• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Enterprise storage / Scaling Storage At The Client

Scaling Storage At The Client

November 25, 2013 By Stephen 2 Comments

Wouldn’t it be great if storage protocols allowed for scalability?

All three of the array-scaling approaches I discussed last week preserve traditional client protocols for connectivity, an admirable goal to be sure. But the inflexibility of these protocols holds the storage industry back, often requiring extreme efforts to achieve simple goals like continuous availability. Attempts to evolve protocols to be more flexible have met with a great deal of resistance, but this hasn’t stopped companies from trying new concepts.

Rather than trying to force existing protocols to scale, many companies are turning to the client. What if we used a special driver or even an entirely different protocol? One common approach to scale the client is to use a special storage driver that provides connectivity to multiple storage nodes.

This is part of a series on “Scale-Out” Storage Field Day 4

  • A multi-path I/O (MPIO) driver installed in the operating system can provide high availability and a bit of flexibility to boot. I’ve relied on MPIO from Veritas (DMP), EMC (PowerPath), and Microsoft for decades, and these continue to be used in today’s operating systems and hypervisors (see VMware PSP, for example). But today’s MPIO drivers are really intended to provide availability, not the kind of scalable storage we’re thinking of in this article.
  • Alternative storage protocols like ATA over Ethernet (AoE) can provide high performance, scalability, and reliability through tight integration between clients and storage nodes. But not everyone is comfortable with such a radical change to client storage connectivity. Consider the fate of pNFS, an industry-standard scalable NAS protocol that has seen almost no client adoption despite being available for most of a decade.

Gridstore

At Storage Field Day 4, the delegates learned about Gridstore, which uses a “virtual controller” installed in each client (typically a Hyper-V host) to distribute data across many independent nodes. This reminded some of the Coraid solution, presented at Storage Field Day 1, which uses a custom host storage controller to connect to storage nodes using the AoE protocol.

Because Gridstore is currently Windows-only, the company has wisely decided to focus the product on Hyper-V storage. It is rather well-suited to this application, offering scalability of capacity and performance with 1U nodes. If anything, the Gridstore appliances offer excessive CPU capacity, suggesting a converged offering (like those recently announced by Violin, Scale Computing, and EMC) might come next.

Oxygen Cloud

Another “change the client” option is application-integrated cloud storage. Oxygen Cloud used Storage Field Day 4 to introduce a new end user-focused enterprise file sharing product called “odrive”. Oxygen places a gateway in front of an enterprise file server or NAS array (IBM Storwize, in their demonstration) which offers storage directly to client computers through a proprietary client.

odrive functions much like Dropbox but uses in-house storage along with a cloud component to facilitate connectivity and synchronization. Since the odrive client can transparently connect to many gateways, Oxygen offers simple scalability and geographic independence.

Cleversafe

Cleversafe first presented at Storage Field Day 3, outlining their scale-out object store architecture. This time around, Cleversafe focused on use cases for this technology, including a discussion of their combined gateway solution with Avere. But Cleversafe is a hyper-scalable storage array on its own, with a REST interface allowing simultaneous access to a true storage cloud. Cleversafe even has their own Accessor “data routers” as well as a client application allowing direct access to the cloud.

At Storage Field Day 4, Cleversafe spent a lot of time talking about customer use cases in a variety of scenarios, including using gateways from Panzura and Avere as well as media distribution with ctera. They also demonstrated scaling and data distribution, as seen in the video below.

Stephen’s Stance

Scaling storage is a serious challenge for the industry, but there is a great deal of thought, effort, and creativity going into it right now. Companies like Gridstore, Oxygen Cloud, and Cleversafe have come up with effective client-side solutions to enable scale-out storage to sing. If you’ve got an appropriate application, client, or gateway, scale-out is a real possibility!

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1
  • GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But…
  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying…
  • Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro
  • Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Features, Virtual Storage Tagged With: AoE, Avere, Cleversafe, cloud storage, cloud storage gateway, DMP, Gridstore, Hyper-V, MPIO, Oxygen Cloud, Panzura, pNFS, PowerPath, scale-out, SFD4, Storage Field Day, Storage Field Day 4, Storwize, Tech Field Day

Primary Sidebar

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Steve Jobs

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

May 29, 2020

What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

May 28, 2019

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

April 6, 2019

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me

    May 28, 2019

    My Advice For New Business Travelers: Get The Credit Cards!

    March 20, 2014

    What is VMware VASA? Not Much (Yet)

    November 11, 2011

    Marketers: Fudging the Meaning of Buzzwords Matters (To You!)

    December 2, 2015

    What More Could Alan Turing Have Accomplished?

    October 7, 2012

    Mac OS X Lion Adds CoreStorage, a Volume Manager (Finally!)

    August 4, 2011

    Donate Your Swag to School Kids In Need

    July 28, 2010

    MacBook Users: Encrypt Your Drive with OS X FileVault! It’s Easy and Free!

    December 20, 2012

    Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack

    May 2, 2016

    New England Takes On Seattle To Determine Who’s Number 2 … In Tech!

    January 19, 2015

    Copyright © 2021 · Log in