@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.
@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.
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:
@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:
@wirestyle22 said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:
Never heard of Exablox. Learned something. I've never had anything even remotely that large either though.
You can get them relatively small. Not SMALL, but not huge. Like 36TB is where you could start with one.
Our file server is 488 GB currently
Any idea of the cost for the most basic of models? Even a round-about?
Too expensive for 488GB I'm afraid
@SeanExablox could tell you some starter prices.
@wirestyle22 it depends on how important the 488GB is to your organization. Lake Chelan Community Hospital has 1TB of medical records they need to protect from ransomware. They purchased OneBlox and with our immutable CDP they can recover from any ransomware infection.
OneBlox is $11,995 and you purchase drives at retail pricing (up to 8TB drives). We're running a promotion this month where we're giving away 72TB of storage when you purchase OneBlox...
@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.
@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.
@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
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
Checking my Veeam backup dedupe ratios on the OneBlox software that is going through QA now.
@MattSpeller said:
I clearly have a lot more reading and learning to do about these things.
Hi MattSpeller, I'm Sean (Sr. Director, Product Management @Exablox). As SAM mentions we're unique in this space. I'd be happy to have a conversation and answer any questions you have. Since we have an object-based file system 'under' SMB that we make accessible to applications and clients we have a lot of flexibility in managing your information efficiently.
@dafyre You should check us out now!
second gen hardware, inline VL dedupe, inline compression, bi-directional and multi-site replication, VMware and Hyper-V ready....
@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
For $10k (my assumed cost of a single OneBlox) you can get a kick ass server with really sexy stuff
$10K is a huge price, though. It's not very sexy until you use the scale out feature, and that is a minimum of two of these $10K units. And you are not big enough for it to make sense until you go another unit bigger. So realistically, it's $30K to get started and that doesn't include the disks. So that's a ton more money. It's not that cheap until you leverage the scale out feature that it is built around.
And then you are limited to nothing but SMB. It's a great scale out SMB system at a good price. But that's not something many people need, at least not in the small business space. When you need it, it's the best solution out there.
SAM is correct. One of the biggest value props of Exablox is our scale-out. Going from 4TB to 50TB over some period of time huge growth! Instead of buying something that may support you in 3 years, just buy what you need today. As your needs change (and they always will) simply add more storage/OneBlox and you'll never have to do a forklift upgrade again. Moreover, since you source your own drives (yourself or your partner) your $/TB will only decrease over time and will do so rapidly.
PS. The $10k is list price. With our YE special it will be significantly less than that.
For those less familiar with Exablox, I just gave an Overview and demo that was recorded.
https://www.exablox.com/what-is-it/techology.php (main page)
https://vimeo.com/168718551 (overview)
https://vimeo.com/168718574 (OneSystem demo)
@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).
Copying over from other thread...
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:
@SeanExablox What is a good starting TB size for looking at an Exablox solution?
ok on forked thread.
One comment on this thread before moving. It really depends on the value of the information to the company. I mentioned the ransomware sizing of 1TB, but this is the exception. We have many customers with less than 10TB backup and shared file serving problems that they start with a single OneBlox and don't fully populate. Our s/w features and scale-out mean they spend very little time managing storage, but have enterprise class features.
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.
@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
When you insert a new drive it claims to give you 100% (or close) to that space, do they reclaim that with their internal de-dupe?
I don't know how the space allocation and display work, I'm not sure how they are showing it.
They show it's 1:1 - put in a 2tb drive, get 2tb more space. Creeps me out! I chalk it up to not understanding OBS and how their setup works internally
we report a few things. We report raw storage capacity, usable capacity, and your deduplication ratio for the OneBlox. As your applications write data, we deduplicate it and protect it from 2 drive (or 2 OneBlox) failures. This is all represented in raw/usable capacity reporting.
@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:
@brianlittlejohn said in How Do You Teach Everything in IT?:
@scottalanmiller His response was notifications/alerts and hotspares....
Oh man, even dumber than the initial post. Hot spares for RAID 5? how dumb is this guy!?!?
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/07/hot-spare-or-a-hot-mess/
And it makes it worse that he's read about what a bad idea it is and recommends it and uses it regardless and acts like he didn't know that he was putting the business at risk!
I was going to chime and say hot/cold spares are irrelevant with OneBlox's distributed object store. We recover from a drive(s) failure without the need to have drive assets sitting passively by. After that's complete, we can recover from additional failures....all without replacing a hard drive. (Caveat: there needs to be enough capacity in the storage pool, but technically possible.)
@lance said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@lance said:
Another thing to remember when comparing it to a windows server is that windows servers don’t have dedupe, CDP, backup target, replication, scale out, and cloud management.
What Windows Server are you using? Windows has scale out, replication, dedupe, compression, etc.
Cloud management is nice, but just use LogMeIn and you have that with Windows. Easy peasy.
It looks like Server 2012 introduced dedup, I guess you learn something new every day. Thanks
yes Server 2012 has file dedupe, but I don't believe it a dedupe target for Backup Exec, Veeam, others. Moreover, without CDP (immutable) it's not a persistent protection scheme for primary data.
@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.
