I’ve been a Dropbox user for some time, and as disk-slinger in a former life, I really enjoy reading the company’s tech blog. This post on cloud storage abstraction with Object Store was great.
Data breaches – everyone’s having them. Are you missing out? It’s probably just a matter of time. While you’re waiting, check out this article from Preston – John Proctor and Data Breaches.
It’s always sad when a startup stops. Mellor writes that Pavilion Data – last NVMe over Fabrics flash array startup – has died. I had the opportunity to take the kit for a spin in a previous role, and spent some time with some of their people. Smart folks doing interesting things. I hope those impacted land on their feet.
I always enjoy talking to Chris about his Plex setup, because he’s taken it to the next level. Here’s a great article he put together on how to automate lighting with Plex playback.
Finally, our old friend VMware vCenter Converter is back. You can download it from here.
Welcome to Random Short Take #37. Not a huge amount of players have worn 37 in the NBA, but Metta World Peace did a few times. When he wasn’t wearing 15, and other odd numbers. But I digress. Let’s get random.
Pavilion Data recently added S3 capability to its platform. It’s based on a variant of MinIO, and adds an interesting dimension to what Pavilion Data has traditionally offered. Mellor provided some good coverage here.
Speaking of object storage, Dell EMC recently announced ECS 3.5. You can read more on that here. The architectural white paper has been updated to reflect the new version as well.
Online events are all the rage at the moment, and two noteworthy events are coming up shortly: Pure//Accelerate and VeeamON 2020. Speaking of online events, we’re running a virtual BNEVMUG next week. Details on that here. ZertoCON Virtual is also a thing.
Speaking of Pure Storage, this article from Cody Hosterman on NVMe and vSphere 7 is lengthy, but definitely worth the read.
I can’t recall whether I mentioned that this white paper covering VCD on VCF 3.9 is available now, and I can’t be bothered checking. So here it is.
I’m not just a fan of Backblaze because of its cool consumer backup solution and object storage platform, I’m also a big fan because of its blog. Articles like this one are a great example of companies doing corporate culture right (at least from what I can see).
I have the impression that Datadobi has been doing some cool stuff recently, and this story certainly seems to back it up.
I recently had the opportunity to hear about Pavilion Data Systems from VR Satish, CTO, and Jeff Sosa, VP of Products. I thought I’d put together a brief overview of their offering, as NVMe-based systems are currently the new hotness in the storage world.
It’s a Box!
And a pretty cool looking one at that. Here’s what it looks like from the front.
[image courtesy of Pavilion Data]
The storage platform is built from standard components, including x86 processors and U.2 NVMe SSDs. A big selling point, in Pavilion’s opinion, is that there are no custom ASICs and no FPGAs in the box. There are three different models available (the datasheet is here), with different connectivity and capacity options.
From a capacity perspective, you can start at 14TB and get all the way to 1PB in 4RU. The box can start at 18 NVMe drives and (growing by increments of 18) goes to 72 drives. It runs RAID 6 and presents the drives as virtual volumes to the hosts. Here’s a look at the box from a top-down perspective.
[image courtesy of Pavilion Data]
There’s a list of supported NVMe SSDs that you can use with the box, if you wanted to source those elsewhere. On the right hand side (the back of the box) are the IO controllers. You can start at 4 and go up to 20 in a box. There’s also 2 management modules and 4 power supplies for resiliency.
[image courtesy of Pavilion Data]
You can see in the above diagram that connectivity is also a big part of the story, with each pair of controllers offering 4x 100GbE ports.
Software?
Sure. It’s a box but it needs something to run it. Each controller runs a customised flavour of Linux and delivers a number of the features you’d expect from a storage array, including:
Active-active controller support
Space-efficient snapshots and clones
Thin provisioning.
There’re also plans afoot for encryption support in the near future. Pavilion have also focused on making operations simple, providing support for RESTful API orchestration, OpenStack Cinder, Kubernetes, DMTF RedFish and SNIA Swordfish. They’ve also gone to some lengths to ensure that standard NVMe/F drivers will work for host connectivity.
Thoughts and Further Reading
Pavilion Data has been around since 2014 and the leadership group has some great heritage in the storage and networking industry. They tell me they wanted to move away from the traditional approach to storage arrays (the dual controller, server-based platform) to something that delivered great performance at scale. There are similarities more with high performance networking devices than high performance storage arrays, and this is by design. They tell me they really wanted to deliver a solution that wasn’t the bottleneck when it came to realising the performance capabilities of the NVMe architecture. The numbers being punted around are certainly impressive. And I’m a big fan of the approach, in terms of both throughput and footprint.
The webscale folks running apps like MySQL and Cassandra and MongoDB (and other products with similarly awful names) are doing a few things differently to the enterprise bods. Firstly, they’re more likely to wear jeans and sneakers to the office (something that drives me nuts) and they’re leveraging DAS heavily because it gives them high performance storage options for latency-sensitive situations. The advent of NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics takes away the requirement for DAS (although I’m not sure they’ll start to wear proper office attire any time soon) by delivering storage at the scale and performance they need. As a result of this, you can buy 1RU servers with compute instead of 2RU servers full of fast disk. There’s an added benefit as organisations tend to assign longer lifecycles to their storage systems, so systems like the one from Pavilion are going to have a place in the DC for five years, not 2.5 – 3 years. Suddenly lifecycling your hosts becomes simpler as well. This is good news for the jeans and t-shirt set and the beancounters alike.
NVMe (and NVMe over Fabrics) has been a hot topic for a little while now, and you’re only going to hear more about it. Those bright minds at Gartner are calling it “Shared Accelerated Storage” and you know if they’re talking about it then the enterprise folks will cotton on in a few years and suddenly it will be everywhere. In the meantime, check out Chris M. Evans’ article on NVMe over Fabrics and Chris Mellor also did an interesting piece at El Reg. The market is becoming more crowded each month and I’m interested to see how Pavilion fare.
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