Posts made by SeanExablox

@julian my Jetta came with GPS, but I never use it. iPhone & Waze is the go to.

Checking my Veeam backup dedupe ratios on the OneBlox software that is going through QA now.

@AVI-NetworkGuy +1 on JV.

I have been using Apple JV for the past 5 years when they began making more of a push into corporations. At $100/user/year it's not insignificant, but I have found on many occasions scheduling a support call and h/w support to be well worth it.

Another benefit is loaner laptop if you have to leave yours with the Genius.

email will certainly change and it's going in two directions. short SMS/tweet and long video unified communications. it's amazing how many people think SMS/tweets are secure and private.

@scottalanmiller so that's a function of not trusting the company, not a 'boogey man' or the manufacturer spying on you.

Did everyone decorate their camera stickers

while you can learn from history as a provider of technology, as a user it doesn't matter how the BB ecosystem never got off the ground. Although I suppose as a savvy user, you could have predicted Android would be successful in the early days.

I also prefer my TVs to be 'dumb' and in 2D. How many people cover up the cameras on their monitors or laptops? I don't

@MattSpeller said:

Seems like the errors from last week have gotten strange. I've only been loading data to the "victoria' unit, however the "vanouver" one is showing greater storage used, along with a really sweet amount of dedupe

You'll see really good dedupe ratios like this as it's strictly a calculation based on how much data is written the Ring and then to the physical drives. Over the week and lifetime you'll get a more 'reasonable' ratio

@MattSpeller said:

Have not yet contacted support as I suspect this may be related to the really crappy networking I gave it. I will let it sit and stew for another day as I have no time to poke it today.

support will be reaching out to you to look at the secondary. Better to be proactive than reactive

@MattSpeller said:

So the follow up to my rant below - I need a way to generate 14TB of uncompressable data and see what happens.

You can use FIO to generate multiple 1GB unique files if you'd like and stream them to the OneBlox Ring. This is what we do internally to test and fill up our file system to 100% utilization in our QA process.

@MattSpeller said:

Ignorance ahoy! I really didn't understand at all how these things work and the following will probably illuminate that, hopefully I'll learn more!

My primary concern (curiosity? frustration?) is how the bleeping heck do they claim 100% space utilization. So this means you toss in a 1TB drive, it appears with 1TB more free space for you to use. This is basically anathema to me when they claim to have your data backed up and safe - to the point where you can just yank a drive out and it'll continue on it's merry way. As we all know, with RAID to get your data backed up it's usually a 50% space penalty (RAID1 / 10). Knowing that the answer probably isn't "witchcraft" I set about trying to figure it all out. The following is my super high level guess and assumptions and I'm probably wrong about half of it.

Object Based Storage is the heart of the answer, I'm pretty sure. My one sentence understand of it is: cut data into chunks, number the chunks, hash them?, store them across a couple (3?) drives. It appears that this is very similar to RAID in that the data is duped; where I know I'm missing something key is that you don't get 1:1 utilization if you're duping data anywhere. Impossible right? Yes. My best guess is that they do take a penalty from duping data, but they MUST recoup it somewhere!

Taking the units I have as the working example: put in 4x4TB drives, got 14.4TB usable storage out. That's not unreasonable to lose some capacity to file system, formatting, whatever. We do know that they use de-dupe and this is primarily how I suppose they recoup the space and claim 1:1. I have checked on the management page and our units are claiming a de-dupe ratio of 1.3. According to "My Computer" I have 2.23TB used currently. Now, here is where the slight of hand comes in - I have (I hope... I didn't actually keep careful track) actually put 2.23TB of data on the thing. AH HAH! Witchcraft this is not! It's just not displaying the space it gained by compacting all your data.

So, best guess: overhead penalty of duping data to maintain redundancy is recouped through compression of original data, and probably some other OBS trickery. I'm not at all sure what that trickery is exactly, though I suspect they can somehow reconstitute blocks of data??? I'm not at all satisfied with my answer but I hope to learn more.

Further suppositions: I strongly suspect that there is a fair bit of overhead from all the work the OBS has to do. How much of a penalty this is I would really like to find out, but I lack the equipment (gigabit networking) to really put the hurt on them for I/O. Given my company's use case for these units, we would likely never push their I/O limitations anyway.

You're thinking is along the right lines. Because we're object based we can do things legacy RAID systems can't. Regarding the capacity question, When you look in OneSystem and see Free and Used capacity that is what's being used within the OneBlox Ring. For your example, when you have 14.4 TB free capacity and you write 1TB of 100% unique data to the Ring, you'll see the used capacity increase to 3 TB. This is because we create three copies of every object to protect against 2 drive failures. As you pointed out, we break every file into chunks and then do inline dedupe, calculate a hash (which is now an object) and write that to three different disks.

You can test this by taking the same group of files, creating multiple folders in your directory and copying the same files over and over. You'll see the used capacity barely increase. You'll also see some great dedupe ratios in OneSystem. Remember to create test shares, and turn OFF snapshots for this. If you don't we're going to protect all your deleted data with our Continuous Data Protection

The other thing to think about is because we're object-based you can add 1 x 4TB drive and your total capacity will increase. We distribute each object across all of the drives so you don't need to worry about adding drives in qty 4, 6, or 8 (as long as you have at least three your good).

@scottalanmiller said:

Does it support SMB 3.o and, therefore, able to back HyperV?

we do support SMB 3.0. Today, you will not see great performance in virtual IOPS driven workloads as we've focused more on file serving and backup targets.

@scottalanmiller said:

I am really interested to see this running production virtualization workloads via NFS.

We're getting there. Currently, our software is optimized for streaming read/write workloads and not IOPS. As you'd expect with the introduction of NFS support, improvement in IOPS is right around the corner.

@MattSpeller

@MattSpeller said:

Chatty little boxes! These things call home quite a bit. It's not a huge quantity of traffic (around 300mb/day/oneblox = 600mb/day total for me). Keep in mind that is without anyone actually accessing them or doing anything to them. I'm not sure if that will effect their level of communication or not. This screen cap is over 24h period.

@MattSpeller user access and storage capacity won't really impact the amount of data that OneBlox and OneSystem send to each other. If you do see a significant uptick, please let me know.

PS. apologies for the delete/repost, neglected to quote the original post.

@scottalanmiller

@scottalanmiller said:

My guess, but it is only a guess, is that that number is diagnostics and will grow slightly but be generally pretty consistent over time. Maybe @SeanExablox can shed some light on that.

@scottalanmiller you're correct. Because our management is cloud-based the heartbeat and metadata comprise the payload sent over a 24 hour period. The larger and more complex the environment (#shares, users, events, etc) the amount traffic OneBlox and OneSystem pass back and forth will increase. Having said that it should be a very modest increase in traffic and it's fairly evenly distributed throughout the day.

@coliver said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@SeanExablox said:

We are introducing NFS now as well. So those that need SMB (3.0)/NFS file services and video storage (we have a number of non-profits using for digital asset management)

That will make a huge difference. Having NFS really changes the use cases.

You would be able to use this as a VMWare/Xen backend at that point? Although not sure about the speed of the unit for virtual workloads.

For lower end workloads yes. We've optimized OneBlox more for file serving/digital asset/backup target and not around higher virtual IOPS requirements. Additionally, as we're just introducing NFS we don't have VAAI integration completed--just want to set expectations.

@MattSpeller said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@SeanExablox said:

Hi MattSpeller, I'm Sean (Sr. Director, Product Management @Exablox).

Hey Sean! Great to see you here. Great to see vendors actively watching the threads.

I'll second that, I almost choked on my coffee when you replied! I have meetings this afternoon but I"ll be watching this space and reading up on your product. Thank you very much for dropping in!

Cool. I don't know forum etiquette, so apologies if posting industry analyst videos is taboo. We just worked with Enterprise Strategy Group and Terri McClure explains a bit more about object storage and what we're doing.

my email is [email protected]. I look forward to speaking with you at your convenience.

@scottalanmiller said:

@coliver said:

I've always wondered what market Exablock is marketing toward. It just seems like a product that you won't see the benefits/advantages over traditional storage until you are in the 10's of TBs with 10-30% yearly growth where re-provisioning a storage server would take a silly amount of time.

It's pretty much anyone who needs medium scale or larger, dedicated SMB storage. If you need scaling, it gets even better, but just large SMB needs is enough. It's amazing as a large scale backup target, as an example. Or a great way to provide large scale file storage for user storage, for example. If you are looking to handle lots of "mapped drives" and personal files, this is an ideal platform once you get to the scale where it makes sense.

We are introducing NFS now as well. So those that need SMB (3.0)/NFS file services and video storage (we have a number of non-profits using for digital asset management)