Gal Turchinski

RAID is Not Data Protection

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RAID is not data protection. It does not provide adequate protection from multiple media failures. The technology also doesn’t offer rapid recovery, especially as drive sizes increase. In addition, RAID doesn’t adapt well to changes in the environment. RAID doesn’t protect against multiple forms of failure, can’t be counted on for rapid recovery, and adds complexity to every upgrade. For RAID to be a legitimate part of the data protection process, it must address these shortcomings.

RAID is not Data Protection it’s Hardware Protection

RAID is often promoted as a form of data protection but it only protects an organization from a hardware failure event. Again, RAID is not data protection. The lowest denominator in RAID is the physical drive. The technology has no understanding of what data is on that drive. If an 8TB drive fails, RAID must rebuild the entire drive, even though that drive may only have 4TBs of data on it. The requirement to restore a drive as a whole leads to slow drive rebuilds. The time to return a volume to a protected state grows longer as capacities increase. Vendors measure RAID rebuild on volumes made up of 8TB, or 14TB drives in DAYS, not hours. 

RAID is not Data Protection
RAID is NOT Data Protection

RAID also can’t mix different protection levels on a set of drives based on the importance of the data. If a set of disks is assigned to a particular RAID type, every volume using those drives must share that setting. The lack of granularity limits the effectiveness of shared drive pools and lowers overall capacity efficiencies.

Another inefficiency of RAID is its requirement for global hot spares. There are two problems with hot spares. First, there is the obvious concern that a global hot spare is 100% wasted capacity. The second challenge occurs when there is a drive failure, and the system needs to use the hot spare. Once it uses the hot spare, the system is exposed to failure until IT replaces the failed drive.

vRAID is DATA Protection

StorONE’s vRAID is DATA protection, and it is a crucial component of our Enterprise Storage Platform. vRAID protects data from hardware failure. If there is a drive failure, vRAID recreates only the actual data on that drive. As a result, an 8TB drive with 4TBs of data only requires 4TBs of the rebuild. With vRAID, customers enjoy fast rebuilds while maintaining current application performance.

vRAID also allows the mixing of multiple data protection settings per drive. vRAID sets protection at the volume level, so that critical applications can have higher levels of protection while still sharing the same drive pool. The result is more efficient capacity utilization and precise, data-driven redundancy.

vRAID does not require global hot spares. It can use any of the available drives in the system to move the volume back into a protected state. The advantage is all drives are available all the time. Rebuild can happen without having to wait for the replacement of the global spare.

Eject Does Not Equal Rebuild

Another challenge with most RAID solutions is once IT ejects a drive, the RAID system instantly starts a rebuild. Accidental ejections of drives happen frequently, and it is something that every IT professional has seen happen. The instant rebuild is particularly a problem when IT is replacing a legitimately failed drive, and they accidentally eject the wrong drive. Then there is a hurry to reinsert it and replace the drive that has failed. The result is an embarrassing double drive failure. In this case not only is RAID not data protection, it actually puts data at risk.

vRAID protects against unintended drive ejections by waiting to declare a drive as failed. If an IT administrator accidentally ejects the wrong disk, reinserts it, and then proceeds to replace the correct drive, there is no data loss because the first ejection did not force a rebuild.

Inflexibility Means RAID is not Data Protection

RAID is not Data Protection, it locks you in.
Protected Shouldn’t Mean Inflexible

A data protection strategy must be flexible and adapt to every advance in drive technologies. Its lack of flexibility means RAID is not data protection. Almost every storage system on the market allows for the expansion of volumes to meet growing capacity demands. The challenge is that those expansions happen over the years. During that time, per drive capacities often double. RAID can’t leverage high capacity. The customer must either create a new volume with new drives or format new drives down to meet the current volume’s per drive capacity makeup. The result is either wasted capacity or complex migration of applications from one volume to another.

vRAID is Future Ready

StorONE’s vRAID technology is future-ready. IT can add new drives to the existing Enterprise Storage Platform configuration and take full advantage of their capacity. The platform will automatically use the new capacity as applications add new data to the volumes.

A customer can use vRAID for in-place-upgrades. If IT needs to be careful with how they allocate data center floor space, they can use vRAID to expand capacity in the same physical footprint, without risky and time-consuming migrations. For example, if their current system uses 24 4TB SSDs, they, one at a time, replace those drives with 8TB or even 16TB drives to double or triple capacity within the same physical footprint. As IT removes an old drive and replaces it with a new one, vRAID will, within minutes, return the volumes to their protected state. IT can then replace another drive. They can repeat this process until they replace all the drives. When complete, their capacity is doubled or tripled.

We have a video of the process here:

Conclusion 

Raid is not data protection; it is drive failure protection. IT can’t count on current RAID technologies to reduce the dependency on the backup infrastructure and lower the associated costs. In fact, RAID makes the organization more dependent on these technologies.

vRAID is data protection. It can support multiple drive failures, does not require a hot spare, and rebuilds to a protected state rapidly, regardless of drive size or type. vRAID is also future-ready and can support drives of mixed capacity. IT professionals can even use it to facilitate an in-place upgrade. vRAID is a part of the S1 Data Protection Suite. Our DirectWrite technology makes sure that data is safely stored. vRAID keeps data protected from media failure.

To learn more about the complete S1 data protection suite, register for our virtual lunch and learn, “Reduce Backup Costs with Better Primary Storage?” The webinar is live on Thursday, April 9th, at 1:00 pm ET. All attendees will get a Domino’s Gift Card so they can enjoy a hot pizza while they learn about S1’s ability to drive down data protection costs.

Reducing Storage Spend – The New Reason for a Storage Refresh

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It is 2020, and although storage hardware and software have not changed very much in the last five years, customer expectations of the storage infrastructure are going through a dramatic change. These changes in attitude create a new reason for storage refreshes, the demand to save money. While other motivations for refreshing storage indeed remain, IT organizations are under immense pressure to shrink storage infrastructure spend dramatically. In fact, reducing storage spend is the best reason to refresh storage infrastructures.

In tomorrow’s live webinar, “Future Proof Your Storage – Eliminate Storage Refreshes,” I’m teaming up with the founder and former lead analyst of Storage Switzerland, and now StorONE’s CMO, George Crump to discuss all aspects of storage refreshes. During the webinar, we will pay extra attention to lowering the financial and administrative investment organizations are making in storage infrastructure.

The Reasons for Storage Refreshes

In the 2002-2009 era, lack of capacity was the primary reason most organizations upgraded their storage system. In the 2010-2019 period, the number one reason was performance. The lure of performance offered by all-flash and hybrid arrays was the motivation for IT professionals to replace their storage system. As I indicated above, the number one reason we see organizations refreshing storage in 2020 is to reduce the cost of storage infrastructure. The challenge is, while lowering storage spend is number one on the list, it usually is followed by improving performance, meeting storage capacity needs, and especially in the ERA of ransomware, protecting data.

Are you Refreshing Storage or Adding to Storage?

As most IT professionals are well aware, a storage refresh is not a small, simple project. It can take months of planning and can be very expensive. The investment in time and money means whatever storage solution the organization refreshes to, it must reduce cost and simplify management.

Meeting performance demands means using faster storage media and buying a storage system that can extract the maximum level of performance from that media. The problem is most storage systems developed in the last three to five years can’t come close to that requirement. We find that most storage systems deliver less than 20% of the per drive performance potential. Some of these systems try to compensate by using more powerful CPUs and more memory, but that adds to the price, and negates the first motivation, saving money. Other systems, remove features or add proprietary hardware acceleration, but this approach limits the usefulness of the solution. Instead of a storage refresh, the customer ends up with additional infrastructure.

Meeting capacity demands requires using higher capacity media. The good news is both flash drives and hard drive capacities are on the rise. Higher-capacity media though, means the rest of the storage system has to handle the additional data and do so affordably. In many cases, organizations that started with an all-flash array end up buying a unique archive storage system or high-capacity NAS, to which they copy older data to, often manually. Again, this is not a refresh but a new system, which adds to cost and complexity instead of reducing it.

Reducing complexity, the next motivation for a storage refresh requires simplifying the entire storage infrastructure. Adding new systems from different vendors with new interfaces can’t possibly lead to a more simple infrastructure. In essence, the only viable way to reduce complexity is to consolidate operations into fewer storage platforms, preferably one. The problem is most storage consolidation solutions require EXPENSIVE proprietary hardware and almost always lead to some form of compromise.

The newest motivation for a storage refresh, reducing storage costs, is the most difficult to tackle. How do you cut costs if you are buying more hardware? You can’t, at least not immediately.

We designed our S1 Enterprise Storage Platform to address these storage refresh challenges specifically. Instead of racing to market after a couple of years of development, we spent eight years developing our core code before initial release. S1 uses resources efficiently to extract maximum value and capabilities from them. We can run on existing server hardware with modest CPU and memory requirements while still delivering better performance than the alternatives. You don’t need to buy a brand new system to start using our software.

Finally, and most importantly, we can, with a single software interface, address all of the storage use cases high-performance, mainstream performance, backup storage, archive storage, and even cloud storage. We also support all storage protocols like fibre channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and Object so you can leverage your existing networking infrastructure.

Conclusion

As StorONE’s Product Manager, I spend a lot of time listening to customers and making sure we design in the features and capabilities they need to meet the demands of the organization. Sometimes, however, I need to make sure we design out the problems customers face in meeting the organization’s needs. One of the top challenges that IT professionals face is dealing with upgrades or replacement. All upgrades are not bad, especially if you only have to do it once. In fact, reducing storage spend is the best reason to refresh storage infrastructure. At StorONE, we’ve invested a lot of time and effort to make sure we’ve future-proofed our solution so that this will be the last refresh you ever have to do. Please join George and me tomorrow for our live webinar.

You can register below:

Rethinking Snapshots to Accelerate Performance

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Previously, we discussed the challenges inherent in providing the strong levels of data protection that are required today. Specifically, outdated storage architectures require application performance to be sacrificed and budgets to be exceeded, in order to obtain acceptable levels of data protection and resiliency. Of data protection capabilities, snapshots are the most CPU and memory-intensive, and as a result are a leading culprit of performance slowdowns. Throughout this installment, we will discuss how StorOne has rewritten snapshots to address this challenge.

The Problem with Traditional Snapshots

Storage snapshots encapsulate the state of a storage system, logical unit number (LUN), volume or virtual machine at a specific point in time. Effectively, they are a virtual, read-only, point-in-time copy of a specific data set. They are important when it comes to ensuring data consistency, and also when it comes to accelerating backup and recovery times and reducing the amount of storage capacity required as compared to taking completing full backups of very large storage systems. The latter is especially true as recovery time objectives (RTOs, the total amount of downtime resulting from a data outage) and recovery point objectives (RPOs, the point in time to which data is restored) become more stringent.
The problem is that storage snapshots halt the storage system’s input/output operations (IOPS) and throughput when they occur. These “halts” can impact application performance. Organizations typically execute hundreds of snapshots per day in order to meet aggressive RTOs and RPOs that application owners and users demand. As a result, storage managers must choose between more snapshots and greater data protection but significantly lower storage IOPS and throughput, or faster performance and lower data protection.

How StorOne Is Different

At StorOne, we wrote the S1 Unified Enterprise Storage (UES) system to enable an unlimited quantity and frequency of snapshots to be captured, without degradation to performance of storage IOPS or throughput, by minimizing the impact of each snapshot on the CPU and storage memory. Specifically, our snapshots are policy-based, redirect-on-write (ROW), as opposed to the copy-on-write (COW) snapshots that are more common. Whereas COW snapshots require write requests to be cached when a snapshot is occurring, ROW snapshots enable changes to be written separately, and adjust the pointers to the original data when the snapshot has completed. As a result, S1 increases computations per snapshot by as much as 10x when compared to most storage and hypervisor snapshot technologies, thus improving CPU and memory utilization by an average of 90%. To further save on capacity, snapshots are thin provisioned, and users can change retention requirements as needed. As a result, the customer can position to meet demanding, near zero RPOs by saving millions of snapshots on a single volume, without requiring tradeoffs to system performance and while keeping storage capacity requirements in check.

Conclusion

Data protection of any form can impact performance. Snapshots and their management are a key consumer of the resources needed to deliver and sustain high performance. However, there are several other key capabilities of data protection and resiliency that must also be revamped to optimize value for customers. In our next blog, we will shift gears to discuss how to use volume-level erasure coding instead of RAID, to increase data resiliency and to accelerate storage rebuilds without taxing storage I/O and throughput performance.
Topics: news, data storage

How to Bypass the Compromises of Legacy RAID Architectures

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Traditional storage architectures force the IT professional to sacrifice either on cost or on performance, in order to obtain data protection services such as snapshots and erasure coding. This is no longer acceptable in a business environment that increasingly does not tolerate compromise on data integrity or on application performance, and that requires maximum levels of utilization of hardware resources. In this installment, we will explore how StorONE has rearchitected the storage software to enable resiliency and accelerate drive rebuilds, without impacting performance, while also increasing both flexibility and hardware cost efficiency.

How Traditional RAID Approaches Fall Short

RAID (redundant array of independent disks) configurations have been used for decades to facilitate data resiliency. The technology allocates data across multiple storage drives, and then presents a virtual array to the operating system as a single drive. RAID configurations may vary depending on the required levels of redundancy and performance. From this perspective, RAID is a prime example of the tradeoffs that enterprises have needed to endure.

How StorONE is Different

Rather than relying on antiquated RAID approaches that are expensive, risky and slow, StorONE takes a different approach. Our S1 Unified Enterprise Storage (UES) software virtually pools storage resources from multiple drives, on the basis of a particular workload’s performance and capacity needs. This approach offers additional flexibility over RAID configurations to fine-tune resiliency levels and boost capacity utilization, because storage drive capacities may be mixed and matched within the virtual pool. Additionally, various redundancy levels may be set for different volumes. At the same time, our approach greatly accelerates storage drive rebuild times in the event of a drive failure, because data can be rewritten to any drive within the virtual pool that has spare capacity. In fact, our customers are seeing drive rebuild speeds that are two orders of magnitude (100 times) faster than RAID. Cost efficiencies are further enhanced for our customers because we do not require a “hot spare” drive to sit unused, awaiting a drive rebuild.

Conclusion

StorONE provides customers with greater peace of mind by removing the need to sacrifice on cost or performance in order to obtain their required levels of data integrity. A prime example of this is how we bypass legacy RAID configurations, facilitating parallel drive access for faster rebuilds, and greater flexibility in the form of drive capacities that may be utilized and the ability to set volume-level redundancy levels. Our S1 software provides greater resiliency and faster performance than traditional systems, while at the same time cutting costs.

Topics: Insider, news, data storage, RAID

Volume Level Erasure Coding to Avoid Storage Tradeoffs

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We previously explored the tradeoffs that traditional storage snapshots require in terms of cost and performance, and how StorOne has written its snapshot algorithms to avoid forcing customers to choose between obtaining snapshots, or delivering on required levels of performance, and staying within the budget. In this blog, we will evaluate a similar problem that erasure coding presents, and how StorOne’s N+K approach enables customers to address this headache.

The Problem with Erasure Coding

Erasure coding increases data resiliency by breaking data (blocks, files or objects) into fragments, and then writing those fragments across multiple storage drives or nodes. Each fragment contains metadata about the other fragments, so that the original data can be rehydrated in the event of a drive or node failure, or in the event that a fragment becomes corrupted. For example, ten fragments may be written, but only eight may be required to rehydrate the data – meaning that two fragments can be lost without the original data also being lost. Erasure coding rebuilds are fast, because only the data itself (as opposed to the entire drive) is rebuilt, and also because multiple drives may work on the data rebuild at the same time.
The downside to erasure coding is that it all but halts storage input/output (I/O) operations and throughput, because it is heavily read and write intensive. In fact, it adds so much latency that most enterprises do not use erasure coding for primary storage, causing them to sacrifice on data resiliency. Most of the data fragments must be read for the data to be rehydrated in response to a read request.

StorOne N+K Erasure Coding

StorOne’s S1 Unified Enterprise Storage (UES) platform utilizes N+K erasure coding to facilitate data resiliency and fast storage drive rebuilds, without the CPU overhead and the resulting tradeoffs to storage performance of traditional erasure coding.
StorOne’s erasure coding technology first aggregates storage pools based on I/O and throughput performance as well as on capacity requirements. These pools are thin provisioned and pull capacity from multiple drives. Unlike a typical Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configuration, various capacity drives may be mixed and matched within the same pool.
The S1 UES platform then establishes virtual “N+K” arrays, which are assigned to the storage pools that have been created. “N” represents the number of physical storage drives over which the virtual array is spread out. Each array may be spread out over 1, 2, 4 or 8 drives. This ultimately determines read performance. Meanwhile, “K” reflects the number of simultaneous drive failures that may be tolerated, and impacts write performance. These arrays may be created per storage volume or logical unit, per file system, or per virtual machine, based on varying performance and data resiliency requirements. A larger number of drives (“N” value) increases throughput but also latency. As a result, the customer has flexibility to adjust the configuration according to the application’s throughput and latency requirements.
In addition to boosting performance, this approach enables greater capacity utilization compared to RAID configurations. Various capacity drives may be deployed within the same pool, and a standby “hot spare” drive does not need to be maintained. It also improves redundancy and avoids the need for tradeoffs to storage performance by avoiding the need to read and write to a singular drive. If a drive fails, data fragments may be rewritten to any drive that has spare capacity, which vastly boosts performance.

Conclusion

StorOne’s volume-based, N+K erasure coding technology minimizes the CPU cycles and memory that are required by every I/O operation, which frees up resources to be applied to serving the application itself. Furthermore, it dramatically accelerates drive rebuilds in the event of a failure, helping the business to get back online faster. The value to the customer is further increased because each storage drive’s capacity and memory may be more fully utilized.
Topics: Insider, news, data storage, Erasure Coding

Data Integrity: The Backbone of Competitive Advantage

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Data is the foundation of business advantage in today’s economy. Analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are helping businesses to uncover new competitive opportunities and to operate in a more efficient and streamlined fashion. At the same time, requirements for data privacy are higher than ever before, because consumers are becoming more discerning about how their information is used, and stringent data privacy regulations are emerging globally. Simply put, it is mission-critical to the business that data be available, accurate, consistent and secure.
The problem is that legacy storage architectures force tradeoffs between cost, data resilience, protection, and performance. Across this blog series, we will explore how StorOne has rewritten the storage algorithms to eliminate these tradeoffs, enabling customers to achieve complete data protection without sacrificing performance or breaking the budget. In this blog, we will level set on what data resilience and data protection are, why they matter, and the challenges in achieving them with legacy storage architectures.

What are Data Resiliency and Data Protection?

Data resiliency and data protection are similar in the sense that they both serve to preserve and make data available in the event that it is compromised. As a result, both are important when it comes to ensuring data integrity – that data is accurate and readily available when the user needs it. The major differences lie in the time it takes to restore the data (the recovery time objective, or RTO), the point in time in which the data is restored to (the recovery point objective, or RPO), and the types of data outages that are protected against.
Data resiliency effectively is the ability of an IT system or an entire data center to return quickly to production after a disruption. Data resiliency is typically architected into the design of the IT system or data center itself. For example, erasure coding (the process of breaking a file up into redundant fragments and storing those fragments across multiple drives), parity (or redundant) drives, and storage mirroring (whereby logical storage volumes are copied and maintained across multiple disks) facilitate data availability in the event of a storage drive or node failure. Storage controllers can be deployed in active-active configurations, leaving one node continuously on standby to process input/output (I/O) operations in the event that the other nodes goes down. Also, non-volatile dual in-line memory modules (NVDIMMs) can be used to protect against data loss in the event of a power outage, because NVDIMMs retain their content when offline.
Data resiliency is designed to facilitate near-zero RPOs and RTOs – that is, continuous availability, and instantaneous recovery to the moment in time immediately before an outage occurred. At the same time, however, data is still at risk from hardware failures, human errors, malicious attacks such as malware, and software corruption. This is where data protection comes in.
Data protection technologies protect against these data loss risks, but at the expense of having longer RTOs (typically hours or even days), and RPOs that are less granular preceding the outage (for example, data might be able to be restored from the previous night’s backup, as opposed to being restored to its exact state immediately preceding the outage). Example storage data protection technologies include snapshots (which mark the state of an entire storage volume at a specific point in time, and then mark subsequent changes to that storage volume over time) and clones (a snapshot that captures an entire storage volume from a specific point in time, rather than capturing only changes to the storage volume).

The Problem with Enabling Data Resiliency and Data Protection

With traditional storage architectures, snapshots, RAID, mirroring, replication and other data resiliency and protection technologies all come at a significant price of input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput. That is to say, they are heavily computationally intensive, and when they are running, they dramatically slow the workload’s performance. As a result, the customer is forced to choose between data quality, which is fundamental to the business’ success, performance (which is also very important to business operations) and cost. They either cannot achieve the levels of performance that their premium storage resources are capable of, or they are forced into expensive workarounds such as adding customized application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) caching.

Conclusion

Computationally-intensive data resilience and protection capabilities are becoming more and more business critical, during a time in which maximizing CPU and storage capacity and memory utilization is also becoming paramount. A re-write of core storage algorithms is needed to deliver data integrity, while keeping storage infrastructure costs and complexities in check and ensuring required levels of performance. In our next blog, we will discuss snapshots specifically in more detail.

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