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Software-defined storage

A Bridge Over Troubled (v)Storage

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Every great technology shift requires the means to move from the old way of doing things to a new and vastly improved approach. A bridge, if you will.

We found that analogy very fitting while reading some interesting and thought-provoking articles on the storage industry. These are A Major Shift in the Data Storage Market is on the Horizon by Kalen Kimm of TweakTown, and Understanding Storage Architectures by Chad Sakac at VirtualGeek.

Both articles are ambitious (nearly 6,000 words combined!). Of the many observations, however, these lines from Kalen Kimm led us to comment:

“The shared visibility between compute, application, and storage is a large step forward to a true software-defined data center. Instead of having to pre-configure LUNs and then presenting them to applications to be consumed, applications will be able to consume storage on an as-needed basis.”

At Nexenta, we are obviously big believers in the software defined data center (SDDC), and the importance of software defined storage (SDS). The SDDC makes too much sense not to take hold; the only variables are around timing and adoption speed. We see VMware’s release of their Virtual SAN SDS solution as an important catalyst to address these variables. A larger player such as VMware can have significant impact on the way that enterprises run their datacenter.

A clear example of the impact is with networking. When VMware first released the hypervisor, all network switching was contained within the host and you were wholly dependent upon the physical switching layer from traditional companies, then the distributed virtual switch (DVS) was released. This allowed network segments to traverse hosts and spread throughout the virtualization cluster. This took switching to a software layer but then they added the Cisco 1000v as an option. The 1000v allowed management to be consistent throughout the data center, physical or virtual but still software based.

In our opinion, VSAN is the necessary bridge between legacy storage and a fully efficient SDS model. VSAN allows customers to utilize their existing internal storage and spread across hosts, similar to the DVS. What is missing is the next layer that allows software defined storage to traverse the entire data center. This is where VSAN bridges internal storage, then Nexenta extends the bridge across the data center. The ability to not only utilize the internal storage but also third party arrays and commodity hardware all presented to both physical and virtual machines.

Nexenta takes this one step further with NexentaConnect, our solution that simplifies the process of deploying a VDI solution. It is a combined all-in-one VDI automation, storage auto-deployment and storage acceleration solution. NexentaConnect can either be used in conjunction with or as an alternative to VSAN. Think of NexentaConnect this way, if you have VSAN in place then deploying your virtual desktops using local storage is a process of creating the VSAN, then using it much like any other traditional storage array. Using NexentaConnect, you deploy the storage only after looking at the desktop needs. This gives you end to end SDS.

The technology industry is famous for forcing customers into either/or decisions. But while vendors want customers to choose one product over another, customers very often need and want both. VSAN strikes us as a great example of a savvy vendor realizing that customers want both the comfort of their existing legacy storage system, and the gateway to SDS. The combination of VSAN and NexentaStor gives the combination that users are looking for.

Cheers – It’s been a blast! – From Evan Powell

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After six years I’m leaving Nexenta.

I could not be prouder of what we’ve built at Nexenta.  We took an idea that at the time was radical – let’s bring openness right to the foundation of IT, to the storage itself.  And we pulled it off.

Along the way I learned a lot including:

  • Team, team, team – the best team beats the brilliant individual every time
  • ZFS is great – and not perfect; thank you Sun for ZFS and Solaris (now Illumos).  It says a lot about the requirements of storage that even Solaris, arguably the 2nd most deployed OS for mission critical enterprise environments was not fully mature for storage. We’ve added a lot of fixes to Illumos over the last few years.
  • And much more that I’ll just call “experience.” Much of what you learn when you start and build companies ends up sounding like common sense; for example, what kind of executive is right for what stage of a company or how do you make money on open source?

So, what am I up to now?  A few answers:

  • Continuing to spend time as an EIR with xSeed.  Over the last several months I’ve beenblessed to meet many start-ups while an EIR at xSeed.  xSeed is an unusual seed fund.  They are deep in enterprise and have arguably the best ties of any early stage enterprise focused fund into Stanford and Berkeley.  They are old school in that they are definitely NOT spray and pray (which can be a great strategy actually).  Instead, they seek to go deep and to understand a domain and to find within that domain the very best entrepreneurs; they then surround that entrepreneur with coaches and advisors and much more than just capital.  In addition to meeting many companies I’ve been privy to many mind expanding discussions at xSeed about companies, and domains – about everything from the chess of strategy to the tough soft stuff of finding, retaining and sometimes transforming teams.  So I’ll be spending a bit more time with my colleagues at xSeed.
  • Finally, the rumors are true – I’m helping found another company.  We are in stealth mode.  I can tell you it is NOT in storage (although storage infects everything in IT).  And that it IS still very much on the side of openness and open source.  As you might imagine, I did a huge amount of diligence and founder dating before deciding to bet the next X years of my life on the opportunity.  So it is out of the frying pan and into the fire for me.

Here’s what I’d like you to do:

  • Stay in touch.  Maybe I’m getting to be sentimental in my middle age, but the people I’ve met as Nexenta has grown up are truly extraordinary.  You know who you are. You are the early channel partners who never shied away from offering “constructive feedback.”  You complain too much, but I love you.  And likewise you are the team members that parked your personal lives for weeks, months and years at a time as we fought the good fight.  Despite many missteps and the joy of starting a company during the worst financial collapse since the 1930s, you stayed true to a vision of more open storage and of what we now call software defined storage.  And maybe most importantly – you are the thousands of customers that bet your company’s data on Nexenta and sometimes bet your jobs and careers as well.  Follow me and, yes, complain to me at @epowell101.
  • Insist on excellence.  Like many entrepreneurs I think I start companies because half assed solutions to important problems make me sick (plus I probably have a complicated relationship with authority).  At a fundamental level – at the level of a life’s mission – I am dedicated to finding waste and calcification and cracking through it somehow.  How many of the world’s problems would be less serious if we all talked less and fixed stuff more?
  • Insist on openness and transparency.   Go open, it is the future, and it will make your company a smarter, more competitive business; don’t cop out and defer the decision onto the next guy in your job.  Eventually people will be fired for buying vendor X’s product; don’t be the last buyer to abandon ship when a legacy vendor goes aground.  Also, please be open within your organization as well.  Collectively we are all smarter than any one of us; by remaining open, we’ll get better technology, better team work, and happier lives.

I guess I did get sentimental.

Thanks for tolerating that sentimentality and for reading this blog and thanks everybody for helping a crazy vision come true.  Stay tuned here or via @epowell101 on twitter.

-Evan Powell

How Does Software Defined Data Storage Equate to Savings?

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Ask any CIO what their greatest concern is, and they’ll invariably come up with some variation of concern over the budget. It’s a Catch-22 for many businesses when it comes to technology: There is always a faster, more reliable option, but it always comes at a cost. So how did the big guys get to the top? How have they learned to strike a balance between cost and effectiveness without compromising either entirely? When it comes to data, more and more have chosen to look at software defined data centers. Here’s why:

There’s no question that data is growing exponentially as we frequently use technology for every aspect of our lives – from shopping and paying bills to reconnecting with friends on social media. All of these things produce data – a lot of data in fact. Studies have estimated that we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. All of this data needs to be stored, and it can be quite costly. Some organizations are spending as must as 40% of their IT budget on storage solutions.

Therefore, government agencies, credit card companies, health care facilities, social media sites, retailors and many other entities are constantly looking for ways to store this data efficiently and affordably. Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) address all of these concerns and more because they take the virtues of virtualization and apply them to data storage.  In fact, our customers have reported that they have saved as much as 75% in storage costs.

Here are just a few of the ways businesses can save using software defined data storage:

Scalability: Did you know that 90% of the data out there has been created in the last two years? Just think about what this could mean in terms of data storage ten years from now. As data grows, more and more hardware must be purchased to keep up with demand. Software defined data storage solutions are more easily scalable, with greater savings.

Operational Cost Savings: We talked about scalability, but what about the problems that traditional storage methods present in regard to operational costs? Energy costs to cool the storage system, labor costs to monitor and troubleshoot the system, and maintenance costs are just some things that are negated through a software defined storage system.

Open Source Opportunities: Hardware storage systems are closed systems. You are bound by specific vendors, which could limit your flexibility and opportunities to adapt when needed. Because software defined data storage solutions are often open-source, you can take advantage of the latest technologies and adapt your storage solution for the lowest cost.

For more information about the benefits of software defined data storage solutions, contact us today.

A Few Impressions from Dell’s Banking Day in NYC

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Three Somewhat Surprising Trends

Contributed by Evan Powell, Chief Strategy Officer, Nexenta Systems

Back in May,  I was thrilled to discuss Software Defined Storage at Dell’s banking day in their offices in One Penn in NYC. I was one of two guest speakers, the other was Gartner’s Joe Unsworth who did a great job outlining the transition to flash-based storage. After our fairly brief presentations and some Q&A there was an open round table discussion. The attendees were a who’s who of global financial IT leaders including CIOs and VPs of technology and storage of most “too big to fail” banks; we had a couple of already highly referencable customers in the audience as well which was great. A friend at Dell estimated that the collective IT capital purchases of the attendees were approximately $20-$30bn per year. I cannot thank Dell enough for the opportunity and for the partnership.

As an aside – I think all of us in IT owe Dell a debt for their willingness to shift towards enterprise and towards a vision of enterprise IT that, for me, is more compelling, more open, and much more dynamic than many legacy system vendors from which Dell is rapidly taking market share. Maybe I should blog sometime soon about why we are Dell fans – I’d welcome the input of folks that read this blog. For now, suffice it to say that I think Dell is doing a good job leveraging their strengths including supply chain management and global support to both enable and benefit from the ongoing re-platforming of IT. Yes – I am biased since Dell recently started paying their sales teams on NexentaStor – so take those comments with a grain of salt. On the other hand – we targeted Dell as a preferred tier one vendor because they are so well positioned so our money and focus is where our mouth is.

The nature of the Banking Day conversations is that they are closed door and vendor neutral. I did not try to sell Nexenta’s products or even the Dell hardware and services we leverage to deliver software defined storage. Instead I tried to kick off a real conversation.

Here are a few observations. First – some comments and themes I expected and then 2-3 really surprising comments.

As expected, these buyers are more interested in agility than they are in cost savings. And, with one or two exceptions, they assented freely to the notion that legacy storage is done, finished, a thing of the past; it feels like the transition to a software defined data center is just the straw breaking the legacy camel’s back.

Perhaps most surprising to me were a few items:

  1. Increased recognition of the inevitability of cloud-based approaches. I’ll call this acquiescence #1. Many financials have been fighting the easy on-ramp of AWS for years as they struggled to get their thousands of developers to keep their IP on premise and protected. There seems to be a sense that only by building a better, safer, more performant and massively easier to deploy and manage IT platform could they attract developers to stay within the enterprise. I sensed a lot less willingness to fight their own users than in the past and much more confidence in their ability to deliver a better solution that will retain users.
  2. Acquiescence #2 – BYOD is here to stay. Again, maybe I’m just out of touch however RIM and blackberry rose to prominence in part because of the mandates of buyers (and their colleagues in the government). And now the iPad and Android devices and similar are a fact of life that Software Defined Storage and the rest of the IT has got to accommodate.
  3. Nobody believes today’s all flash landscape will be with us in 18 months. Here I may be stealing Joe and Gartner’s thunder slightly. Suffice it to say that he presented a fairly provocative view of likely changes and everyone agreed that today’s apparent leaders are unlikely to win longer term. Hybrid players like Nexenta-based solutions and Nimble did receive more support.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out one final acquiescence which may be why the event was so well attended – I think there is more uncertainty over the fundamental structure of IT than I’ve seen since I first startedpartnering with and selling to these buyers 10-15 years ago. The storage teams feel like they are under threat – and they are. In a way it is similar to what I experienced when building Clarus Systems (now Riverbed) and the voice teams were realizing that voice and video convergence with the IP networks could mean “career convergence” as well. As the software defined data center progresses, you’ll see much more need for a true DevOps mindset and skill set. Service engineering is now the hot commodity and folks that know a particular silo really well are increasingly being flanked by those that build IT platforms that deliver on the agility promised by software defined data centers.

Hopefully these few nuggets are of interest. All in all, it is tremendously exciting to see some of the most credible and financially powerful IT buyers and partners (again – thank you Dell!) assent to the notion that software defined storage has got to happen for IT to remain relevant and to deliver on the promise of a more agile platform. I learned a lot from the conversations.

Congratulations to EMC!

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Congratulations to EMC and their software teams for announcing ViPR. Since we have been selling software defined storage for a number of years – and now have many more times customers than Vmware did when EMC bought them (and more than 10x than 3PAR when they went public for example) – I take exception to the lead in the press release proclaiming ViPR as “the world’s first Software Defined Storage platform…”

Nonetheless, ViPR appears to be a real step forward towards software defined storage. And EMC deserves a lot of credit for again showing a willingness to risk aspects of their core business in order to keep up with customer requirements.

If you are one of the folks to read this blog regularly, you know we have shared a simple definition of SDS. You can read more about it here. Our definition is based on countless discussions with our cloud and enterprise customers who have shared with us why they started down the journey to software defined storage in the first place.

Basically it is 1) Abstract away the underlying hardware. 2) Achieve flexibility through the ability to handle multiple data access methods and data types. 3) Be truly software defined – through an architecture and set of APIs that allows, for example, orchestration software to manage the storage and to determine to what extent it is meeting application requirements.

If you look at what we know about ViPR – I think it is software that is policy driven that delivers object storage and that also manages and possibly virtualizes block and file storage. I gathered this especially from the more detailed write up over onEFYTimes.

It’s difficult to glean much from a press storm and I know that things will be much clearer once we see more detail from EMC and customers but let’s look at early indications of how ViPR might shape up based on those criteria.

  1. Abstraction
      • ViPR: ViPR does not, it appears, add a consistent set of storage management capabilities over any hardware – it exposes and manages those that are already available on the hardware. If you are on an array with snapshots – congratulations, you’ve got (some sort of) snap shots. On the other hand if you are on a JBOD, no luck. Additionally, of course, ViPR does not open up the on disk format as it is generally not in the data path. This means vendor lock–in remains and arguably increases as ViPR hooks into your Vmware environment.
      • NexentaStor: Conversely NexentaStor runs on any hardware, including high performance SSDs to deliver caching, and of course JBODs and does deliver that consistent set of capabilities irrespective of the underlying hardware. But – NexentaStor really prefers JBODs to legacy storage arrays and it is extremely likely that ViPR will be better able to manage heterogenous storage arrays, especially those from EMC, than NexentaStor does; NexentaStor can virtualize them but is not aware of their underlying capabilities in a way that ViPR will be.
  2. Achieve flexibility. The basic difference is that NexentaStor is broader and more flexible that we think ViPR will be when it ships thanks, again, to controlling everything from the on disk format to the access methods. On the other hand, while Nexenta has sponsored open source object approaches we are not shipping today a object storage solution whereas ViPR will include object. Whether we will ship object by the time ViPR ships is yet to be seen.
      • A lot depends on to what extent ViPR can actually virtualize the underlying resources by combining them into pools that include SSDs; NexentaStor has this ability today which is why we have partners shipping JBODs with cache achieving 1 million IOPS and more. On the other hand, the promised capability of ViPR to turn object into file and vise–versa could be important.
      • I am hopeful that in this area ViPR will be a massive step forward vs. legacy arrays which are essentially black-holes for your data, each requiring a different set of expertise to manage and built to address a different silo of data.
      • What needs to be seen is how ViPR will handle putting the right data on the right underlying array. Whereas with NexentaStor the configurations themselves, such as the block sizes used to write the data disk, are themselves variable in the case of ViPR the software has make sure that, for example, video files needed for streaming are stored on underlying Isilon arrays whereas structured data like Oracle remains on VNX and presumably high random I/O workloads from larger cloud and Vmware deployments are served from XtremeIO.
  3. Being software defined this is arguably the most vague section of our fairly vague definition of software defined storage.Today, however, IF ViPR is routing data sets based on application requirements to the right underlying array – per the point above – than it may well have the architecture necessary to close the application management loop. By comparison, NexentaStor can absolutely eliminate the need for deep storage engineering with solutions like VSA for VDI. In this solution the customer must simply enter the number and type of desktops and NexentaStor – with integration code for VDI – does the rest AND, crucially, tests and manages the system to insure that the requirements are being met.
      • Nexenta, however, built the VSA for VDI business logic in part in hopes of seeing others in the industry run with the task. Arguably orchestration solutions like aspects of OpenStack and CloudStack and even VMTurbo should pick up the baton if they are truly going to be the brain inside the software defined data center. It may be that EMC with ViPR and of course Vmware will lead the industry in creating an open approach to characterizing application requirements and using them to simplify management.
      • Please note – plaintive request – what the storage layer really needs is something like the recently announced Project Daylight from IBM, Cisco, Juniper and of course the Linux Foundation. I think even Nicra / Vmware / EMC is joining that effort to open up the control layer. Read more about Project Daylight here
      • In the meantime, Nexenta’s upcoming Metis utility – which ties application logic to details like pool configurations – is growing in value and importance with integration into our and our partner’s Salesforce for example and ServiceNow and other management solutions in the future. However, again, Nexenta cannot be the business logic of a software defined data center on our own. The industry needs to come together here and maybe ViPR will be a catalyst to make that happen.