2003: Heads Will Fly! - Thoughts on Storage Systems (for Brocade Comm.)

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1 Heads will Fly! Thoughts on Storage Systems Tom Lyon For Brocade Communications 10/2/2003

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2 Backup And hope you never have to restore!

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3 The Backup Paradox  Old filesystems: random updates, sequential reads  New filesystems: sequential updates (log), random reads  Walking the filesystem to backup causes extreme overhead  Is snapshot/rollback enough?

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4 Backup  Most users perform backups ‘religiously’  It’s a miracle if they can restore things!  Restores can be major source of un- availability  Allocity – recovery for MS Exchange

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5 Capacity

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6 Storage vs Network  Individual drives approach 500 Mbps  10Gbps “non-blocking” is only 20 drives  PCI Express 16b wide = 32Gbps  We need 40 to 100Gbps Ethernet (or FC) soon!

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7 Network vs. Storage Network Megabits/Second Terabytes/Day Petabytes/Year T1 1.5 0.02 0.01 Ethernet 10 0.11 0.04 T3 45 0.49 0.18 FastEther 100 1.08 0.39 GigEther 1000 10.80 3.94 10Gig 10000 108.00 39.42

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8 Capture Applications  Gathering workload information  Network sanity analysis  Wire-tapping “Legal Intercept”  Intrusion detection / analysis  Forensic evidence gathering  Capture, timestamp, encrypt, …  Video capture for security cameras

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9 Switched I/O

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10 New I/O  PCI Express – serialized PCI  PCI Express/Advanced Switching  Peer-Peer Host & Devices  Infiniband

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11 Peer-to-Peer I/O  Most busses allow p2p I/O device transfers  Multibus, VME, PCI, …  Switched I/O allows p2p Host transfers  PCI Express, Infiniband, some CompactPCI  Management framework is usually insufficient  I2O attempted solution for PCI  Too complex, failed  P2P I/O never happens, P2P Host uses IP

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12 RDMA  RDMA is peer-peer host & memory  Datapath can be optimized  But control is horribly complex  DMA never happened between hosts on a bus, why would it happen between hosts on a network?  DMA between device & host works when device is dedicated to host

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13 Virtual Everything (This slide does not exist)

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14 Virtual Storage  Virtual Tapes on Drives  Virtual Drives with RAID  Virtual Volumes – expandable, replicated, cached in mem  Virtual filesystems, virtual filers  Virtual files - /proc/…  Virtual databases – ODBC proxy/cache/repl

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15 Virtualizing Interfaces  [host] –iface1-- [drive]  [host] –iface1-- [new logic] –iface2-- [drive]  If iface1 = iface2 then proxy  Else translator

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16 Proxies  Switches – simple transport  Caches  LUN mapping  Many others

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17 HW vs SW Interfaces  ATA, SATA HBAs are software compatible back to the dark ages – HW interfaces  SCSI, FC, iSCSI all require vendor unique OS support – SW interfaces  Deployment of HW interface is quick & painless; SW is slow and complex

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18 Low Level Interfaces Type Value-Add ATA HW low SATA HW low SCSI SW med iSCSI SW hi FC SW hi

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19 Translations To From ATA SATA SCSI iSCSI FC ATA R ? x x x SATA R ? x ! ! SCSI R R R x pl iSCSI R R R ? sr FC R R R ? R

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20 HyperSCSI  From SAN -> Internet (iSCSI) is a giant leap  SAN -> LAN (HyperSCSI) is smaller step  Non-IP (not politically correct)  Avoids TCP overhead, IP admin & security problems http://nst.dsi.a-star.edu.sg/mcsa/hyperscsi/

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21 What I Want  Convert SATA front end (highly compatible) into FC/iSCSI back ends (high value add)  ASIC for SATA->HyperSCSI aggregation  Build blade server system to replace the typical rack of single-disk servers  Rich backend for HyperSCSI->FC or iSCSI

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22 High Level Interfaces  NFS & CIFS  HTTP & WebDAV  NDMP