All Flash Arrays: Active/Active versus Active/Passive

I want you to imagine that you are about to run a race. You have your trainers on, your pre-race warm up is complete and you are at the start line. You look to your right… and see the guy next to you, the one with the bright orange trainers, is hopping up and down on one leg. He does have two legs – the other one is held up in the air – he’s just choosing to hop the whole race on one foot. Why?

You can’t think of a valid reason so you call across, “Hey buddy… why are you running on one leg?”

His reply blows your mind: “Because I want to be sure that, if one of my legs falls off, I can still run at the same speed”.

Welcome, my friends, to the insane world of storage marketing.

High Availability Clusters

The principles of high availability are fairly standard, whether you are discussing enterprise storage, databases or any other form of HA. The basic premise is that, to maintain service in the event of unexpected component failures, you need to have at least two of everything. In the case of storage array HA, we are usually talking about the storage controllers which are the interfaces between the outside world and the persistent media on which data resides.

Ok so let’s start at the beginning: if you only have one controller then you are running at risk, because a controller failure equals a service outage. No enterprise-class storage array would be built in this manner. So clearly you are going to want a minimum of two controllers… which happens to be the most common configuration you’ll find.

So now we have two controllers, let’s call them A and B. Each controller has CPU, memory and so on which allow it to deliver a certain level of performance – so let’s give that an arbitrary value: one controller can deliver 1P of performance. And finally, let’s remember that those controllers cost money – so let’s say that a controller capable of giving 1P of performance costs five groats.

Active/Passive Design

In a basic active/passive design, one controller (A) handles all traffic while the other (B) simply sits there waiting for its moment of glory. That moment comes when A suffers some kind of failure – and B then leaps into action, immediately replacing A by providing the same service. There might be a minor delay as the system performs a failover, but with multipathing software in place it will usually be quick enough to go unnoticed.

So what are the downsides of active/passive? There are a few, but the most obvious one is that you are architecturally limited to seeing only 50% of your total available performance. You bought two controllers (costing you ten groats!) which means you have 2P of performance in your pocket, but you will forever be limited to a maximum of 1P of performance under this design.

Active/Active Design

In an active/active architecture, both controllers (A and B) are available to handle traffic. This means that under normal operation you now have 2P of performance – and all for the same price of ten groats. Both the overall performance and the price/performance have doubled.

What about in a failure situation? Well, if controller A fails you still have controller B functioning, which means you are now down to 1P of performance. It’s now half the performance you are used to in this architecture, but remember that 1P is still the same performance as the active/passive model. Yes, that’s right… the performance under failure is identical for both designs.

What About The Cost?

Smart people look at technical criteria and choose the one which best fits their requirements. But really smart people (like my buddy Shai Maskit) remember that commercial criteria matter too. So with that in mind, let’s go back and consider those prices a little more. For ten groats, the active/active solution delivered performance of 2P under normal operation. The active/passive solution only delivered 1P. What happens if we attempt to build an active/passive system with 2P of performance?

To build an active/passive solution which delivers 2P of performance we now need to use bigger, more powerful controllers. Architecturally that’s not much of a challenge – after all, most modern storage controllers are just x86 servers and there are almost always larger models available. The problem comes with the cost. To paraphrase Shai’s blog on this same subject:

Cost of storage controller capable of 1P performance  <  Cost of storage controller capable of 2P performance

In other words, building an active/passive system requires more expensive hardware than building a comparable active/active system. It might not be double, as in my picture, but it will sure as hell be more expensive – and that cost is going to be passed on to the end user.

Does It Scale?

Another question that really smart people ask is, “How does it scale?”. So let’s think about what happens when you want to add more performance.

In an active/active design you have the option of adding more performance by adding more controllers. As long as your architecture supports the ability for all controllers to be active concurrently, adding performance is as simple as adding nodes into a cluster.

But what happens when you add a node to an active/passive solution? Nothing. You are architecturally limited to the performance of one controller. Adding more controllers just makes the price/performance even worse. This means that the only solution for adding performance to an active/passive system is to replace the controllers with more powerful versions…

The Pure Storage Architecture

Pure Storage is an All Flash Array vendor who knows how to play the marketing game better than most, so let’s have a look at their architecture. The PS All Flash Array is a dual-controller design where both controllers send and receive I/Os to the hosts. But… only one controller processes I/Os to and from the underlying persistent media (the SSDs). So what should we call this design, active/active or active/passive?

According to an IDC white paper published on PS’s website, PS controllers are sized so that each controller can deliver 100% of the published performance of the array. The paper goes on to explain that under normal operation each controller is loaded to a maximum of 50% on the host side. This way, PS promises that performance under failure will be equal to the performance under normal operations.

In other words, as an architectural decision, the sum of the performance of both controllers can never be delivered.

So which of the above designs does that sound like to you? It sounds like active/passive to me, but of course that’s not going to help PS sell its flash arrays. Unsurprisingly, on the PS website the product is described as “active/active” at every opportunity.

Yet even PS’s chief talking head, Vaughn Stewart, has to ask the question, “Is the FlashArray an Active/Active or Active/Passive Architecture?” and eventually comes to the conclusion that, “Active/Active or Active/Passive may be debatable”.

There’s no debate in my view.

Conclusion

You will obviously draw your own conclusions on everything I’ve discussed above. I don’t usually pick on other AFA vendors during these posts because I’m aiming for an educational tone rather than trying to fling FUD. But I’ll be honest, it pisses me off when vendors appear to misuse technical jargon in a way which conveniently masks their less-glamorous architectural decisions.

My advice is simple. Always take your time to really look into each claim and then frame it in your own language. It’s only then that you’ll really start to understand whether something you read about is an innovative piece of design from someone like PS… or more likely just another load of marketing BS.

* Many thanks to my colleague Rob Li for the excellent running-on-one-leg metaphor

All Flash Arrays: Controllers Are The New Bottleneck

Today’s storage array market contains a wild variation of products: block storage, file storage or object storage; direct attached, SANs or NAS systems; fibre-channel, iSCSI or Infiniband… Even the SAN section of the market is full of diversity: from legacy hard disk drive-based arrays through the transitory step of tiered disk+flash hybrid systems and on to modern All-Flash Arrays (AFAs).

If you were partial to the odd terrible pun, you might even say that it was a bewildering array of choices. [*Array* of choices? Oh come on. If you’re expecting a higher class of humour than that, I’m afraid this is not the blog for you]

Anyway, one thing that pretty much all storage arrays have in common is the basic configuration blocks of which they comprise:

• Array controllers
• Internal networking
• Persistent Media (flash or disk)

Over the course of this blog series I’ve talked a lot about both flash and disk media, but now it’s time to concentrate a little more on the other stuff – specifically, the controllers. A typical Storage Area Network delivers a lot more functionality than would be expected from just connecting a bunch of disks or flash – and it’s the controllers that are responsible for most of that added functionality.

Storage Array Controllers

Think of your storage system as a private network on which is located a load of dumb disk or flash drives. I say dumb because they can do little else other than accept I/O requests: reads and writes. The controllers are therefore required to provide the intelligence needed to present those drives to the outside world and add all of the functionality associated with enterprise-class storage:

• Resilience, automatic fault tolerance and high availability, RAID
• Mirroring and/or replication
• Data reduction technologies (compression, deduplication, thin provisioning)
• Data management features (snapshots, clones, etc)
• Management and monitoring interfaces
• Vendor support integration such as call-home and predictive analytics

Controllers are able to add this “intelligence” because they are actually computers in their own right, acting as intermediaries between the back-end storage devices and the front-end storage fabric which connects the array to its clients. And as computers, they rely on the three classic computing resources (which I’m going to list using fancy colours so I can sneak them up on you again later in this post):

1. Memory (DRAM)
2. Processing (CPU)
3. Networking

It’s the software running on the array controllers – and utilising these resources – that describes their behaviour. But with the rise of flash storage, this behaviour has had to change… drastically.

Disk Array Controllers vs Flash Array Controllers

In the days when storage arrays were crammed full of disk drives, the controllers in those arrays spent lots of time waiting on mechanical latency. This meant that the CPUs within the controllers had plenty of idle cycles where they simply had to wait for data to be stored or retrieved by the disks they were addressing. To put it another way, CPU power wasn’t such an important priority when specifying the controller hardware.

This is clearly not the case with the controllers in an all flash array, since mechanical latency is a thing of the past. The result is that controller CPUs now have no time to spare – data is constantly being handled, addressed, moved and manipulated. Suddenly, the choice of CPU has a direct effect on the array’s ability to process I/O requests.

Dedupe Kills It

But there’s more. One of the biggest shifts in behaviour seen with flash arrays is the introduction of data reduction technology – specifically deduplication. This functionality, known colloquially as dedupe, intervenes in the write process to see if an exact copy of any written block already exists somewhere else on the array. If the block does exist, the duplicate copy does not need to be written – and instead a pointer to the existing version can be stored, saving considerable space. This pointer is an example of what we call metadata – information about data.

I will cover deduplication at greater length in another post, but for now there are three things to consider about the effect dedupe has on storage array controllers:

1. Dedupe requires the creation of a fairly complex set of metadata structures – and for performance reasons much of this will need to reside in DRAM on the controllers. And as more data is stored on the array, the amount of metadata created increases – hence a growing dependency on the availability of (expensive) memory in those array controllers.
2. The process of checking each incoming block (which involves calculating a hash value) and comparing against a table of metadata stored in DRAM is very CPU intensive. Thus array controllers which support DRAM have increasing requirements for (expensive) processing power.
3. For storage arrays which run in an active/active configuration (i.e. with multiple redundant controllers, each of which actively send and receive data from the persistent storage layer), much of this information will need to be passed between controllers over the array’s internal networking.

Did you spot the similarities between this list and the colourful one from earlier? If you didn’t, you must be colour blind. Flash Array controllers are much more dependant on their resources – particularly CPU and DRAM – than disk array controllers.

Summary

Flash array controllers have to do almost everything that their ancestors, the venerable disk array controllers, used to do. But they have to do it much faster and in greater volume. Not only that, but they have to do so much more… especially for the process known as data reduction. And as we’ve seen, the overhead of all these tasks causes a much greater strain on memory, processing and networking than was previously seen in the world of disk arrays – which is one of the reasons you cannot simply retrofit SSDs into a disk array architecture.

With the introduction of flash into storage, the bottleneck has moved away from the persistence layer and is now with the controllers. Over the next few articles we’ll look at what that means and consider the implications of various AFA architecture strategies on that bottleneck. After all, as is so often the case when it comes to matters of performance, you can’t always remove the bottleneck… but you can choose the one which works best for you 🙂

All Flash Arrays: Hybrid Means Compromise

Sometimes the transition between two technologies is long and complicated. It may be that the original technology is so well established that it’s entrenched in people’s minds as simply “the way things are” – inertia, you might say. It could be that there is more than one form of the new technology to choose from, with smart customers holding back to wait and see which emerges as a stronger contender for their investment. Or it could just be that the newer form of technology doesn’t yet deliver all of the benefits of the legacy version.

The automotive industry seems like a good example here. After over a century of using internal combustion engines, we are now at the point where electric vehicles are a serious investment for manufacturers. However, fully-electric vehicles still have issues to overcome, while there is continued debate over which approach is better: batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. Needless to say, the majority of vehicles on the road today still use what you could call the legacy method of propulsion.

However, one type of vehicle which has been successful in gaining market share is the hybrid electric vehicle. This solution attempts to offer customers the best of both worlds: the lower fuel consumption and claimed environmental benefits of an electric vehicle, but with the range, performance and cost of a fuel-powered vehicle. Not everybody believes it makes sense, but enough do to make it a worthwhile venture for the manufacturers.

Now here’s the interesting thing about hybrid vehicles… the thing that motivated me to write two paragraphs about cars instead of flash arrays… Nobody believes that hybrid electric vehicles are the permanent solution. Everybody knows that hybrids are a transient solution on the way to somewhere else. Nobody at all thinks that hybrid is the end-game. But the people who buy hybrid cars also believe that this state of affairs will not change during the period in which they own the car.

Hybrid Flash Arrays (HFAs)

There are two types of flash storage architecture which could be labelled a hybrid – those where a disk array has been repopulated with flash and those which are designed specifically for the purpose of mixing flash and disk. I’ve talked about naming conventions before, it’s a tricky subject. But for the purposes of this article I am only discussing the latter: systems where the architecture has been designed so that disk and flash co-exist as different tiers of storage. Think along the lines of Nimble Storage, Tegile and Tintri.

Why do this? Well, as with hybrid electric vehicles the idea is to bridge the gap between two technologies (disk and flash) by giving customers the best of both worlds. That means the performance of flash plus its low power, cooling and physical space requirements – combined with the density of disk and its corresponding impact on price. In other words, if disk is cheap but slow while flash is fast but expensive, HFAs are aimed at filling the gap.

Hybrid (adjective)

of mixed character; composed of different elements.

bred as a hybrid from different species or varieties.

As you can see there are a lot of synergies between this trend and that of the electric vehicle. Also, most storage systems are purchased with a five-year refresh cycle in mind, which is not dissimilar to the average length of ownership of a car. But there’s a massive difference: the rate of change in the development of flash memory technology.

In recent years the density of NAND flash has increased by orders of magnitude, especially with the introduction of 3D NAND technology and the subsequent use of Triple-Level Cell (TLC). And when the density goes up, the price comes down – closing the gap between disk and flash. In fact we’re at the point now where Wikibon predicts that “flash … will become a lower cost media than disk … for almost all storage in 2016″:

Image courtesy of Wikibon “Evolution of All-Flash Array Architectures” by David Floyer (2015)

That’s great news for customers – but definitely not for HFA vendors.

Conclusion

And so we reach the root of the problem with HFAs. It’s not just that they are slower than All Flash Arrays. It’s not even that they rely on the guesswork of automatic tiering algorithms to move data between their tiers of disk and flash. It’s simply that their entire existence is predicated on the idea of being a transitory solution designed to bridge a gap which is already closing faster than they can fill it.

If you want proof of this, just look at the three HFA vendors I name checked earlier – all of which are rushing to bring out All Flash versions of their arrays. Nimble Storage is the only one of the three to be publicly listed – and its recent results indicate a strategic rethink may be required.

When it comes to hybrid electric vehicles, it’s true that the concept of mass-owned fully-electric cars still belongs in the future. But when it comes to hybrid flash arrays, the adoption of All-Flash is already happening today. The advice to customers looking to invest in a five-to-seven year storage project is therefore pretty simple: Mind the gap.

All Flash Arrays: SSD-based versus Ground-Up Design

In recent articles in this series I’ve been looking at the architectural choices for building All Flash Arrays (AFAs). I surmised that there are three main approaches:

• Hybrid Flash Arrays
• SSD-based All Flash Arrays
• Ground-Up All Flash Arrays (which from here on I’ll refer to as Custom Flash Module arrays or CFM arrays)

I’ve already blown metaphorical raspberries at the hybrid approach, so now it’s time to cover the other two.

SSD or CFM: The Big Question

I think the most interesting question in the AFA industry right now is the one of whether the SSD or CFM design will win. Of course, it’s easy to say “win” like that as if it’s a simple race, but this is I.T. – there’s never a simple answer. However, the reality is that each method offers benefits and drawbacks, so I’m going to use this blog post to simply describe them as I see them.

Before I do that, let me just remind you of what the vendor landscape looks like at this time:

SSD-based architecture: Right now you can buy SSD-based arrays from EMC (XtremIO), Pure Storage, Kaminario, Solidfire, HP 3PAR and Huawei to name a few. It’s fair to say that the SSD-based design has been the most common in the AFA space so far.

CFM-based architecture: On the other hand, you can now buy ground-up CFM-based arrays from Violin Memory, IBM (FlashSystem), HDS (VSP), Pure Storage (FlashArray//m) and EMC (DSSD). The latter has caused some excitement because of DSSD’s current air of mystery in the marketplace – in other words, the product isn’t yet generally available.

So which approach is “the best”?

The SSD-based Approach

If you were going to start an All Flash Array company and needed to bring a product to market as soon as possible, it’s quite likely you would go down the SSD route. Apart from anything else, flash management is hard work – and needs constant attention as new types of flash come to market. A flash hardware engineer friend of mine used to say that each new flash chip is like a snowflake – they all behave slightly differently. So by buying flash in the ready-made form of an SSD you bypass the requirement to put in all this work. The flash controller from the SSD vendor does it for you, leaving you to concentrate on the other stuff that’s needed in enterprise storage: resilience, availability, data services, etc.

On the other hand, it seems clear that an SSD is a package of flash pretending to behave like a disk. That often means I/Os are taking place via protocols that were designed for disk, such as Serial Attached SCSI. Also, in a unit the size of an all flash array there are likely to be many SSDs… but because each one is an isolated package of flash, they cannot work together and manage the flash holistically. In other words, if one SSD is experiencing issues due to garbage collection (for example), the others cannot take the strain.

The Ground-Up Approach

For a number of years I worked for Violin Memory, which adopted the ground-up approach at its very core. Violin’s position was that only the CFM approach could unlock the full potential benefits from NAND flash. By tightly integrating the NAND flash into its array – and by using its own controllers to manage that flash – Violin believed it could deliver the best performance in the AFA market. On the other hand, many SSD vendors build products for the consumer market where the highest levels of performance simply aren’t necessary. All that’s required is something faster than disk – it doesn’t always have to be the fastest possible solution.

It could also be argued that any CFM vendor who has a good relationship with a flash fabricator (for example, Violin was partly-owned by Toshiba) could gain a competitive advantage by working on the very latest NAND flash technologies before they are available in SSD form. What’s more, SSDs represent an additional step in the process of taking NAND flash from chip to All Flash Array, which potentially means there’s an extra party needing to make their margin. Could it be that the CFM approach is more cost effective? [Update from Jan 2017: Violin Memory has now filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection]

SSD Economics

The argument about economics is an interesting one. Many technical people have a tendency to focus on what they know and love: technology. I’m as guilty of this as anyone – given two solutions to a problem I tend to gravitate toward the one that has the most elegant technical design, even if it isn’t necessarily the most commercially-favourable. Taking raw flash and integrating it into a custom flash module sounds great, but what is the cost of manufacturing those CFMs?

Manufacturing is all about economies of scale. If you design something and then build thousands of them, it will obviously cost you more per unit than if you build millions of them. How many ground-up all flash vendors are building their custom flash modules by the millions? In May 2015, IBM issued this press release in which they claimed that they were the “number one all-flash storage array vendor in 2014“. How many units did they ship? 2,100.

In just the second quarter of 2015, almost 24 million SSDs were shipped to customers, with Samsung responsible for 43.8% of that total (according to US analyst firm Trendfocus, Inc). Who do you think was able to achieve the best economy of scale?

Design Agility

The other important question is the one about New Stuff ™. We are always being told about fantastic new storage technologies that are going to change our lives, so who is best placed to adopt them first?

Again there’s an argument to be made on both sides. If the CFM flash vendor is working hand-in-glove with a fabricator, they may have access to the latest technology coming down the line. That means they can be prepared ahead of the pack – a clear competitive advantage, right?

But how agile is the CFM design? Changing the NVM media requires designing an entirely-new flash module, with all the associated hardware engineering costs such as prototyping, testing, QA and limited initial manufacturing runs.

For an SSD all flash array vendor, however, that work is performed by the SSD vendor… again somebody like Samsung, Intel or Micron who have vast infrastructures in place to perform that sort of work all the time. After all, a finished SSD must behave exactly like a disk, regardless of what NVM technology it uses under the covers.

Conclusion

There are obviously two sides to this argument. The SSD was designed to replace a fundamental bottleneck in storage systems: the hard disk drive. Ironically, it may be the fate of the SSD to become exactly what it replaced. For flash to become mainstream it was necessary to create a “flash-behaving-as-disk” package, but the flip side of this is the way that SSDs stifle the true potential of the underlying flash. (Although perhaps NVMe technologies will offer us some salvation…)

However, unless you are a company the size of Samsung, Intel or Micron it seems unlikely that you would be able to retain the manufacturing agility and economies of scale required to produce custom flash modules at the price point of SSDs. Nor would you be likely to have the agility to adopt new NVM technologies at the moment that they become economically preferable to whatever medium you were using previously.

Whatever happens, you can be sure that each side will claim victory. With the entire primary data market to play for, this is a high stakes game. Every vendor has to invest a large amount of money to enter the field, so nobody wants to end up being consigned to the history books as the Betamax of flash…

For younger readers, Betamax was the loser in a battle with VHS over who would dominate the video tape market. You can read about it here. What do you mean, “What is a video tape?” Those things your parents used to watch movies on before the days of DVDs. What do you mean, “What is a DVD?” Jeez, I feel old.