Category: Object Storage

New Webcast: Hierarchical Erasure Coding: Making Erasure Coding Usable

Glyn Bowden Leave a comment

On May 14th the SNIA-CSI (Cloud Storage Initiative) will be hosting a live Webcast “Hierarchical Erasure Coding: Making erasure coding usable.” This technical talk, presented by Vishnu Vardhan, Sr. Manager, Object Storage, at NetApp and myself, will cover two different approaches to erasure coding – a flat erasure code across JBOD, and a hierarchical code with an inner code and an outer code. This Webcast, part of the SNIA-CSI developer’s series, will compare the two approaches on different parameters that impact the IT business and provide guidance on evaluating object storage solutions. You’ll learn:

  • Industry dynamics
  • Erasure coding vs. RAID – Which is better?
  • When is erasure coding a good fit?
  • Hierarchical Erasure Coding- The next generation
  • How hierarchical codes make growth easier
  • Key areas where hierarchical coding is better than flat erasure codes

Register now and bring your questions. Vishnu and I will look forward to answering them.

OpenStack Cloud Storage Q&A

Sam Fineberg Leave a comment

More than 300 people have seen our Webcast “OpenStack Cloud Storage.” If you missed it, it’s now available on demand. It was a great session with a lot of questions from attendees. We did not have time to address them all – so here is a complete Q&A. If you think of any others, please comment on this blog. Also, mark your calendar for January 29th when the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative will continue its Developers Tutorial Series with a live Webcast on OpenStack Manila.

Q. Is it correct to say that one can use OpenStack on any vendor’s hardware?

A. Servers, yes, assuming the hardware is supported by Linux. Block storage requires a driver, and not all vendor systems have Cinder drivers.

Q. Is there any OpenStack investigation and/or development in the storage networking area?

A. Cinder includes support for FC and iSCSI. As of Icehouse, the FC support also includes auto-zoning. 

Q. Is there any monetization going on around OpenStack, like we see for distros of Linux?

A. Yes, there are already several commercial distributions available.

Q. Is erasure code needed to get a positive business case for Swift, when compared with traditional storage systems?

A. It is a way to reduce the cost of replication. Traditional storage systems typically already have erasure coding, in the form of RAID. Systems without erasure coding end up using more storage to achieve the same level of protection due to their use of 3-way replication.

Q. Is erasure code currently implemented in the current Swift release?

A. No, it is a separate development stream, which has not been merged yet.

Q. Any limitation on the number of objects per container or total number of objects per Swift cluster?

A. Technically there are no limits. However, in practice, the fact that the containers are implemented using SQL lite limits their size to a million or maybe a few million objects per container. However, due to the way that Swift partitions its metadata, each user can also have millions of containers, and there can be millions of users. So practically speaking, the total system can support an unlimited number of objects.

Q. What are some of the technical reasons for an enterprise to select Swift vs. Amazon S3? In other words, are they pretty much direct alternatives, or does each have its own preferred use cases?

A. They are more or less direct alternatives. There are some minor differences, but they are made for the same purpose. That said, S3 is only available from Amazon. There are some S3 compatible systems, but most of those also support Swift. Swift, on the other hand, is available open source or from multiple vendors. So if you want to run it in your own data center, or in a public cloud other than Amazon, you probably want Swift.

Q. If I wanted to play around with Open Stack, Cinder, and Swift in a lab environment (or in my basement), what do I need and how do I get started?

A. openstack.org is the best place to start. The “devstack” distribution is also good for playing around.

Q. Will you be showing any features for Kilo?

A. The “Futures” I showed will likely be Kilo features, though the final decision of what will be in Kilo won’t happen until just before release.

 Q. Are there any plans to implement data encryption in Cinder?

A. I believe some of the back ends can support encryption already. Cinder is really just a provisioning and orchestration layer. Encryption is a data path feature, so it would need to be implemented in the back end.

Q. Some time back I heard OpenStack Swift is going to come up with block storage as well, any timeline for that?

A. I haven’t heard this, Swift is object storage.

Q. The performance characteristics of Cinder block services can vary quite widely. Is there any standard measure proposed within OpenStack to inform Nova or the application about the underlying Cinder block performance characteristics?

A. Volume types were designed to enable clouds to provide different levels of service. The meaning of these types is up to the cloud administrator. That said, Cinder does expose QoS features like minimum/maximum IOPS.

Q. Is the hypervisor talking to a cinder volume or to (for example) a NetApp or EMC volume?

A. The hypervisor talks to a volume the same way it does outside of OpenStack. For example, the KVM hypervisor can talk to volumes through LVM, or can mount SAN volumes directly.

Q. Which of these projects are most production-ready?

A. This is a hard question, and depends on your definition of production ready. It’s hard to do much without Nova, Glance, and Horizon. Most people use Cinder too, and Swift has been in production at HP and Rackspace for years. Neutron has a lot of complexity, so some people still use Nova network, but that has many limitations. For toy clouds you can avoid using Keystone, but you need it for a “production” cluster. The best way to get a “production ready” OpenStack is to get a supported commercial distribution.

Q. Are there any Plugfests?

A. No, however, the Cinder team has a fairly extensive and continuous integration process that drivers need to pass through. Swift does not because it doesn’t officially “support” any plugins.

 

 

 

Object Storage 201 Q&A

Vishnu Vardhan Paul Levy Leave a comment

Now available on-demand, our recent live CSI Webcast, “Object Storage 201: Understanding Architectural Trade-Offs,” was a highly-rated event that almost 250 people have seen to date. We did not have time to address all of the questions, so here are answers to them. If you think of additional questions, please feel free to comment on this blog.

Q. In terms of load balancers, would you recommend a software approach using HAProxy on Linux or a hardware approach with proprietary appliances like F5 and NetScaler?

A. This really depends on your use case. If you need HA load balancers, or load balancers that can maintain sessions to particular nodes for performance, then you probably need commercial versions. If you just need a basic load balancer, using a software approach is good enough.

Q. With billions of objects what Erasure Codes are more applicable in the long term? Reed Solomon where code words are very small resulting in many billions of code words or Fountain type codes such as LDPC where one can utilize long code words to manage billions of objects more efficiently?

A. Tracking Erase Code fragments have a higher cost than replication but the tradeoff is higher HDD utilization. Using Rateless coding lowers this overhead because each Fragment has equal value. Reed Solomon requires knowledge of fragment placement for repair.

Q. What is the impact of having HDDs of varying capacity within the object store?  Does that affect hashing algorithms in any way?

A. The smallest logical storage unit is a Volume. Because Scale-Out does not stripe volumes there is no impact. Hashing, being used for location would not understand volume size, so a separate Database is used, on a volume basis, to track open space. Hashing algorithms can be modified to suit the underlying disk. The problem is not so much whether they can be designed a priority for the underlying system, but really the rigidity they introduce by tying placement very tightly with topology. That makes failure / exception handling hard.

Q. Do you think RAID6 is sufficient protection with these types of Object Storage Systems or do we need higher parity based Erasure codes?

A. RAID6 makes sense for a Direct Attached storage solution where all drives in the RAID Set can maintain sync. Unlike filesystems (with a few exceptions) Scale-Out Object Storage systems are “Storage as a workload” systems that already have protection as part of the system. So the question is what data protection method is used on solution x as apposed to solution y. You must also think about what you are trying to do.  Are you trying to protect against a single disk failure, or are you trying to protect against a node failure, or are you trying to protect against a site failure. Disk failures – RAID is great, but not if you’re trying to do node failure or site failure. Site failure is an EC sweet spot, but hard to solve from a deployment perspective.

Q. Is it possible to brief how this hash function decides the correct data placement order among the available storage nodes?

A. Take a look at the following links: “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistent_hashing“; https://swiftstack.com/openstack-swift/architecture/

Q. What do you consider to be a typical ratio of controller to storage nodes? Is it better to separate the two, or does it make sense to consolidate where a node is both controller and storage?

A. The flexibility of Scale-Out Object Storage makes these two components independently scalable. The systems we test all have separate controllers and storage nodes so we can test this independence. This is also very dependent on the Object Store technology you use. We know of some object stores where there is a 1GB RAM / TB of data, while there are others that use 1/10 of that.  The compute is dependent on whether you are using erasure coding, and what codes. There is no one answer.

Q. Is the data stored in the Storage depository interchangeable with other vendor’s controller units? For instance, can we load LTO tapes from vendor A’s library to Vendor B’s library and have full access to data?

A. The data stored in these systems are part of the “Storage as a workload” principle. So system metadata used to track Objects stored as a function within the Controller. I would not expect any content stored to be interchangeable with another system architecture.

Q. Would you consider the Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform a radical architectural shift in how object storage can be done?  Kinetic basically eliminates the storage server, POSIX and RAID or all of the “busy work” that storage servers are involved in today.

A. Ethernet drives with key value interface provides a new approach to design object storage solution. It is yet to be seen how compelling they are for TCO and infrastructure availability.

Q. Will the inherent reduction in blast radius by the move towards Ethernet-interface HDDs be a major driver of the Ethernet HDD in object stores?

A. Yes. We define Blast Radius by a compute failure that impacts access to connected hard drives. As we lower the Number of Connected Hard Drives to compute the Blast Radius is reduced. For Ethernet drives, you may need redundant Ethernet switches to minimize the blast radius.  Blast radius can be also minimized with intelligent data placements with software as well.