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Tag: Sun

For a short while, I ran the flash memory strategy at Sun and then Oracle, so I still keep my ear to the ground regarding flash news. That news is often frustratingly light — journalists in the space who are fully capable of providing analysis end up brushing the surface. With a tip of the hat to the FJM crew, here’s my commentary on a recent article.
NetApp has Hybrid Aggregate drives coming, with data moved automatically in real time between flash located next to the spinning disks. The company now says that this is a better technology than PCIe flash approaches.
Sounds interesting. NetApp had previously stacked its chips on a PCIe approach for flash called the performance acceleration module (PAM); I read about it in the same publication. This apparent change of strategy is significant, and I wish that the article would have explored the issue, but it was never mentioned.
NetApp, presenting at an Analyst Day event in New York on 30 June, said that having networked storage move as it were into the host server environment was disadvantageous. This was according to Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers.
1. So is this a quote from NetApp or a quote from an analyst or a quote from NetApp quoting an analyst? I’m confused.
2. This is a dense and interesting statement so allow me to unpack it. Moving storage to the host server is code for Fusion-io. These guys make a flash-laden PCIe card that you put in your compute node for super-fast local data access, and they connect a bunch of them together with an IB backplane to share the contents of different cards between hosts. They recently went public, and customers love the performance they offer over traditional SANs. I assume the term “disadvantageous” was left intentionally vague as those being disadvantaged may be NTAP shareholders rather than customers implementing such a solution.
Manish Goel, NetApp’s product ops EVP, said SSDs used as hard disk drive replacements were not as interesting as using flash at the disk layer in a Hybrid Aggregate drive approach – and this was coming.
An Aggregate is the term NetApp uses for a collection of drives. A Hybrid Aggregate — presumably — is some new thing that mixes HDDs and SSDs. Maybe it’s like Sun’s hybrid storage pool. I would have liked to see Manish Goel’s statement vetted or explained, but that’s all we get.
Flash Cache in the controller is a straightforward array read I/O accelerator. PCIe flash in host servers is a complementary technology but will not decentralise the storage market and move networked storage back into the host servers.
Is this still the NetApp announcement or is this back to the journalism? It’s a new paragraph so I guess it’s the latter. Fusion-io will be happy to learn that it only took a couple of lines to be upgraded from “disadvantageous” to “complementary”. And you may be interested to know why NetApp says that host-based flash is complementary. There’s a vendor out there working with NetApp on a host-based flash PCIe card that NetApp will treat as part of its caching tier, pushing data to the card for fast access by the host. I’d need to dig up my notes from the many vendor roadmaps I saw to recall who is building this, but in the context of a public blog post it’s probably better that I don’t.
NetApp has a patent in this Hybrid Aggregate disk drive area called “Mechanisms for moving data in a Hybrid Aggregate”.
I won’t bore you by reposting the except from the patent, but the broad language of the patent does recall to mind the many recent invalidated NetApp patents…
Surely this is what we all understand as auto-placement of data in a virtual storage pool comprising SSD and fast disk tiers, such as Compellent’s block-level Data Progression? Not so, according to a person close to the situation: “It’s much more automatic, real-time and granular. Compellent needs policies and is not real-time. [NetApp] will be automatic and always move data real-time, rather than retroactively.”
What could have followed this — but didn’t — was a response from a representative from Compellent or someone familiar with their technology. Compellent, EMC, Oracle, and others all have strategies that involve mixing flash memory with conventional hard drives. It’s the rare article that discusses those types of connections. Oracle’s ZFSproducts uses flash as a caching tier, automatically populating it with useful data. Compellent has a clever technique of moving data between storage tiers seamlessly — and customers seem to love it. EMC just hucks a bunch of SSDs into an array — and customers seem to grin and bear it. NetApp’s approach? It’s hard to decipher what it would mean to “move data in real-time, rather than retroactively.” Does that mean that data is moved when it’s written and then never moved again? That doesn’t sound better. My guess is that NetApp’s approach is very much like Compellent’s — something they should be touting rather than parrying. And I’d love to read that article.

In 2005, Sun released the source code to Solaris,  described then as the company’s crown jewel. Why do this? The simplest answer is that Solaris had been losing ground to an open source competitor in Linux. Losing ground was a symptom of  economics. Students who had once been raised on Solaris were being inculcated with Linux knowlege. The combination of Linux and x86 were good enough and significantly cheaper; new companies for whom the default had once been Sun/Solaris/SPARC were instead building on x86/Linux. OpenSolaris along with x86 support were specifically intended to address this trend. Indeed, the codename for OpenSolaris was “tonic” — the tonic for Solaris’ problems.

To that end, OpenSolaris was on reasonably stable footing: open source had become expected for an operating system,  source code availability was a benefit to traditional enterprise users (especially with the advent of DTrace), and the community would attract new users. But then Solaris lost the plot. Users chose Solaris because it is a — or perhaps the — enterprise operating system. OpenSolaris was intended to broaden the appeal, but that notion was taken to such extremes as to lose sight of the traditional customers of Solaris, and, indeed, the focus that makes Solaris both unique and great.

OpenSolaris  June 14, 2005 – August 13, 2010

We launched Solaris 10 in 2004 with an impressive list of features — ZFS, DTrace, Zones, SMF, FMA, Fire Engine — all highly relevant for enterprise users. You can find a company that has bet its business on the success of each of those features. In the wake of OpenSolaris, the decision was made (and here I can no longer use the active voice because by then I had left to start Fishworks elsewhere at Sun) to have an explicit focus on building an operating system for developers — which is to say, for their laptops. This was an error, but a predictable one. Once Solaris was free to download and use, revenue recognition for the Solaris organization which has always been difficult to measure became even more indirect. The metrics were changed: the targets for management bonuses became not revenue, or enterprise users, but downloads. Directly or indirectly much of the focus for the Solaris organization shifted to address that straightforward goal. The mistake was that OpenSolaris didn’t need to find users, they found Solaris. In trying to build a community, the new direction for OpenSolaris weakened the very principles upon which a thriving community would have been based.

The very name “OpenSolaris” got confused, diluted, and poluted. OpenSolaris was a source repository, a community, and a distro (although purists still insist that Indiana is the appropriate name for that part) intended to “close the familiarity gap” with Linux. Moreover, new projects that shifted efforts away from enterprise uses (read: paying customers) to focus on the laptop also rallied under the banner of “OpenSolaris”. In a way Oracle’s acquisition of Sun saved Solaris from itself; the marching orders became much clearer: address enterprise users, ship Solaris 11 (something that should not have taken 6 years). As for OpenSolaris, that decision too was likely simple for Oracle, never an overt fan of open source. Had “OpenSolaris” simply meant a code base and user community, I think there’s a good chance it would have been allowed to live. Burdened, however, with the baggage of the Indiana distro and sundry projects incomprehensible to Oracle management, OpenSolaris was in a politically untenable position. Mike‘s “Friday the 13th memo” merely made it official — Solaris was to be closed source once more.

Sun’s efforts with OpenSolaris  were, at best, a mixed success. Quietly, however, an ecosystem of companies grew out of the technologies in OpenSolaris. Notably Joyent uses Zones and DTrace as significant differentiators; Nexenta builds very heavily on ZFS; as I’ve mentioned, Delphix, my new employer, builds on OpenSolaris as well. There are many more that I know about, and still more that I don’t. These companies chose OpenSolaris so they could use the innovative technologies that simply aren’t available anywhere else. And they did so in spite of a common trend towards Linux with its familiarity, and broad compatibility — the innovation in Solaris was more valuable and, in some cases, enabling for the company’s business.

illumos  August 3, 2010 –

The danger for those companies has long been that Oracle would pull the rug out from under them; only the foolish had no contingency plan. The options were to give up on Solaris or maintain a fork. Happily illumos has stepped in to offer a third path. Garrett D’Amore and Nexenta graciously started the illumos project to carry the OpenSolaris torch. It is an ostensible fork of OpenSolaris (can you fork a dead project?), but more importantly a mechanism by which companies building on those component technologies can pool their resources, amortize their costs, and build a community by and for the downstream users who are investing in those same technologies. Rather than being operated by a single corporate interest, its steward will be a 501(c)(3) non-profit in the model of the Mozilla Foundation.

I was pleased to announce at tonight’s SVOSUG meeting that I’ll be joining the illumos developer council, I was delighted to accept when Garrett offered me the position. My bias for illumos is that the main repository will focus on reliability, performance, and compatibility while taking a conservative approach to new features and functionality. As much as possible, I’d like the downstream users — the distributions, appliances, and platforms — to make the decisions appropriate to their uses and only adopt large-scale changes into the trunk when there’s broad consensus among them. The goal must be to build a project that is readily useful to everyone and to allow our collective efforts to be shared as easily as possible.

What’s the future of Solaris? For many it will be Solaris 11 in late 2011. But for others, it will be illumos either as the firmware for an appliance (not unlike what we built at Fishworks in the 7000 series), the platform for your web applications, or as a general purpose operating system. The innovation in Solaris has always flowed from the creative individuals working on the project. Keep your eyes on illumos; Oracle ending OpenSolaris is no surprise, but in doing so they have broken their own monopoly on Solaris and Solaris talent.

This year’s flash memory summit got me thinking about our use of SSDs over the years at Fishworks. The picture of our left is a visual history of SSD evals in rough chronological order from the oldest at the bottom to the newest at the top (including some that have yet to see the light of day).

Early Days

When we started Fishworks, we were inspired by the possibilities presented by ZFS and Thumper. Those components would be key building blocks in the enterprise storage solution that became the 7000 series. An immediate deficiency we needed to address was how to deliver competitive performance using 7,200 RPM disks. Folks like NetApp and EMC use PCI-attached NV-DRAM as a write accelerator. We evaluated something similar, but found the solution lacking because it had limited scalability (the biggest NV-DRAM cards at the time were 4GB), consumed our limited PCIe slots, and required a high-speed connection between nodes in a cluster (e.g. IB, further eating into our PCIe slot budget).

The idea we had was to use flash. None of us had any experience with flash beyond cell phones and USB sticks, but we had the vague notion that flash was fast and getting cheaper. By luck, flash SSDs were just about to be where we needed them. In late 2006 I started evaluating SSDs on behalf of the group, looking for what we would eventually call Logzilla. At that time, SSDs were getting affordable, but were designed primarily for environments such as military use where ruggedness was critical. The performance of those early SSDs was typically awful.

Logzilla

STEC — still Simpletech in those days — realized that their early samples didn’t really suit our needs, but they had a new device (partly due to the acquisition of Gnutech) that would be a good match. That first sample was fibre-channel and took some finagling to get working (memorably it required metric screw of an odd depth), but the Zeus IOPS, an 18GB 3.5″ SATA SSD using SLC NAND, eventually became our Logzilla (we’ve recently updated it with a SAS version for our updated SAS-2 JBODs). Logzilla addressed write performance economically, and scalably in a way that also simplified clustering; the next challenge was read performance.

Readzilla

Intent on using commodity 7,200 RPM drives, we realized that our random read latency would be about twice that of 15K RPM drives (duh). Fortunately, most users don’t access all of their data randomly (regardless of how certain benchmarks are designed). We already had much more DRAM cache than other storage products in our market segment, but we thought that we could extend that cache further by using SSDs. In fact, the invention of the L2ARC followed a slightly different thought process: seeing the empty drive bays in the front of our system (just two were used as our boot disks) and the piles of SSDs laying around, I stuck the SSDs in the empty bays and figured out how we’d use them.

It was again STEC who stepped up to provide our Readzilla, a 100GB 2.5″ SATA SSD using SLC flash.

Next Generation

Logzilla and Readzilla are important features of the Hybrid Storage Pool. For the next generation expect the 7000 series to move away from SLC NAND flash. It was great for the first generation, but other technologies provide better $/IOPS for Logzilla and better $/GB for Readzilla (while maintaining low latency). For Logzilla we think that NV-DRAM is a better solution (I reviewed one such solution here), and for Readzilla MLC flash has sufficient performance at much lower cost and ZFS will be able to ensure the longevity.

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