Thoughts on “Open Storage”

Some marketing terms come along that make you stop and think. Sun is pushing Open Storage, pairing up terms like “revolution”, and you have to ask: Whats really new here? I suppose you have to step back and consider that all industries are not the same and what one customer considers “catching up with reality”, another customer considers “a fresh new approach”.

When I think about what Sun concept of Open Storage really boils down to it is this: servers aren’t just storage clients. If you think about the direction Fibre Channel and even iSCSI solutions were going, the drive was to push more and more of the storage management and access into array controllers such that servers are clients only. I think I told the story in this blog some time ago when I stormed out of HDS’s data center when I realized you required a Windows server to manage the array. Storage should be autonomous!

But things have changed. When I stormed out of HDS I was managing an environment of large SPARC systems that had 1 or 2 internal disks just for the OS, or small 1U X86 servers with just enough local disk for the OS and apps. With the increasing availability of high performance multi-core CPU’s 2U’s are more attractive and local disk storage is commonly managed by a dedicated RAID card with onboard cache of up to 512MB. When you have racks full of 2U systems that each have more than 2.5TB of RAID6 and a write-back cache to boot in each machine… its time to think differently. Filesystems like Lustre or even pNFS (parallel NFS) look very attractive to the enterprise…. yet again, HPC technology trickles down to the enterprise market.

While the push from Sun has just started publicly this year, there has been signs of this for a long time, especially when Jonathan declared many moons ago that all proprietary OS’s would have to go, which at the time was shocking given that all the storage arrays ran various embedded or specialized OS’s. So, it should be noted that this would seem to be the fulfillment of something Sun has been working toward for quite some time, unified under a single banner of “Open Storage”.

The implications could really change the landscape though. Traditionally in large enterprise storage you spend a lot of time working with vendors, testing configurations, listening to presos, etc. It was a very hands-off world. This new push would mean that Storage Administrators are going to spend less time making purchasing decisions and more time learning how to install, manage, and optimize their deployments. When “secure storage” goes from checking a box to configuring IPsec things get sticky. But that also provides new opportunities for administrators and vendors alike. In fact, that reminds me of something…. :)

So the real question is, how will “traditional” storage vendors like HDS and EMC respond? If you don’t have a server business getting behind the idea of buying servers and JBOD’s isn’t terribly attractive. That suggests that in 3 years companies like Dell, Sun, IBM, and HP will rule the storage world leaving EMC to supply a dying market while it continues to cash in on its acquisitions like VMware and RSA.

So, like I said in the beginning…. “Open Storage” is either something mind-numbingly obvious or something radically new, depending on where you sit.

146 Responses to “Thoughts on “Open Storage””

  1. Renier says:

    Ben, have you seen COMSTAR in action?

    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/comstar/

  2. Matt Simons says:

    I usually agree with your opinion, but in this case, I’ve got to
    disagree with the wisdom of having every 2u server having localized storage. It’s my (humble) opinion that this is the “bad old way”.

    Pushing aside the current media darling of storage virtualization, and maybe even machine virtualization, I only have to look at centralized
    backups and snapshots to know that a centralized (or modular) storage
    is the way to go. JBODs are nice for raw storage, but as you alluded
    to, you’re tying yourself, not only to a single platform, but a single
    machine, in most (all?) cases.

    The biggest exception I could see is if you rig up a host which
    emulates iSCSI stores, and then performs block level network-based
    replication to another host set up in a similar configuration.

    With one of my sites, I’ve got a file server doing NAS functions from a Promise locally attached external array, but I’d trade it in a heartbeat for a SAN based storage device of equal space.

    Do you see a technology-based advantage to JBOD or host-managed RAID, or is it a pricepoint issue?

  3. benr says:

    Matt: This isn’t a return to local storage in the 90′s sense…. the point is that systems now have multiple Gigabit ethernet interfaces, large caches and large amounts of unused disk. Traditional large storage systems always have a bottle neck. So why not take 200GB from each of your (n) servers and pool it into a usable network storage device? pNFS and Lustre are examples of this. Now you have storage thats faster than any single centralized storage solution and cheaper to boot.

    Especially “In the cloud”, disk is the enemy and any trick you can use to speed up disk access has to be exploited.

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  6. damntech says:

    This isn’t a completely original idea. Folks have been doing this on Linux with a series of tools: mpio, lvm, mdadm, ext2/ext3, aoe/iscsi for a few years now. Microsoft has had WUDSS since 2006. But all in all they both suck compared to Suns total solution. What really surprises me is that Sun had the software side of this solution ready for years now. It took how many years to start offering JBODs for servers with MPIO over DAS???

  7. mcdtracy says:

    Sun is calling these new disk arrays JBOD’s but they actually have SAS compliant expansion devices in the controllers so they will offer SAS Zones when CAM 6.1.2 ships. Two hosts iitially supported but it’s effectively a building block for a SAS-based SAN: 128 devices (targets) connected bu up to 128 expanders… up to 128×128 = 16,384 devices potentially.

    So, SAS SAN’s are coming. Just when you thought iSCSI was slated to slow the growth of FC SAN’s we have another option to build a storage architecture that is more than DAS.

    Hopefully, OpenSolaris Storage projects accelerate the deployment of these new technologies faster than waiting for Sun to code the proper interfaces, management solutions and support consoles. Because history indicates Sun arrives too late to win the day without partners to assist in the heavy lifting: leverage continues to be a force multiplier.

    Beside, I really need to see their stock move in the other direction.

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