. You can also  download the webcast slides.