Tag Archives: nas

Random Short Take #106

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Random short take #106. Looking for old news? I’ve got just the thing. Let’s get random.

Nexsan Announces Unity NV4000

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Nexsan recently announced the Nexsan Unity NV4000. I had the chance to speak to Vincent Phillips (CEO), Judy Kaldenberg (SVP Sales & Marketing), and Mircea Turcu (VP of Engineering) about it, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

What Is It?

[image courtesy of Nexsan]

I’ve said it before (a little over a year ago as it happens), and I’ll say it again … in the immortal words of Silicon Valley: “It’s a box“. And a reasonably powerful one at that, coming loaded with the following specifications.

Supported Protocols SAN (Fibre Channel, iSCSI), NAS (NFS, SMB 1.0 to 3.0, FTP), Object (S3)
Disk Bays | Rack U 24 | 4RU
Supported Expansion Systems N/A
Maximum Raw Capacity 576 TB Raw
System Memory (DRAM) per controller up to 128GB
FASTier 2.5″ SSD Drives (TB) 1.92 | 3.84 | 7.68 | 15.36
SAS SSDs (TB) 1.92 | 3.84 | 7.68 | 15.36 | 30.72
SAS HDDs (TB) 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 12 | 14 | 16| 18 | 20 | 22 | 24
Host Connectivity 16/32Gb FC | 10/25/40/100 GbE

It’s a dual-controller platform, with dual Intel Xeon Silver 4309Y CPUs (2.8 GHz CPU, 8 cores, 16 threads) per controller, and you get access to the following features included as part of the platform license:

  • Nexsan’s FASTier® Caching – Use solid-state to accelerate the performance of the underlying spinning disks
  • Nexsan Unity software version 7.2, with important enhancements to power, enterprise-class security, compliance, and ransomware protection
  • Enhanced Performance – Up to 1,000,000 IOPs
  • Third-Party Software Support – Windows VSS, VMware, VAAI, Commvault, Veeam Ready Repository, and more
  • Multi-Protocol Support – SAN (Fibre Channel, iSCSI), NAS (NFS, CIF, SMB1 to SMB3, FTP), Object (S3), 16/32GB FC, 10/25/40/100 GbE
  • High Availability – No single point-of-failure architecture with dual redundant storage controllers, redundant power supplies and RAID

 

Other Features (via Unity 7.2)

Along with the standard Unity features, with the release of Unity 7.2, you also get access the new Cloud Connector, offering bi-directional sync for files / directories with cloud storage solutions such as AWS S3, Azure Blob, and Unity Object store. As well as this, an SMB Access Audit capability has been introduced with the new version of Unity, given administrators the ability to view file access by user via the SMB protocol.

 

Use Cases

The Unity NV series of arrays is well suited to the following workloads:

  • Media and entertainment;
  • Hypervisor storage (primary and secondary);
  • Digital video surveillance; and
  • Backup and recovery storage.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

I wrote about the NV6000 when it was announced in January last year. At the time I wondered, somewhat tongue in cheek, who really cared about storage array announcements in this age of hyperscaler storage solutions. But I think plenty of people should and do care that these kinds of products are out there in the market. As with the other Unity solutions, the NV4000 provides users some degree of flexibility when it comes to the protocols they want to use (SMB, NFS, iSCSI) and the transport mechanisms (FC, Ethernet). For every pundit pronouncing the death of fibre channel, there are any number of folks out in the field still running those networks from a bygone era, and quite happily to boot. The smaller footprint of the NV4000 may not be that exciting for those of us craving large scale storage capacities and high performance arrays to do the heavy lifting for our critical workloads, but these kinds of solutions are great at the edge or in places where you can’t simply roll in a full rack of storage. As well as this, in a society increasingly fascinated with surveillance, solutions like the NV4000 provide a robust solution for the storage of CCTV footage, and Nexsan also seems very focussed on solving this problem efficiently and cost-effectively.

Hybrid storage is still a real thing in the wild, because people are still looking for ways to store more and more data in a cost effective manner, and providing support for spinning disks in storage arrays, with some clever caching / storage tiering up front, is one way of doing that. Particularly when that storage needs to happen at the edge, or in places where clouds can’t be easily reached. While it seems like an odd concept for people working with data in places where big fibre runs exist to their hyperscaler of choice, there are plenty of places (like most of Australia) where moving large volumes of data between the cloud and local workloads still isn’t a terribly fast (or cheap) activity. Until that problem is somehow solved (and I know it’s being worked on by many companies) midrange, on-premises storage isn’t dead yet.

Random Short Take #100

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Welcome to Random Short Take #100. I’m back from my holiday, but it’s only a few weeks until Christmas, so this is likely the last Random Short Take for the year. Let’s get random.

Bonus round. vExpert applications are now open for next year. Read more about that here. In the meantime, stay safe, don’t get shot, and see you in the new year.

QNAP – Add Cache With SSDs

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I recently added some cache to my QNAP NAS at home and thought I’d document the process here. It’s pretty straightforward, but there are nonetheless some things you need to take into consideration. Also, this is more about me satisfying my curiosity. I’m not suggesting you’ll real benefits (particularly the way I’m using it).

 

The Hardware

Firstly, my NAS is a TS-831X model, with 8 drive bays and the ability to add in a small form-factor PCIe card. As all of the bays are already occupied with spinning disks, I opted to use the PCIe solution. To that end, I purchased a QM2-2S-220A Dual M.2 22110/2280 SATA SSD expansion card from a local supplier. It’s relatively inexpensive, and you get some choice in terms of the storage you install. It also comes with low-profile and normal baseplates as well, so you could load this in a PC if you’re into that sort of thing. Since I’ve been using Apple gear for a while, I’m a little rusty with the screwdriver, but installation was straightforward. Remove the heatsink and fan, add some thermal pads to your M.2 drives, and you’re good to go.

The card slots into the single PCIe slot in the NAS.

You’ll notice I went with the cheapest 1TB M.2 drives I could find on Amazon. Time will tell (probably sooner rather than later) whether that was really a wise choice.

 

The Software

Once the NAS has booted up again (and hopefully with no errors), you’re good to start the software configuration. The QNAP documentation covering the process can be found here. While I’m running version 5.2 of QTS, note that other versions may look a little different. There are some things to consider with regard to the amount of RAM you have installed, the version of software you’re running, and the amount of cache you have installed.

To get started, click on Storage & Snapshots.

You’ll see that I have the main enclosure (with 8 drives) and a USB-C enclosure with 4 drives. I also now have two SSDs installed on the QM2 card.

Click on Cache Acceleration to get started. Then click on the big + sign.

You’re then presented with a wizard that will guide you through the configuration process.

The first thing you’ll need to do is select the disks you want to use for your cache. Note that you can’t select any disks that are already in use.

Once you’ve selected the two disks you want to use, you’ll see that the RAID Type changes to RAID 0. You can use this option if you’re only going to configure read cache.

In this example, however, I’m going to configure the cache as read-write.

As I’m configuring the cache as read-write, I need to set the RAID Type to RAID 1, as I don’t want to lose writes if one of my cache devices fails. Once that’s done, click on Next to continue.

On this screen you can configure SSD Over-provisioning, Cache Mode, and Advanced Settings. If you’re confused about the percentage you should set for over-provisioning, there is a tool available in QTS that you can use (the SSD Profiling Tool). Or you can just click click next like I did.

In this example, I’m changing the Cache Mode to All I/O, as this NAS is used primarily for streaming media. I’ll talk about whether it really makes a difference further down.

Under Advanced Settings, you can configure the Bypass Block Size setting (this only comes into play if your Cache Mode is set to Random I/O) and the Cache replacement policy. Click on Next to continue.

You can now select which volume can use the SSD cache. In this example, even though I have two volumes configured, only the internal one can leverage the cache as it’s configured as read-write. If I wanted to use cache with my external volume, I’d need to set the cache to read-only. Click on Next to continue.

You’ll then be presented with a summary of your configuration options. If you’re happy with how it looks, click on Create.

You’ll then be presented with some warnings regarding the cache creation and removal considerations.

Click on I Understand and OK to proceed.

Once you’ve finished you’ll see that the Cache is set to Initializing. It doesn’t take a terribly long time to complete.

And now you’re done and ready to enjoy that cache goodness.

 

Thoughts

Adding a Terabyte of SSD Cache to my home NAS was a fairly simple process, and relatively inexpensive to boot. I haven’t had much chance to test the performance yet, but I have noticed that the UI in QTS is reporting slightly higher CPU usage than I’d seen previously. While the process is easy, I’m not entirely convinced that I’ll see any real benefits, given that I’m serving up video files over SMB to a Plex server using a gigabit network. Maybe if I had a 10GbE running in the house I’d see it. And the workload has a bit to do with it too. If I was running Virtual Machines on this machine I think I’d see something good from a Random I/O profile, particularly with data coming off the SATA drives. Why didn’t I use Qtier? Because I have static volumes configured, not storage pools. And SSD Caching seemed the easiest thing to do without tearing it all down and starting from scratch. In any case, it was a fun experiment, and I’ll be curious to see whether I notice any real improvements and how long the drives last with normal use.

Random Short Take #96

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Welcome to Random Short Take #96. I’m pouring one out for Geordie Guy this week. Let’s get random.

Finally, and I’m a little late to the party, I just wanted to call out Jetpack for being a bunch of pumpkins and wanting me to upgrade my stats plan because I run a “commercial” site. If you think I want to pay $12.99 a month to see different numbers from those that Google and my hosting provider give me you’re wildly mistaken. And sod knows how I qualify as commercial (unless it’s for posting GoFundMe links for people who are dead or dying) but you can seriously get fucked. Sorry for swearing Mum.

Random Short Take #93

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Welcome to Random Short Take #93. If it’s old news can it still be called news? Maybe olds. Let’s get random.

Random Short Take #79

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Welcome to Random Short Take #79. Where did October go? Let’s get random.

QNAP – Expand Volume With Larger Drives

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This is one of those articles I’ve been meaning to post for a while, simply because I forget every time I do it how to do it properly. One way to expand the capacity of your QNAP NAS (non-disruptively) is to replace the drives one at a time with larger capacity drives. It’s recommended that you follow this process, rather than just ripping the drives out one by one and waiting for the RAID Group to expand. It’s a simple enough process to follow, although the QNAP UI has always struck me as a little on the confusing side to navigate, so I took some pictures. Note that this was done on QNAP firmware 5.0.0.1986.

Firstly, go to Storage/Snapshots under Storage in the ControlPanel. Click on Manage.

Select the Storage Pool you want to expand, and click on Manage again.

This will give you a drop-down menu. Select Replace Disks One by One.

Now select the disk you want to replace and click on Change.

Once you’ve done this for all of the disks (and it will take some time to rebuild depending on a variety of factors), click on Expand Capacity. It will ask you if you’re sure and hopefully you’ll click OK.

It’ll take a while for the RAID Group to synchronise.

You’ll notice then that, while the Storage Pool has expanded, the Volume is still the original size. Select the Volume and click on Manage.

Now you can click on Resize Volume.

The Wizard will give you information on the Storage Pool capacity and give you the option to set the new capacity of the volume. I usually click on Set to Max.

It will warn you about that. Click on OK because you like to live on the edge.

It will take a little while, but eventually your Volume will have expanded to fill the space.

 

CTERA – Storage The Way Your Users Want It

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Disclaimer: I recently attended Storage Field Day 22.  Some expenses were paid for by Tech Field Day. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated in any way for my time at the event.  Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.

CTERA recently presented at Storage Field Day 22. You can see their videos from Storage Field Day 22 here, and download a PDF copy of my rough notes from here.

 

CTERA?

In a nutshell, CTERA is:

  • Enterprise NAS over Object
  • 100% Private
  • Multi-cloud, hybrid consistent
  • Delivers data placement policy and mobility
  • Caching, not tiering
  • Zero-trust

 

The Problem

So what’s the problem we’re trying to solve with unstructured data?

  • Every IT environment is hybrid
  • More data is being generated at the edge
  • Workload placement strategies are driving storage placement
  • Storage must be instrumented and accessible anywhere

Seems simple enough, but edge storage is hard to get right.

[image courtesy of CTERA]

What Else Do You Want?

We want a lot from our edge storage solutions, including the ability to:

  • Migrate data to cloud, while keeping a fast local cache
  • Connect branches and users over a single namespace
  • Enjoy a HQ-grade experience regardless of location
  • Achieve 80% cost saving with global dedupe and cloud economics.

 

The Solution?

CTERA Multi-cloud Global File System – a “software-defined file over object with distributed SMB/NFS edge caching and endpoint collaboration”.

[image courtesy of CTERA]

CTERA Architecture

  • Single namespace connecting HQ, branches and users with ACL support
  • Object-native backend with cache accelerated access for remote sites
  • Multi-cloud scale-out to customer’s private or public infrastructure
  • Source-based encryption and global deduplication
  • Multi-tenant administration scalable to thousands of sites
  • Data management ecosystem for content security, analytics and DevOps automation

[image courtesy of CTERA]

Use Cases?

  • NAS Modernisation – Hybrid Edge Filer, Object-based Filesystem, Elastic scaling, Built-in Backup & DR
  • Remote Workforce – Endpoint Sync, Share, Backup & Cached Drive Distributed VDI clusters Small-form-factor Filer Mobile Collaboration
  • Media – Large Dataset Handling, Ultra-Fast Cloud Sync, MacOS Experience, Cloud Streaming
  • Multi-site Collaboration – Global File System Distributed Sync Scalable Central Mgt.
  • Edge Data Processing – Integrated HCI Filers Distributed Data Analysis Machine-Generated Data
  • Container-native – Global File System Across Distributed Kubernetes Clusters and Tethered Cloud Services

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

It should come as no surprise that people expect data to be available to them everywhere nowadays. And that’s not just sync and share solutions or sneaker net products on USB drives. No, folks want to be able to access corporate data in a non-intrusive fashion. It gets worse for the IT department though, because your end users aren’t just “heavy spreadsheet users”. They’re also editing large video files, working on complicated technical design diagrams, and generating gigabytes of log files for later analysis. And it’s not enough to say “hey, can you download a copy and upload it later and hope that no-one else has messed with the file?”. Users are expecting more from their systems. There are a variety of ways to deal with this problem, and CTERA seems to have provided a fairly robust solution, with many ways of accessing data, collaborating, and storing data in the cloud and at the edge. The focus isn’t limited to office automation data, with key verticals such as media and entertainment, healthcare, and financial services all having solutions suited to their particular requirements.

CTERA’s Formula One slide is impressive, as is the variety of ways it works to help organisations address the explosion unstructured data in the enterprise. With large swathes of knowledge workers now working more frequently outside the confines of the head office, these kinds of solutions are only going to become more in demand, particularly those that can leverage cloud in an effective (and transparent) fashion. I’m excited to see what’s to come with CTERA. Check out Ray’s article for a more comprehensive view of what CTERA does.

Random Short Take #31

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Welcome to Random Short Take #31. Lot of good players have worn 31 in the NBA. You’d think I’d call this the Reggie edition (and I appreciate him more after watching Winning Time), but this one belongs to Brent Barry. This may be related to some recency bias I have, based on the fact that Brent is a commentator in NBA 2K19, but I digress …

  • Late last year I wrote about Scale Computing’s big bet on a small form factor. Scale Computing recently announced that Jerry’s Foods is using the HE150 solution for in-store computing.
  • I find Plex to be a pretty rock solid application experience, and most of the problems I’ve had with it have been client-related. I recently had a problem with a server update that borked my installation though, and had to roll back. Here’s the quick and dirty way to do that on macOS.
  • Here’s are 7 contentious thoughts on data protection from Preston. I think there are some great ideas here and I recommend taking the time to read this article.
  • I recently had the chance to speak with Michael Jack from Datadobi about the company’s announcement about its new DIY Starter Pack for NAS migrations. Whilst it seems that the professional services market for NAS migrations has diminished over the last few years, there’s still plenty of data out there that needs to be moved from on box to another. Robocopy and rsync aren’t always the best option when you need to move this much data around.
  • There are a bunch of things that people need to learn to do operations well. A lot of them are learnt the hard way. This is a great list from Jan Schaumann.
  • Analyst firms are sometimes misunderstood. My friend Enrico Signoretti has been working at GigaOm for a little while now, and I really enjoyed this article on the thinking behind the GigaOm Radar.
  • Nexsan recently announced some enhancements to its “BEAST” storage platforms. You can read more on that here.
  • Alastair isn’t just a great writer and moustache aficionado, he’s also a trainer across a number of IT disciplines, including AWS. He recently posted this useful article on what AWS newcomers can expect when it comes to managing EC2 instances.