On March 18^th, SNIA-CSI will be hosting a live Webcast “Hybrid Clouds: Bridging Private and Public Cloud Infrastructures.”

Every IT consumer is using (or is planning to use) cloud in one form or another. The emphasis on the design and implementation of cloud architectures is often made without consideration of where the cloud storage and compute should be located and the benefits, costs and risks of deciding where the applications will run. Will it be a public cloud? Or a private cloud in the data center or co-location site? Or a hybrid of the two?

This session will be an overview on developing & delivering a cloud architecture with a focus on getting the overall goals correctly specified and defined, understanding the issues that must be addressed, and then making the decision about whether the application is suitable for public, private or some hybrid mixture of the two before undertaking implementation. We’ll also focus on one of the most difficult aspects of the solution, the management of data and storage in the cloud, and present a case study of a successful commercial implementation.

Register now for this live event. I hope you’ll join Alex McDonald and me for what we hope will be an informative and interactive event.

At our recent live Webcast “Benefits of RDMA in Accelerating Ethernet Storage Connectivity” experts from Emulex, Intel and Microsoft had an insightful discussion on the ways RDMA is having an impact on Ethernet storage. The live event was attended by nearly 200 people and feedback was overwhelming positive with several attendees thanking us for our vendor neutral presentation and one attendee commenting that it was, “Probably the most clearly comprehensible yet comprehensive webinar I’ve attended in some time.” If you missed the Webcast, it’s now available on demand. We did not have time to get to everyone’s questions, so as promised, below are answers to all of them. If you have additional questions, please ask them in the comments section in this blog and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Q. Is RDMA over RoCEv2 in production?

A. The IBTA released the RoCEv2 Specification in September 2014.  In order to support that specification changes may be required across the RDMA stack, including firmware, drivers & operating systems.  Schedules for implementation of that specification will vary by operating system.  For example, the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) has not released an Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version that implements that standard yet, although it is in process now.  Once OFA completes their OFED stack implementation, the Linux distribution vendors will then incorporate and support the updated OFED stack.  Implementations provided prior to full OFA and Distro vendor support would be preliminary, potentially incompatible with the OFED release, and require confirmation by the distro vendor with regard to the nature/level of support they would be providing

Q. I would have liked a list of Windows applications that take advantage of SMB Direct – both in a Hyper-V host or bare metal.

A. In Windows, any file-based application can make use of SMB3 and SMB Direct due to the native file-based programming interface support. No application changes are required. For certain enterprise applications such as Hyper-V and SQL Server, SMB3 is officially supported, and more information can be found in the product catalog at www.microsoft.com.

Q. Are there any particular benefits in using one network protocol over another for SMB Direct/RDMA (iWARP vs. RoCE vs. IB)?

A. There are no hard and fast rules; any adapter or protocol can be suitable for many scenarios. Of the Ethernet-based protocols we considered in today’s webcast

• iWARP offers the benefit of operation over TCP with its reliability and routability, well-suited to a broad range of installed infrastructure.
• RoCE offers a lightweight, efficient protocol when a DCB-enabled switched fabric is available. RoCE, however, is not routable.
• RoCEv2 offers similar properties to RoCE, with the possibility to scale to larger routed and DCB-enabled fabrics.

Q. Who are the vendors offering iWARP capable RNICs?

A. Chelsio Communications has production iWARP adapters today, and both Intel and Qlogic have publicly committed to future iWARP controllers.

Q. How much testing has been done with SMB3, and in particular SMB direct, over WAN connections?

A. The SMB2 protocol was originally designed to adapt to WAN scenarios, and supports a credit-based management of large amounts of data to be outstanding, to make best use of WAN-type long pipes. The SMB3 protocol retains these design attributes, and the SMB Direct protocol also supports similar deep pipelining. The iWARP protocol, being layered on standard TCP, is well suited to such deployments, and RoCE WAN adapters are potentially available. Please contact the respective technology vendors for information on any available testing results.

Q. I love a future webcast for RDMA enabled distributed filesystems.

A. Thanks for the suggestion! We’re always looking for ideas for future webcasts and SNIA-ESF will consider this as a potential follow-on.

Q. Is Live Migration the scenario where “packet size” is 1MB?

A. All SMB Direct scenarios have workloads that range anywhere up to 8MB. For large file copies, most SMB3 clients request from 1MB to 8MB per operation, for Hyper-V live migration, transfers are typically similar, during the bulk transfer phase.

Q. SMB3 is being compared to FC for enterprise. If Ethernet based protocols are of interest, wouldn’t FCoE give the same performance as FC (same stack) vs. SMB3?

A. SMB3 with SMB Direct enables many workloads not possible with Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and performance comparisons are therefore difficult. Perhaps another SNIA webcast could investigate this!

Q. Regarding your SMB direct example with lots of small operations, how do you deal with the overhead of registering and unregistering buffers for the RDMA operations?

A. As answered later in the session, the registration and unregistration is not a protocol matter, but in the case of the Windows implementation, it is strictly performed for the specific buffers of each operation, which is critical for security, data integrity, and system protection. The standard “Fast Register Work Request” method is used, and careful implementation has shown that the overhead does not negatively impact performance, even for small I/O (4KB/operation). Check out Jose Barreto’s blog, which contains many benchmark results.

Q. But isn’t Live Migration done in 1MB “chunks”? So not “small” I/Os?

A. As answered later in the session, Hyper-V Live Migration is done in several phases, the first phase is the initial bulk copy of memory, done in large chunks, but immediately after it a second phase of copying individual pages which were dirtied by the live-running VM is performed. These operations are typically 4KB. Note: The faster the initial phase goes, the less work there is in this second phase, but in both phases, the faster, the better, and RDMA accelerates both.

Q. Are iSER and iWARP alternatives to one another?

A.  iWARP is an RDMA protocol, and iSER is a mapping of iSCSI to iWARP, as well as RoCE/InfiniBand.

Q. What’s Intel’s roadmap for RoCE and/or iWARP?

A. Intel is committed to iWARP and plans to incorporate it in future server chipsets and SOCs. See http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ethernet-products/accelerating-ethernet-iwarp-video.html for more information.

Q. Is there any other Transport being used other than IB to create a reliable transport for RoceV2? Puristically it is possible?

A. RoCE was developed to leverage Infiniband as much as possible.  For that reason, the Infiniband transport was chosen when the RoCE standard was developed.  As the RoCEv2 standard was developed, the underlying Infiniband network protocol was replaced with IPv4 / IPv6 in order to provide the layer 3 routability and UDP to provide stateless encapsulation (and indication) of the Infiniband transport header that was retained.  While it may be possible to develop a reliable transport to replace Infiniband, the RoCE standards body has elected not to go that route as of this writing.

 

 

 

At our recent live Webcast "Benefits of RDMA in Accelerating Ethernet Storage Connectivity" experts from Emulex, Intel and Microsoft had an insightful discussion on the ways RDMA is having an impact on Ethernet storage. The live event was attended by nearly 200 people and feedback was overwhelming positive with several attendees thanking us for our vendor neutral presentation and one attendee commenting that it was, "Probably the most clearly comprehensible yet comprehensive webinar I've attended in some time." If you missed the Webcast, it's now available on demand. We did not have time to get to everyone's questions, so as promised, below are answers to all of them. If you have additional questions, please ask them in the comments section in this blog and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Q.  Is RDMA over RoCEv2 in production? A. The IBTA released the RoCEv2 Specification in September 2014.  In order to support that specification changes may be required across the RDMA stack, including firmware, drivers & operating systems.   Schedules for implementation of that specification will vary by operating system.   For example, the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) has not released an Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version that implements that standard yet, although it is in process now.   Once OFA completes their OFED stack implementation, the Linux distribution vendors will then incorporate and support the updated OFED stack.   Implementations provided prior to full OFA and Distro vendor support would be preliminary, potentially incompatible with the OFED release, and require confirmation by the distro vendor with regard to the nature/level of support they would be providing Q. I would have liked a list of Windows applications that take advantage of SMB Direct - both in a Hyper-V host or bare metal. A.  In Windows, any file-based application can make use of SMB3 and SMB Direct due to the native file-based programming interface support. No application changes are required. For certain enterprise applications such as Hyper-V and SQL Server, SMB3 is officially supported, and more information can be found in the product catalog at www.microsoft.com. Q. Are there any particular benefits in using one network protocol over another for SMB Direct/RDMA (iWARP vs. RoCE vs. IB)? A.  There are no hard and fast rules; any adapter or protocol can be suitable for many scenarios. Of the Ethernet-based protocols we considered in today's webcast

• iWARP offers the benefit of operation over TCP with its reliability and routability, well-suited to a broad range of installed infrastructure.
• RoCE offers a lightweight, efficient protocol when a DCB-enabled switched fabric is available. RoCE, however, is not routable.
• RoCEv2 offers similar properties to RoCE, with the possibility to scale to larger routed and DCB-enabled fabrics.

Q. Who are the vendors offering iWARP capable RNICs? A. Chelsio Communications has production iWARP adapters today, and both Intel and Qlogic have publicly committed to future iWARP controllers. Q. How much testing has been done with SMB3, and in particular SMB direct, over WAN connections? A. The SMB2 protocol was originally designed to adapt to WAN scenarios, and supports a credit-based management of large amounts of data to be outstanding, to make best use of WAN-type long pipes. The SMB3 protocol retains these design attributes, and the SMB Direct protocol also supports similar deep pipelining. The iWARP protocol, being layered on standard TCP, is well suited to such deployments, and RoCE WAN adapters are potentially available. Please contact the respective technology vendors for information on any available testing results. Q. I love a future webcast for RDMA enabled distributed filesystems. A. Thanks for the suggestion! We're always looking for ideas for future webcasts and SNIA-ESF will consider this as a potential follow-on. Q.  Is Live Migration the scenario where "packet size" is 1MB? A.  All SMB Direct scenarios have workloads that range anywhere up to 8MB. For large file copies, most SMB3 clients request from 1MB to 8MB per operation, for Hyper-V live migration, transfers are typically similar, during the bulk transfer phase. Q. SMB3 is being compared to FC for enterprise. If Ethernet based protocols are of interest, wouldn't FCoE give the same performance as FC (same stack) vs. SMB3? A. SMB3 with SMB Direct enables many workloads not possible with Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and performance comparisons are therefore difficult. Perhaps another SNIA webcast could investigate this! Q.  Regarding your SMB direct example with lots of small operations, how do you deal with the overhead of registering and unregistering buffers for the RDMA operations? A. As answered later in the session, the registration and unregistration is not a protocol matter, but in the case of the Windows implementation, it is strictly performed for the specific buffers of each operation, which is critical for security, data integrity, and system protection. The standard "Fast Register Work Request" method is used, and careful implementation has shown that the overhead does not negatively impact performance, even for small I/O (4KB/operation). Check out Jose Barreto's blog, which contains many benchmark results. Q. But isn't Live Migration done in 1MB "chunks"? So not "small" I/Os? A. As answered later in the session, Hyper-V Live Migration is done in several phases, the first phase is the initial bulk copy of memory, done in large chunks, but immediately after it a second phase of copying individual pages which were dirtied by the live-running VM is performed. These operations are typically 4KB. Note: The faster the initial phase goes, the less work there is in this second phase, but in both phases, the faster, the better, and RDMA accelerates both. Q. Are iSER and iWARP alternatives to one another? A.  iWARP is an RDMA protocol, and iSER is a mapping of iSCSI to iWARP, as well as RoCE/InfiniBand. Q. What's Intel's roadmap for RoCE and/or iWARP? A.  Intel is committed to iWARP and plans to incorporate it in future server chipsets and SOCs. See http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ethernet-products/accelerating-ethernet-iwarp-video.html for more information. Q. Is there any other Transport being used other than IB to create a reliable transport for RoceV2? Puristically it is possible? A. RoCE was developed to leverage Infiniband as much as possible.   For that reason, the Infiniband transport was chosen when the RoCE standard was developed.   As the RoCEv2 standard was developed, the underlying Infiniband network protocol was replaced with IPv4 / IPv6 in order to provide the layer 3 routability  and UDP to provide stateless encapsulation (and indication) of the Infiniband transport header that was retained.   While it may be possible to develop a reliable transport to replace Infiniband, the RoCE standards body has elected not to go that route  as of this writing.      

At our annual SNIA Members’ Symposium in San Jose, the Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) elected our 2015 CSI board. I’d like to officially welcome our newest board member, Glyn Bowden from HP. HP now joins our growing list of member companies.

The CSI is committed to the adoption, growth and standardization of cloud storage and related cloud data services to promote interoperability and portability of data stored in the cloud. CSI leads as an industry-neutral authority on cloud storage environments and is committed to educating vendor and end user communities on cloud storage & industry standardization benefits.

It’s only the beginning of March and we’ve already hosted several educational Webcasts on topics ranging from OpenStack Cloud Storage and OpenStack Manila, to CDMI and the LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard. All CSI Webcasts are available on-demand. I encourage you to check then out.

At our annual SNIA Members’ Symposium in San Jose, the Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) elected our 2015 CSI board. I’d like to officially welcome our newest board member, Glyn Bowden from HP. HP now joins our growing list of member companies. The CSI is committed to the adoption, growth and standardization of cloud storage and related cloud data services to promote interoperability and portability of data stored in the cloud. CSI leads as an industry-neutral authority on cloud storage environments and is committed to educating vendor and end user communities on cloud storage & industry standardization benefits. It’s only the beginning of March and we’ve already hosted several educational Webcasts on topics ranging from OpenStack Cloud Storage and OpenStack Manila, to CDMI and the LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard. All CSI Webcasts are available on-demand. I encourage you to check then out.

Our recent live SNIA Cloud Webcast “LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard” is now available on-demand. Thanks to all the folks who attended the live event. We did not have time to address all of the questions, so here are answers to them. If you think of additional questions, please feel free to comment on this blog.

Q. The LTFS standard seems to support shared extents between files, and by extension, deduplicated files. Is this a correct assessment, and how does it play in the bulk transfer standard?

A. The LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard supports shared extents as supported by the LTFS standard, which can transparently reduce space used by having multiple references to common data stored on tape (deduplication). This typically happens below the bulk transfer layer, by the software used to read and write the LTFS volumes. At this point, few software packages support this feature due to the wear and latency consequences of read seeks resulting from using this feature.

Q. What is the state of the standard in its lifecycle? (e.g., working group draft, public review, published, etc.)

A. The LTFS standard has been around for some time; more information can be found here at http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/standards/curr_standards/ltfs. The LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard is here at http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/publicreview#ltfsbulk, and is in public review.

Q. The standard seems to be based on the idea of moving physical tapes to the cloud. Is there a definition of a virtual LTFS image that can be moved between systems over the network?

A. Not yet, but that is a great idea we’ll be taking forward in the next versions of the proposal.

Q. One of the barriers to greater use of LTFS in the Cloud is the relative lack of enterprise grade management software that ensures that the tape media is refreshed / upgraded as it ages, that its integrity is periodically checked, that reclamation and compaction is done. It needs open standards for support in standard volume management systems as well. Until these things are in place, LTFS will be interesting largely to specialized industries like film/entertainment, seismic, and bulk transfer & bulk storage — but not about the steady-state use of tape as a true additional layer of the cloud storage hierarchy. Tape with LTFS plus proper management could fill this role — but not until the full lifecycle tape management is available and integrated.

A. The management that is always required for a physical product with a well-defined and finite lifetime is not a unique requirement of LTFS. Tape has a long history of use as a backup and archive medium, and there are a number of tape management products that are commercially available from LTO tape suppliers and independent software companies, as well as open source products. A Google search for “tape management software” will provide you with a number of alternative solutions.

Q. Do you have a list or people that sell LTFS based solutions?

A. No we don’t, but it’s a very good idea, and we’ll investigate it further.

 

Our recent live SNIA Cloud Webcast “LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard” is now available on-demand. Thanks to all the folks who attended the live event. We did not have time to address all of the questions, so here are answers to them. If you think of additional questions, please feel free to comment on this blog. Q. The LTFS standard seems to support shared extents between files, and by extension, deduplicated files. Is this a correct assessment, and how does it play in the bulk transfer standard? A. The LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard supports shared extents as supported by the LTFS standard, which can transparently reduce space used by having multiple references to common data stored on tape (deduplication). This typically happens below the bulk transfer layer, by the software used to read and write the LTFS volumes. At this point, few software packages support this feature due to the wear and latency consequences of read seeks resulting from using this feature. Q. What is the state of the standard in its lifecycle? (e.g., working group draft, public review, published, etc.) A. The LTFS standard has been around for some time; more information can be found here at http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/standards/curr_standards/ltfs. The LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard is here at http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/publicreview#ltfsbulk, and is in public review. Q. The standard seems to be based on the idea of moving physical tapes to the cloud. Is there a definition of a virtual LTFS image that can be moved between systems over the network? A. Not yet, but that is a great idea we’ll be taking forward in the next versions of the proposal. Q. One of the barriers to greater use of LTFS in the Cloud is the relative lack of enterprise grade management software that ensures that the tape media is refreshed / upgraded as it ages, that its integrity is periodically checked, that reclamation and compaction is done. It needs open standards for support in standard volume management systems as well. Until these things are in place, LTFS will be interesting largely to specialized industries like film/entertainment, seismic, and bulk transfer & bulk storage -- but not about the steady-state use of tape as a true additional layer of the cloud storage hierarchy. Tape with LTFS plus proper management could fill this role -- but not until the full lifecycle tape management is available and integrated. A. The management that is always required for a physical product with a well-defined and finite lifetime is not a unique requirement of LTFS. Tape has a long history of use as a backup and archive medium, and there are a number of tape management products that are commercially available from LTO tape suppliers and independent software companies, as well as open source products. A Google search for “tape management software” will provide you with a number of alternative solutions. Q. Do you have a list or people that sell LTFS based solutions? A. No we don’t, but it’s a very good idea, and we’ll investigate it further.  

Mark your calendar for March 25^th as SNIA-ESF, together with the Dell’Oro Group, will be hosting a live Webcast, “Visions for Ethernet Connected Drives.” The arrival of mass-storage services, the emergence of analytics applications and the adoption of object storage by the cloud-services industry have provided an impetus for new storage hardware architectures. One such underlying hardware technology is the Ethernet connected hard drive, which is in early stages of availability.

Please join us on March 25^th to hear Chris DePuy, Vice President of Dell’Oro Group share findings from interviews with storage-related companies, including those selling hard drives, semiconductors, peripherals and systems, as he will present some common themes uncovered, including:

• What system-level architectural changes may be needed to support Ethernet connected drives
• What capabilities may emerge as a result of the availability of these new drives
• What part of the value chain spends the time and money to package working solutions

We will also present some revenue and unit statistics about the storage systems and hard drive markets and will discuss potential market scenarios that may unfold as a result of the object storage and Ethernet connected drive trends.

I’ll be hosting the event and together with Chris, taking your questions. I hope you’ll join us.

 

Mark your calendar for March 25^th as SNIA-ESF, together with the Dell'Oro Group, will be hosting a live Webcast, "Visions for Ethernet Connected Drives." The arrival of mass-storage services, the emergence of analytics applications and the adoption of object storage by the cloud-services industry have provided an impetus for new storage hardware architectures. One such underlying hardware technology is the Ethernet connected hard drive, which is in early stages of availability. Please join us on March 25^th to hear Chris DePuy, Vice President of Dell'Oro Group share findings from interviews with storage-related companies, including those selling hard drives, semiconductors, peripherals and systems, as he will present some common themes uncovered, including:

• What system-level architectural changes may be needed to support Ethernet connected drives
• What capabilities may emerge as a result of the availability of these new drives
• What part of the value chain spends the time and money to package working solutions

We will also present some revenue and unit statistics about the storage systems and hard drive markets and will discuss potential market scenarios that may unfold as a result of the object storage and Ethernet connected drive trends. I'll be hosting the event and together with Chris, taking your questions. I hope you'll join us.  

Mark your calendar for February 10^th as we conclude our Cloud Developer’s series by hosting a live Webcast on the LTFS Bulk Transfer Standard. LTFS (Linear Tape File System) technology provides compelling economics for bulk transportation of data between enterprise cloud storage.

This Webcast will provide an update on the joint work of the LTFS and Cloud Technical Working Groups on a bulk transfer standard that uses LTFS to allow for the reliable movement of bulk data in and out of the cloud, and mechanisms for verification, error handling and the management of namespaces. Register now to hear David Slik, Co-Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, discuss:

• LTFS standard mandate and history
• LTFS adoption and use cases
• LTFS bulk transfer to, from, and between clouds
• Error handling and recovery
• Security considerations

I’ll be hosting the event, taking your questions, and hopefully shedding some light on the importance of this standard. I hope you’ll join us.