Demitasse

New servers in your data center can have a lot of RAM DIMMs in them, or some RAM and some Persistent MEMory (PMEM) such as Optane DIMMs. Either way, there is a lot of fast capacity that might help solve application performance issues that are caused by slow storage. Formulus Black would like to help you by turning some DIMMs into a block device for your application. Their FORSA software takes either RAM or PMEM and makes it into a local file system with latency and throughput that are better than NVME SSDs. Your application can run directly on the Linux host, where FORSA is installed. The other option is your application inside VMs under the KVM hypervisor on that host. The VM option allows applications that require Windows to be accelerated with DIMM based storage. There are other drivers that take Optane DIMMs and make them a disk device, and other RAM disk drivers around. FORSA has some unique features around management and data services. One feature is the ability to rapidly clone a volume (usually RAM-based) to an SSD to provide data protection. Another is replicating a volume from one FORSA node to another for high availability. There is also a GUI for friendlier management and deduplication to increase the effective capacity of the high-speed volume.

I expect we will see more use of DIMM based storage when there are cost-effective options for PMEM. Increasing application (particularly database) performance is important, but finding the expertise to fix and optimize applications is expensive. Moving from the fastest NVMe SSD, you can get to DIMM attached storage can offer an order of magnitude better application performance for a relatively small increase in hardware cost. Formulus Black says that they are targeting medium-sized companies and Wall Street. The presentation I saw had some significant improvements in IOPS and 99th percentile latency, which translates into fewer storage bottlenecks. If you are struggling to get enough storage performance with local NVMe SSDs, give them a look.

This is the first in a series of posts about things that surprised me when I started to work with AWS services. This particular surprise was one of the first, back in 2013, I was still teaching VMware courses and was invited to attend some AWS training. On the first day, the trainer explained that you could deploy as much software-defined network and as many VMs as you wanted. That was all a given at the time when VMware was struggling to integrate Nicera (now NSX) with vSphere. Then my mind was blown when the instructor said that EC2 (the VM service) is not that interesting. The real fun is in the AWS services that you use to assemble applications. The next two days were spent learning about these services and labs where I actually built an application. It was just too easy, even when I started going outside the lines. The lab had the usual prescriptive guidance about how to configure everything to work as intended. I built the autoscaling group of EC2 instances that would respond to the number of requests in a queue and take input data from object storage and place results in more object storage. The lab instructions only told us to scale-out the cluster, I worked out how to configure scale-in too & managed to test that still in the lab time.

Now that I teach the AWS courses, I do see more acceptance of applications that run in VMs, the way they do on-premises. But I now talk about EC2 instances as the last resort for when you have no better way to achieve your objectives. Usually, a managed service is a better option because it requires less work from you and often because it costs less in AWS bills too. I noticed that the Developing on AWS course is very focussed on serverless application development, meaning no EC2. New applications shouldn’t require working with legacy constructs like VMs, but you can have your VMs for your older applications.

When it comes to managing a fleet of Linux boxes with minimal extra infrastructure, I am a fan of Ansible. I have written before about using PowerShell to automate working with Cohesity, that will be a good choice for vSphere and Hyper-V environments where PowerShell is the native automation platform. I have also shown how the AutoProtection feature on Cohesity allows newly created VMs to be protected based on folders, tags, or naming. But what about when you have a bunch of physical Linux boxes that you want to protect? Ansible seems a great fit, and happily, Cohesity has an Ansible role to make everything easy. Here, I look at deploying the role and retrieving information about your Cohesity cluster using the Cohesity facts function. The video of me following this process is right here if you would prefer not to read any further.

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Cohesity I have made a lot of walk-through and demonstrations videos as I have learnt about the Cohesity platform over the last year. We also showed you the deployment process and some architecture in the Cohesity Build Day Live event, plenty of video there too. If you would like a more structured set of presentations about the Cohesity platform and its newer features, then I suggest you take a look at their presentations at Tech Field Day. Unfortunately, I did not get to attend any of these events, hopefully I will see my Cohesity friends at Tech Field Day in 2020.

Disclosure: This post is part of my work with Cohesity.

Storage Field Day 18

• Cohesity Under the Covers: SpanFS A scale-out file system is central to any scale-out storage platform, Apurv Gupta exposes the inside of SpanFS
• A Deep Dive into Cohesity Scale-Out NAS Once you have a scale-out file system, why not share it?
• Cohesity Comprehensive Data Protection and Compliance Jon Hildebrand is a past Tech Field Day delegate, so ideally placed to cover technical demonstrations for this audience.
• Cohesity Leveraging Your Backup and Unstructured Data Legacy backup vendors have told us that we could get value out of our backup data, it has taken newer vendors to show us simple ways to get this value.

Cloud Field Day 5

• Cohesity Vision for a Hybrid Cloud World If you have never seen Rawlinson present, he is always entertaining as he digs into architecture and business.
• Cohesity Protecting Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online Theresa has a long history of hands-on technical expertise and has been exposing the issues around data protection for online services.
• Cohesity: Under the Hood – Cloud Native Data Protection for Virtual Workloads Jon again, more cloud-native data protection.
• Cohesity: Introducing Cloud Backup Service for Google Cloud Everyone starts with data protection to AWS, but customers always want diversity so data protection to Google is a great option.
• Cohesity: Achieve Disaster Recovery With Cloud Jon is back with another demonstration
• Cohesity Deep Dive – CloudSpin for Disaster Recovery DR to the cloud is all about how you handle recovery, cleanly bringing up VMs on a new virtualization platform is not a trivial task.

Size matters, not in absolute terms where bigger or smaller is always better, but in matching a solution to the requirements it needs to fulfill. Scale Computing has transformed over the last few years from a player for budget-conscious small businesses to a scalable solution for distributed enterprises. I see two vital dimensions where Scale Computing has been innovating. The first is multi-cluster management to allow the central management of vast numbers of clusters. The other has been in scaling down the size of the minimum site for which they have a solution. Past Scale Computing hardware platforms have been full-depth rack-mount servers, offering options for dozens of CPU cores and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM. These models fulfill the requirements for medium-sized offices where a few dozen to a few hundred VMs are required. If you are a bank or a big box retail store, you might need this infrastructure at each branch to serve dozens of staff. You also want the same management console to manage all hundred or thousand branches, each with a local cluster. The scale of multi-cluster management that Scale Computing offers has been impressive. Recently, Scale simplified some of the network requirements, removing the need for a physical dedicated cluster network, now using VXLAN to isolate the cluster networking. There is an excellent set of videos on some of Scale’s innovations in their presentations at Tech Field Day 20.

A branch office solution that is deployed to every retail premises of a national or international retailer needs to scale to the requirements of the largest and smallest branch. Often, the smallest branch is a sole-charge staff member and a single till plus the corporate infrastructure like security systems and staff tracking. That small branch might need between three and five VMs, usually with a total size of a few Gigabytes of RAM and less than a terabyte of storage. In the past, the only cost-effective way to run these VMs was on a small form-factor desktop PC, very limited in both redundancy and remote management. The latest platform from Scale Computing is the HC150, based on Intel NUC tenth generation hardware, which can have as little as 4GB per node, allowing 6GB of VMs in a 3-node redundant cluster. Some of the magic is that Scale has optimized their RAM overhead to under 1GB, leaving 3GB per node for VMs in a tiny 4GB NUC config and 15GB for VMs in a 16GB NUC configuration. With the tenth generation NUC, Intel has brought back AMT features for remote management of hardware. Scale Computing uses the AMT capability to allow zero-touch remote deployment; a tiny cluster is shipped to the site with just a diagram of how to install. The commissioning process for the cluster is managed remotely once the NUCs are connected to the network. With NUCs, a three-node cluster can fit inside a shallow network rack, or on a shelf under the till in a small retail site where space is at a premium. If those NUCs don’t seem enterprise enough for you, Lenovo is a significant partner for Scale. Lenovo has rugged micro-servers that can form a Scale Computing cluster, no fans, and robust metal cases. I also saw some mention of support for the Wi-Fi adapters in both the NUC and Lenovo machines. I imagine that the Scale cluster traffic is still over wired ethernet, but the VM networking could happen over Wi-Fi. I imagine that it opens some exciting deployment options.