This article is more than 1 year old

Block storage is dead, says ex-HP and Supermicro data bigwig

Recent consolidations show ‘distinct lack of imagination’

Object storage/block storage speed match

El Reg How will object storage change to use direct IP address drives?

Robert Novak By having the ability to store objects directly to a storage device there is no need to translate an object name into a set of file names that represents the "family" of metadata files that can accompany the rich metadata affiliated with objects.

There is a similar "family" of one or more files that represents the object as a single file or as multiple files which are the "chunks" of the file. Now we can simply PUT(Key,Value) or GET(Key).

El Reg Can object storage match block storage in speed?

Robert Novak Contrary to most popular opinions, object storage can actually outperform block storage. In a block storage paradigm, the block storage has gone through a gradual shift in what makes for the fastest access to data.

In the early days of disk drives, the fastest access was when the data was in contiguous blocks that could be read sequentially off the disk drive. As things became more sophisticated, RAID technologies evolved that striped the data across multiple drives.

However, with object storage, if you divide the data into chunks and store the chunks (possibly redundantly) across many different drives, then you can achieve a bit-torrent effect in reading the data so that the limit of your reading speed is the bandwidth of your inbound data pipe (e.g., Ethernet port).

El Reg Will file storage be affected by direct IP address drives?

Robert Novak If I am successful with my patent pending technology, it will have a dramatic effect. I can demonstrate that the throughput for retrieving files where files and blocks are built on top of key/value drive objects will actually be faster than what you can achieve with traditional block storage.

Kinetic_Model

Object storage layering with Kinetic-style drives

In addition, it will not have all of the challenges that the traditional file systems have with Shingled Magnetic Recording or Flash Translation Layer that slow down access to data.

El Reg What do you think of the current state of the storage industry?

Robert Novak This is my personal opinion and does not reflect the thinking of any of the mainstream industry players — the industry is in a state of consolidation and retrenchment as it grapples with massive shifts in the amount of data we generate and the shifts in the ways in which we manage and store the data.

Many people have not yet realised that with object storage paradigms we will actually need less storage to reliably hold the data when compared with the past 40-50 years.

In the past, as a CIO you were required to not only keep your primary RAID/MIRROR storage online, you would often store 2-10 times as many copies of the data as daily, weekly, monthly and annual backups.

Some of those backups would be sent to offsite locations for geographic dispersal to provide for Disaster Recovery in the event of an environmental catastrophe (hurricane, tornado, earthquake, floods), political catastrophe (placing data overseas to prevent access by governments), or conflict catastrophe such as 9/11.

Object storage can achieve all of these same objectives with a realistic savings of 50-80 per cent of the cost of reliable traditional storage.

El Reg How will the public cloud affect the storage industry?

Robert Novak The public cloud is part of that space savings that is achieved through object technology. The problem is that the data in the cloud is accessible only at WAN speeds. That is fine for the data on your phone or tablet, but unsuitable when you want to run analytic applications on archived records.

In addition, the cost of public cloud storage is deceptive. For your phone or tablet data, it is palatable. When you get into your massive data needs, the cost of retrieving cloud data overwhelms the savings of not keeping the data within the company.

In the short term we will see a flattening in the number of storage units as the IT managers stall in making purchase decisions while they evaluate using public cloud for their DR and cold storage needs.

They already overbought capacity (to get performance from RAID striping) and they are going to soak up that capacity before the next buying wave begins. Just as discretionary travel budgets are being slashed in many companies today, so too are budgets for storage acquisition, as more companies turn to the cloud for short term savings.

El Reg Does the wave of large storage vendor consolidation please or concern you?

Robert Novak The wave of consolidations show a distinct lack of imagination on the part of the storage vendor management teams. They simply cannot conceive of the conditions that are leading us to an entirely new paradigm. As part of the consolidations, there are a number of companies that are also doing layoffs. Many of these layoffs are affecting the most innovative teams and technologies.

El Reg What do you think might happen to the startups?

Robert Novak There is going to be a short-term slowdown in the number of new startups as the investors view the consolidation with some alarm. There are two different schools of thought. One is that the consolidation is occurring because the industry cannot accommodate the larger number of players.

The other school will realise that the consolidation is happening because the big players are not adopting and promoting the new technologies, and that this might be the best time to invest in new startups.

This latter group will initially be small and the time to reap rewards on those investments will be long, due to the development cycles.

I am personally praying that I can find early stage investors that will be willing to invest in this disruptive market shift.

El Reg How do you see the future of our industry?

Robert Novak The industry will move away from SAS/SATA storage that is captive on a single server. Ethernet-attached storage devices that use stateless UDP access will gradually become more and more intelligent to handle more of the necessary storage and search functions. Servers will not use local storage for anything more than "boot" and "swap", and even that will shift over time.

The only "local" store will be the Tier 0 Storage Class Memory which will migrate out to slower tiers when the data is unreferenced for a period of time.

El Reg There is a lot to ponder on and digest here. One thing that strikes us is a similarity to some of the views expressed by Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez concerning object storage and underlying file systems.

The potential bright future for Kinetic-style drives is particularly interesting. Comments please if you disagree with Robert or think he needs to consider other points. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like