SSSI member Jim Handy at Objective Analysis has started a blog dedicated to SSDs. Jim is an avid follower of the SSD market, and his blog will doubtless be a great resource.
You’ll find the link on the SSSI Blogroll.
Month: October 2011
What’s the story with NFSv4? Four things you need to know.
Experts from SNIA’s Ethernet Storage Forum are going to discuss the key drivers to consider working with NFSv4. For years, NFSv3 has been the practical standard of choice. But, times have changed and significant advances in the NFS standards are ready to address today’s challenges around massive scale, cloud deployments, performance and management.
Join our host Steve Abbott from Emulex and our content expert, Alex McDonald from NetApp, as these SNIA representatives discuss the reasons to start planning for deployment with NFSv4.
Date: November 8, 2011
Time: 11am ET
Register for a live webinar. http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/35415
Now Available – The SSSI Blogroll
For those who don’t already know, a blogroll is a list of recommended blogs. The SSSI website now has a page dedicated to two such lists – SSD-specific blogs and general storage blogs that mention SSDs from time to time.
If you have a favorite storage blog that’s not listed, please send a link to the email address at the bottom of the blogroll page. Or add a comment to this post.
Just one more way that SSSI is working to be the source for all things SSD.
PTS Award Photo
We had previously mentioned that the SSS Performance Test Specification won an award at the Flash Memory Summit.
A photo of the award is now available here.
Validating CDMI features – Server Side Encryption
One of the features of many storage systems and even disk drives is the ability to encrypt the data at rest. This protects against a specific threat – the disk drive going out the back door for replacement or repair. So it was only a matter of time before we would see this important feature start to be offered for Cloud Storage as well. Well, today Amazon announced their Server Side Encryption capability for their S3 cloud offering. This feature was anticipated by the CDMI standard interface when it was finalized as a standard back in April 2010.
Standard Server Side Encryption
So, how does CDMI standardize this feature? Well, as usual, it starts with finding out if the cloud actually supports the feature and what choices are available. In CDMI, this is done through the capabilities resource – a kind of catalog or discovery mechanism. By fetching the capabilities resource for objects, containers, domain or queues, you can tell whether server side encryption of data at rest if available from the cloud offering (yes this is granular for a reason). The actual capability name is: cdmi_encryption (see section 12.1.3). This indicates that the cloud can do encryption for the data at rest, but also indicates what algorithms are available to do this encryption. The algorithms are expressed in the form of: ALGORITHM_MODE_KEYLENGTH, where:
• “ALGORITHM” is the encryption algorithm (e.g., “AES” or “3DES”).
• “MODE” is the mode of operation (e.g.,”XTS”, “CBC”, or “CTR”).
• “KEYLENGTH” is the key size (e.g.,”128″,”192″, “256″).
So the cloud can offer the user several different algorithms of different strengths and types, or if it only offers a single algorithm (such as the Amazon offering), the cloud storage client can at least understand what that algorithm is.
So how does the user tell the cloud that she wants her data encrypted? Amazon does this with a proprietary header of course, but CDMI does it with standard Data System Metadata that can be placed on any object, container of objects, queue or domain. This metadata is called cdmi_encryption (see section 16.4), and contains merely a string with a value chosen from the list of available algorithms in the corresponding capability. There is also a cdmi_encryption_provided metadata value to tell the client whether their data is being encrypted or not by the cloud.
Lastly, there is a system-wide capability called cdmi_security_encryption (section 12.1.1) that tells the user whether the cloud does server side encryption at all.
Server side encryption is an important capability for cloud storage offerings to provide, which is why CDMI standardized this in advance of having cloud offerings available. We expect more clouds to offer this in the future, and customers to soon realize that – without CDMI implementations, these offerings are locking them in and causing a high cost of exiting that vendor.
New Webpage about SSD Form-Factors
There’s a new page on the SSSI website which describes the wide range of SSD form-factors (physical formats) on the market today. SSSI defines three major categories – Solid State Drive, Solid State Card, and Solid State Module – and the new page provides descriptions and examples of each.
Take a look.
What’s Old is New Again: Storage Tiering
Storage tiering is nothing new but then again is all new. Traditionally, tiering meant that you’d buy fast (Tier One) storage arrays, based on 15K Fibre Channel drives, for your really important applications. Next you’d buy some slower (Tier Two) storage arrays, based on SATA drives, for your not-so-important applications. Finally you’d buy a (Tier Three) tape library or VTL to house your backups. This is how most people have accomplished storage tiering for the past couple of decades, with slight variations. For instance I’ve talked to some companies that had as many as six tiers when they added their remote offices and disaster recovery sites – these were very large users with very large storage requirements who could justify breaking the main three tiers into sub-tiers.
Whether you categorized your storage into three or six tiers, the basic definition of a tier has historically been a collection of storage silos with particular cost and performance attributes that made them appropriate for certain workloads. Recent developments, however, have changed this age-old paradigm:
1) The post-recession economy has driven IT organizations to look for ways to cut costs by improving storage utilization
2) The introduction of the SSD offers intriguing performance but a higher cost than most can afford
3) Evolving storage array intelligence now automates the placement of “hot” data without human intervention
These three events lead to a rebirth of sorts in tiering, in the form of Automated Storage Tiering. This style of tiering allows the use of new components like SSD without breaking the bank. Assuming that for any given workload, a small percentage of data is accessed very frequently, Automated tiering allows the use of high performance components for that data only, while the less-frequently accessed data can be automatically stored on more economical media.
As with any new technology, or in this case a new technique, vendors are approaching automated tiering from different angles. This is good for consumers in the long run (the best implementations will eventually win out) but in the short run creates some confusion when determining which vendor you should align you and your data with.
As a result, automated storage tiering is getting quite a bit of press from vendors and industry analysts alike. For example, here are two pieces that appeared recently:
Information Week Storage Virtualization Tour – All About Automated Tiering
Business Week – Auto Tiering Crucial to Storage Efficiency
SNIA is also interested in helping clear any confusion around automated storage tiering. This week the DPCO committee will host a live webcast panel of tiering vendors to discuss the pros and cons of tiering within the scope of their products, you can register for it here: Sign up
Join this session and learn more about similarities and differences in various tiering implementations. We hope to see some “lively” interaction, so join the tiering discussion and get your questions answered.
See you there!
Larry
PS – If you can’t make this week’s Webcast, we’ll also be recording it and you’ll be able to view it from the DPCO website
What’s Old is New Again: Storage Tiering
Storage tiering is nothing new but then again is all new. Traditionally, tiering meant that you’d buy fast (Tier One) storage arrays, based on 15K Fibre Channel drives, for your really important applications. Next you’d buy some slower (Tier Two) storage arrays, based on SATA drives, for your not-so-important applications. Finally you’d buy a (Tier Three) tape library or VTL to house your backups. This is how most people have accomplished storage tiering for the past couple of decades, with slight variations. For instance I’ve talked to some companies that had as many as six tiers when they added their remote offices and disaster recovery sites – these were very large users with very large storage requirements who could justify breaking the main three tiers into sub-tiers.
Whether you categorized your storage into three or six tiers, the basic definition of a tier has historically been a collection of storage silos with particular cost and performance attributes that made them appropriate for certain workloads. Recent developments, however, have changed this age-old paradigm:
1) The post-recession economy has driven IT organizations to look for ways to cut costs by improving storage utilization
2) The introduction of the SSD offers intriguing performance but a higher cost than most can afford
3) Evolving storage array intelligence now automates the placement of “hot” data without human intervention
These three events lead to a rebirth of sorts in tiering, in the form of Automated Storage Tiering. This style of tiering allows the use of new components like SSD without breaking the bank. Assuming that for any given workload, a small percentage of data is accessed very frequently, Automated tiering allows the use of high performance components for that data only, while the less-frequently accessed data can be automatically stored on more economical media.
As with any new technology, or in this case a new technique, vendors are approaching automated tiering from different angles. This is good for consumers in the long run (the best implementations will eventually win out) but in the short run creates some confusion when determining which vendor you should align you and your data with.
As a result, automated storage tiering is getting quite a bit of press from vendors and industry analysts alike. For example, here are two pieces that appeared recently:
Information Week Storage Virtualization Tour – All About Automated Tiering
Business Week – Auto Tiering Crucial to Storage Efficiency
SNIA is also interested in helping clear any confusion around automated storage tiering. This week the DPCO committee will host a live webcast panel of tiering vendors to discuss the pros and cons of tiering within the scope of their products, you can register for it here: Sign up
Join this session and learn more about similarities and differences in various tiering implementations. We hope to see some “lively” interaction, so join the tiering discussion and get your questions answered.
See you there!
Larry
PS – If you can’t make this week’s Webcast, we’ll also be recording it and you’ll be able to view it from the DPCO website