We need to move beyond fake disks and deploy application-centric storage

Change is not a word normally associated with storage, and revolution is practically unheard of. Today’s modern enterprise storage systems and networks employ massive resources to do one simple thing: Emulate the basic hard disk drives used over three decades ago. But cracks are appearing in our mausoleum of fake disks: Application developers are discovering the value of object storage, and storage systems are appearing to support this need.

I also wrote about this two years ago, proclaiming that We Need a Storage Revolution and forecasting The Techie/Business Schism

The CAS Revolution

Caringo founder and CTO, Paul Carpentier, rose to prominence around 2000 at FilePool, one of the prime movers in the content-addressable storage (CAS) space. I recall a light going off in my head as Paul introduced me to FilePool’s CAS technology back then, imagining the possibilities of the concept. Files would be stored based on “what they were” rather than “where they were” and could be organized according to application needs rather than the conventional “extent of blocks” or tree heirarchy.

CAS discarded decades of filesystem and block storage baggage, introducing a new method for storing and retrieving data that better-matched the burgeoning web and enterprise applications of today. I had seen the failure of the first wave of storage service providers from inside StorageNetworks, and it was this desire for a real storage revolution that led me to dive into cloud storage at Nirvanix almost a decade later. Although I am now on my own, I remain convinced that the future belongs to storage systems that look nothing like today’s SAN and NAS.

Shortly after that 2001 meeting, EMC acquired FilePool and launched it as the Centera product line. But CAS systems quickly ran into a serious roadblock: Conventional applications cannot read and write to unconventional storage systems like Centera. EMC pushed key software vendors (especially in the archiving space) to create special Centera interfaces, and the industry bogged down developing the XAM standard. Other companies, like Seven Ten Storage Software, jumped in to help with the translation from proprietary CAS interfaces, but the transition from legacy files and blocks to object storage has been long and slow.

Cloud Storage: Another Dimension

Meanwhile, in an alternate dimension, web developers realized they had a serious problem. They were developing applications that scaled massively, spanning servers and exhausting conventional filesystems. Conventional systems just wouldn’t cut the mustard.

Since they were soaking in web applications, these developers applied the lessons of web services to storage: Why not just make an HTTP connection and ask for an object by a unique ID rather than walk a filesystem tree? Why not encapsulate the “state” of this request in the request itself rather than make a lasting connection and association between the client and server?

Thus was born cloud storage, and it was bookseller Amazon who opened the floodgates with their 2006 introduction of a “Simple Storage Service” or S3. They allowed anyone to store and retrieve objects from their massive web services infrastructure. S3 and similar services from Rackspace, Nirvanix, and others, are special-purpose web servers, and their simple interfaces are wonderfully attractive to web developers. For example, this WordPress-based blog uses cloud storage to serve images to your browser!

Similarities in CAS and Cloud

Although developed from vastly-differing starting points, CAS and cloud storage are essentially similar: Both reject conventional blocks and files in favor of object storage; both organize data with metadata databases; both multiply and scale out. There is one other major similarity between CAS and cloud storage: Both are attractive to service providers.

Imagine you operate a business that stores data for customers. You would want a flexible infrastructure that would scale with demand and segment each “tenant” from others for security and performance. As we learned at StorageNetworks, conventional SAN and NAS systems just weren’t meant to work in this kind of environment. Whether operating an internal service or a public cloud, service providers require something entirely different.

Cloud storage was designed from the start with service providers in mind, embedding per-object and per-”bucket” security, scalability, and abstraction between hardware and clients. Although quite complex to design, cloud storage is amazingly simple to use, provided an application can interface with it.

CAS wasn’t designed like this. Systems like EMC’s Centera were created for the needs of applications like enterprise archiving, but secure storage of content and extreme scalability are critical here as well. But early CAS systems didn’t need simple web-style interfaces or extreme hardware abstraction. These were enterprise systems, after all.

The CAS/Cloud Colission

CAS wasn’t exactly successful. Although object storage found a niche in enterprise archiving, the enterprise storage world has mostly continued with blocks and files. The major storage vendors all have some kind of object storage, but most are repurposed NAS rather than dedicated CAS like the Centera.

Although much skepticism has been raised about cloud storage in the enterprise, its impact on application development cannot be denied. Indeed, the majority of developers are now focused on programming platforms that abstract both compute and storage from conventional operating systems. The next generation of applications will run in “platform as a service” environments first, and cloud storage is a key component.

Storage vendors are rapidly moving to rework their conventional systems for cloud use. Although block and file systems from 3PAR, NetApp, Isilon, Symantec, HDS, HP, and others are useful in cloud environments, unconventional CAS becomes more valuable here. This is where EMC, Mezeo, and Caringo (with Dell) shine, and why HDS bought Parascale, NetApp bought Bycast, and what Overland could do with MaxiScale. In the mean time, “gateway” products from Nasuni, Cirtas, StorSimple, Twin Strata, and Asigra are awfully interesting.

Stephen’s Stance

The storage revolution is coming, whether we in the industry are ready or not. Developers are voting with their feet, targeting cloud storage and application platforms rather than conventional filesystems. Although the market for cloud storage products is slow to develop, the cloud storage concept will eventually dominate the landscape.

It seems most likely that this revolution will decimate the storage industry as we know it today. Unable to push high-margin storage arrays into the ballooning cloud space, product vendors will see their market share eroded by service providers with no use for these expensive systems. Monolithic file and block will soldier on in the new legacy applications, but the action will inevitably slip away.

The likely winners will be those who can leverage commodity hardware for scale-out cloud storage use. The proliferation of cloud platforms will settle down, with a few gaining traction and the rest discarded. Then we will see companies like HP, Dell, and Oracle rise to lead the storage sales charts with massive volume shipments to service providers.

Disclosure: I used to work for StorageNetworks (which is now defunct) and Nirvanix.

Image credit: Barcelona Graffiti by Aeioux

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | From CAS to Cloud: Revolutionary Storage
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

It’s that time again, when everyone who thinks they’re a pundit (that would be everyone with a blog or Twitter account) has to make predictions for the coming year. But predictions are perilous: Get it right and you look like a mere trend-watcher; get it wrong and you look like a fool. It’s such a hassle! So I’m doing something different this year: I’m going to make predictions for 2009 now that it’s over, and reflect on just how smart I am (not) to have made them. Or something.

What I Would Have Gotten Right

I definitely could have predicted a lot of what happened in 2009. I mean, these were slam dunks!

1. Twitter rocks the world – I wasn’t early to Twitter, but I spent the early part of 2009 evangelizing its benefits to companies and co-workers alike. Considering how common Twitter is today, it’s hard to believe how roundly criticized and misunderstood it was this time last year. Yet here we are, on the verge of 2010, and Twitter has seeped onto our business cards, presentation templates, and web sites. I might not have predicted how stable (!) Twitter got by the end of the year, though.
2. Apple’s Macs and iPhones rule – I switched to the iPhone and the Mac in 2007 and 2008, respectively, but it looks like I wasn’t much of an iconoclast after all: By November, half of the Tech Field Day delegates were using MacBooks, and the Windows and Blackberry holdouts have started vocally defending their operating system choice. Pretty much like Mac folks used to do way back in 2008.
3. The recession is a serious pain – Companies put the brakes on spending and hiring, many even shifting both into reverse in 2009. This came as no surprise to humans capable of thought. The impact on enterprise IT companies was similarly predictable: Although most were able to survive, the impact of 2009 will continue to be felt for years. I might have predicted it would be worse, though I’m glad to say I would have been wrong.
4. EMC, NetApp, HDS, HP, and IBM continue to quibble – Surprise: Big company bloggers spend way too much time criticizing the products and actions of each other and way to little time talking about the true value of their own products.

Non-IT slam-dunk predictions: Obama was reviled by the right; the war in Afghanistan continues; people do stupid stuff in the name of reality shows.

What I Probably Could Have Predicted

Although some details would likely have been missed, I think I would have seen these coming.

1. Cloud compute and storage hits the enterprise – I was a believer in the cloud this time last year, and I bet my future on it by taking a position at enterprise cloud storage provider, Nirvanix, in March. I would have predicted that enterprise buyers would be putting serious thought to buying cloud products, but the scope has surprised me. We’re talking enough petabytes that the non-cloud players felt compelled to strike back with the private cloud pitch. Awesome!
2. Sun and Data Domain were acquired – My money would have been on Dell, IBM, or HP as buyers for this pair, but EMC wouldn’t have been outside my guesses. Still, Oracle buying Sun and vocally committing to keep it going, SPARC and all, would never have come to mind. But I wouldn’t have guessed against it either, so I’ll give myself a point here!
3. Cisco and EMC buddy up – I’ve long thought an outright merger of these two was in the cards, but even the recession couldn’t make the financials work. A partnership would have been on the list, and Acadia came as no surprise to anyone.
4. Cloud outages and data loss – I definitely could have predicted that high-profile cloud services would fall over throughout the year, and that some would lose data. Not all are enterprise-grade, after all. But the outages at Google, Rackspace, and Amazon, and Microsoft’s Danger data loss, surprised me. Don’t those guys have their acts together?
5. IT conferences falter – I spoke at Interop in 2009, but it lacked the 20,000-strong crowd it once had. Storage Decisions and Storage Networking World managed to fill their halls, but the old-school IT conference has lost its luster. Although VMworld remains strong, attendance was definitely off.
6. FCoE and SSD are still starting – I’ve been lukewarm on Fibre Channel over Ethernet and Solid State Drives, but I’m a bit surprised that storage vendors didn’t push them harder in 2009. I might have guessed there would have been more customer uptake to match the buzz.
7. SMB storage is hot – There’s a hole in the storage market between $1,000 and $20,000, and companies like Drobo and Iomega are rushing in to fill it. Now that ESX has solid iSCSI support, I expect a world of innovation here. (Oops, that sounds kind of like a 2010 prediction!)

Also in the predictable category: Goldman Sachs and Bank of America thrived while others fell; Ford is the strongest of the remaining US automakers; Boeing finally got the 787 off the ground.

What I Never Would Have Guessed

I’m not perfect, even in retrospect. Some of the Tech news from 2009 was just completely off the wall.

1. Microsoft Bing: This time for sure! – Seriously, Microsoft should stick to in-house thinking instead of trying to copy its rivals. Yet somehow, miraculously, Bing appeared and did not suck. In fact, I’m hearing regular (non-techie) folks around town talking about using the search engine. I’ve even used it! Could they actually have a winner?
2. Windows 7 rocks – Really? Seriously? Could Microsoft have come up with a solid replacement for Windows XP?
3. Ship it! – It’s not even 2010, and enterprise storage buyers can go out and purchase NetApp’s OnTap 8, EMC’s FAST, EMC Atmos Compute, and unicorn tears. Well, maybe not unicorn tears.
4. Still no GDrive – Seemingly every company has a cloud storage platform, from Amazon to Rackspace, Nirvanix to EMC, so why not Google? Could GDrive join Duke Nukem Forever as the most famous vaporware of the decade?
5. The executive shuffle – Dave Donatelli was supposed to lead EMC, not HP. Alan Atkinson was supposed to launch another startup, not take over Xiotech. At least NetApp was gentle.
6. Mac OS X (still) lacks iSCSI and ZFS – Come on, Cupertino, what’s wrong with you guys? I’ve been hyping ZFS for years, and iSCSI is commonplace. Yet Snow Leopard is stingy with both. Makes me want to hiss like one of those blue folks in Avatar.
7. Gestalt IT is a success – On a personal note, Gestalt IT didn’t even exist this time last year, and now we have a successful IT infrastructure blog and social media event. Amazing!

Other total shockers: Everyone loves Michael Jackson again; digital Beatles tunes are available everywhere but iTunes; Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize arrives 10 years early.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | My 2009 IT Industry Predictions
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Great! But I thought the new era for IT was a cloud with choice, mobility, and application support, as trumpeted by EMC’s VMware subsidiary! Wasn’t Cloud vServices from VDC-OS supposed to be the prototype cloud strategy for the datacenter?

What we have here is a simple clash of marketing amusingly taking place at (nearly) the same company. VMware figured out how to extend their server virtualization products outside the confines of the data center, and laid that technology out as a strategy with the trendy “cloud” name. Meanwhile, mother EMC is working on next-generation content storage software and decides to roll that out as a strategy and also jumps on the “cloud” meme. What’s an IT manager to do?

Defining Atmos

As predicted, EMC’s Atmos (code-name Maui) is a distributed software layer to handle the storage and management of data objects across geographically-dispersed storage devices. EMC’s Chuck Hollis demonstrates Atmos with a simple, practical example, perhaps making it sound too much like Akamai but generally getting the point across. You have a data object, write it to Atmos through REST/SOAP or CIFS/NFS, assign some metadata, and the software takes care of data placement for you. It’ll add local copies, replicate for availability and performance, compress or deduplicate, manage versions, and all sorts of goodies (if you ask it to).

But EMC already has a capable object storage platform, the Centera. We’ve just got used to the content-addressable storage (CAS) label for object storage (even though this name misses the point of object storage, in my opinion) and now EMC wants us to learn a new label for a somewhat-similar device? Steve Todd, EMC’s object guy extraordinaire, lays it out:

SAN Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for blocks.

NAS Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for files.

CAS Value = Centralized, secure multi-tenancy for objects (content + metadata).

COS Value = Globalized, secure multi-tenancy for content with rich policies.

Ok, so the defining capabilities of Atmos are its global scale and rich policies. And the fact that “objects” has become “content”, presumably since Atmos can handle traditional NAS (CIFS/NFS) chores as well.

Prayers Answered?

It sounds like EMC is answering my prayers for a storage revolution, delivering a highly-capable object storage platform that transcends the old limits of blocks, directories, and files. Steve Todd points out that Atmos handles five policy categories out of the box:

• Replication
• Compression
• Spin-down
• Object de-dup
• Versioning

So we write some data to Atmos, using either traditional NAS or webby dubby protocols like SOAP, and can then apply policies in any of these five categories to that data. One can also extend the Atmos to accept other policies, but the absence (out of the box) of concepts like encryption, secure deletion, retention, and access control are surprising.

I am quite puzzled about how practical these policy capabilities will be in the real world. How exactly would an application say “I want you to compress that file I wrote over NFS just now?” Hitachi’s HCAP platform, for example, also has policy capabilities and a NAS front end, and although archiving applications can communicate their policy needs, I don’t see lots of current general-purpose applications using it.

Strategic Storage?

This brings me to my puzzlement: The default Atmos policies are all general-purpose, production computing ideas, not the special-purpose, archiving and retention needs served by Centera, HCAP, and the rest. So the Atmos is clearly intended to be a production data storage system, not an archiving system to compete with Centera.

Since mainstream business applications currently don’t have any capability to specify policies like these when writing files, and since NAS protocols lack any means to communicate them even if the apps want to, we can conclude that EMC expects that Atmos users will write special applications to take advantage of it.

EMC certainly doesn’t expect that the NAS-capable Atmos will simply replace today’s distributed NAS solutions. NAS is a sideshow for Atmos. The real action will be in the REST/SOAP webby dubby applications that will be written with the platform in mind and will take full advantage of these capabilities.

If this is true, and I and others suspect that it is, then Atmos really isn’t a game-changing platform unless you change your game. If you write new applications to store data with SOAP, Atmos is a nice in-house alternative to Amazon S3 or Nirvanix, and offers a very compelling set of data management capabilities. And if you want to set up shop to compete with those service providers, Atmos is a dream come true with built-in multi-tenancy.

Datacenter Strategy

So EMC alone has two seemingly competitive datacenter strategies. And then there’s Microsoft, which announced its Azure cloud platform recently, and Amazon and the other cloud providers.

So let’s say you’re a CIO for a large corporation. Which of the following strategies is more compelling:

1. Use VMware VDC-OS to add capabilities and Cloud vServices extend your current virtual infrastructure geographically
2. Recompile and tweak your Windows applications to leverage Microsoft Azure
3. Develop new applications to take advantage of the impressive storage capabilities of an in-house EMC Atmos system
4. Point your new applications at a third-party cloud provider like Amazon or Nirvanix

IT people are practical. Although we love new technology, we tend to be cautious. We also hate massive software development efforts, and only sanction them when they’re absolutely necessary. Given these personality traits, I’d say VDC-OS and perhaps Cloud vServices still stands out as the most likely and practical scenario for the majority of applications and businesses.

This is not to say that EMC Atmos will be a flop. I’m impressed by the technology, and expect that Atmos will find buyers, just as Centera did. And Atmos might even replace Centera once EMC adds retention policies to it and scales it down as well as up and out. But Atmos will not redefine the datacenter. We’re stuck with blocks and files, and VMware’s practical strategy is a winner in that world.

Update: Marc Farley compares Atmos to WAFS, with ominous implications, and echos my recent question on what is and is not innovative.

Update 2: Chuck Hollis, Storagezilla, and Len Devanna have all come right out and said that this is only intended for certain customers with massive distributed storage needs, and is not intended as a new datacenter strategy. Even the “cloudfella” says “ciao”:

Update 3: More great information, including a reply regarding VDC-OS and Atmos from the one and only Chad Sakac, more great detail about the inner workings of Atmos from Steve Todd, and even more info from Dave Graham. Finally, although I think that Cloudfellas video is cute, I wouldn’t categorize it as viral. But those Mozy ads are awesome!

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | EMC Atmos Versus VMware VDC-OS: Will The Real Cloud Strategy Please Stand Up?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.