Cloud Block Storage Now In Unlimited Availability | Hacker News Reader

Cloud Block Storage Now In Unlimited Availability

rackspace.com

77 pointsbretpiatt33 comments

Unless they're doing dedicated disks per user (which they aren't, it seems) and dedicated networking, there's really no reason to think they'll do better than AWS, once there are a significant number of users on the system.

The idea of pooling large numbers of drives, dividing it up by space, and then sharing it over a network (IP or not) will never get you the kind of performance you get from dedicated locally-attached drives.

For server storage, it just makes more sense (IMHO) to have local disks with unquestionably reliable performance characteristics. The flexibility of EBS-type solutions is nice, but it comes at too high a cost.

It's reasonable to think that this will have similar performance to 'cloudfiles' as from what i've read it's pretty much just a block file on there.

their cloud servers already have locally attached storage, but it's limited, because they're not just going to chuck disks in servers at user demand. if you want that you need to go with a dedicated server.

I really see this product as being more for people who want to use something like cloudfiles but who's software can't deal with it.

This is completely wrong. Rackspace's Block Storage offering is built on OpenStack Cinder which has nothing to do with Cloud Files, it's backend data store, the servers it runs on, or the regions it runs in. Openstack.org has plenty of information on how Cinder works.

That might be exactly what i was thinking about. I know i saw some diagram.

(Disclosure: I work for Rackspace)

Hi there ehutch79, just a quick clarification. Cloud Files is object storage, whereas Cloud Block Storage is block storage. The performance characteristics of both types of storage are very different. One way I use sometimes to explain the difference is by talking about how they are accessed: Cloud Files objects are accessed using HTTP (think REST), whereas Cloud Block Storage blocks are accessed using low level OS I/O operations (think block read and write operations). Because of that, you could implement a database on Cloud Block Storage, but not on Cloud Files as it would not be very performant. Think Cloud Files when you have a website that needs media, large objects, application-specific content, files, etc., or when you need CDN for improved performance at the edge (CDN is a great feature of Cloud Block Storage). Think Cloud Block Storage when you could have used a regular old hard drive: you provision it, you format it, you may stamp a file system on it, or use the block storage for MongoDB or a relational database (with the difference that with Cloud Block Storage you can pick Standard drives or Solid State Drives).

Hey jrarrendondo, I've been using Rackspace for a few months now, using some of your servers and Cloud Files and I'm loving all of it. So what you're telling me is if I sign up for Cloud Block Storage, I could potentially "attach" it to my server as another hard drive? I know you guys are really great with your documentation and announcements of potential ways of using the storage, so if you could point me in the right direction, I'd be interested in getting this set up.

Thanks!

Yes dougbarrett, you can attach a volume like you would attach a hard drive (modulo the screw driver!)

http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/getting-started/cl...

You guys rock. Thanks!

Inability to add more disk was a huge problem when were at slicehost [now rackspace]. Glad to see that finally lifted.

I was under the impression that it wasn't wise to run a high read/write database on SSD because they have limited writes. But obviously people are finding it wise to do this. Is a 20GB postgresql going to work ?

I guess considering the number of times I've had to migrate servers it shouldn't be a problem lasting 5 years ;)

How many customers asked you for a network block device? I can't think of anyone who uses raw block devices these days. Qmail? Some db storage engines?

I'd posit that what most consumers actually want is a persistent filesystem. Clear consistency semantics is probably a bonus at this point.

Vending a fs shim to your domus eliminates a whole mess of abstractions.

You realize this is essentially the same offering as EBS? It just shows up as a raw device in your operating system and you can create your preferred FS on it and its a persistant file system. Some people might want to use xfs some might want to use zfs so just providing a raw block device is the best way to have widespread compatibility.

I ask "How many customers asked you for a network block device" but I don't know what EBS or a "raw device" is?

So yes, I'm well aware that "compatibility" is the general reasoning for building a block device interface. But how many unique domu kernels do these providers support? Two, maybe three on the outside? And minus win32 theyre all posix with shockingly similar vfs interfaces.

Which comes back to Henry ford and his faster horse. Do customers actually want another layer on the abstraction fest so they can stack their mount option of choice on top? Or do they want a persistent file system with well defined consistency semantics.

I've never heard a customer actually request Yet Another Leaky Block Device Abstraction. And if that customers out there, what's their use case? Because building an fs shim to the dom0 seems to eliminate a whole mess of underlying infrastructure. So why isnt anyone doing that?

Hi donavanm,

Remember Koenig’s Fundamental Theorem of Software Engineering: “We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection”? :-)

You would be surprised if I could tell you the number of customers that asked about Cloud Block Storage. This is one of the most requested services! Since all storage is block storage at the lowest level of abstraction on top of the device, it is always used by higher level abstractions. The question is whether that level of abstraction is appropriate for your application and your productivity as a developer if writing new apps. I see block level storage as the most versatile because it is the most fundamental and you can use it for anything: storage for emails, storage for tables and indexes of your favorite database, storage for file systems, archives, etc., by building that abstraction on top of blocks.

But I agree with the basic idea of your comment: as the most fundamental layer, then it may also be too low an abstraction layer to be used directly if you are writing a new high level app (think a business app for instance). That’s why there are file systems, databases, etc., all of which use blocks to do their thing and provide higher level functionality. I like to use the example of how most people don’t stop to think that systems really do not know about files and directories, or database tables and indexes. They just know blocks. But the file system abstracts blocks and provides the appearance of files and directories and hierarchy. And DBAs and developers using our Cloud Databases product are happy to do SELECT A, B FROM T WHERE C=’value’ without having to worry about blocks. But blocks are always there, underneath all that.

Whether you would want to stay at that lower level of abstraction depends on what you are doing. The higher the level the more specialized the abstraction, the more flexibility you gain at that level and the less flexibility you have to optimize at the lower level. For example, on average, 50% of the last block used by a file is wasted in many file systems. Nothing you can do about that. But I bet those directories and ability to find a file by name come in handy at that higher level.

I think that there are two cases where block is needed. The first one is to deploy commercial applications, databases, file systems, etc. for which you have no choice because you did not write the app. The second is for optimization of storage for infrastructure applications you are writing and have control of and where you want that optimization.

Many people writing business applications or web apps will be happy to use object storage or Cloud Databases for MySQL. No need to worry about block level because we abstract it for them. Many people will need a file system: they will just create a block storage device and format it as an fs and move on with their lives. Others will use it as a database. Others will write apps we cannot even imagine right now. But blocks will be there, humbly, doing their work.

Thanks for clarifying the differences.

I was assuming that it was using the same infrastructure as cloud files, and that the performance characteristics would be similar.

Rackspace Cloud's offering is nice, though, in that you get guaranteed, durable storage with each instance. Their EBS-like offering will allow people to supplement that storage if what they have in-machine isn't sufficient, but users will be able to decide for themselves about the speed and reliability tradeoffs around what goes where (unlike with Amazon, where everything that needs to be durable has to go on EBS). The resulting system will be both more flexible, and, I would guess, more performant, if only because I would expect lighter load given that many users won't need to use this offering at all.

Separately, it also seems that Amazon's architecture under EBS has at least some per-AZ single points of failure, such that certain classes of issues can take down storage for a whole (or at least large parts of an) AZ. There doesn't seem to be any a priori reason that this needs to be the case; I could imagine an EBS-like system that would have storage per rack, say, which would appear similar from the user's perspective except that it might perform better and would be unlikely to disable all of their instances at once if it failed. No idea how Rackspace's implementation works, but I doubt all EBS-like solutions are created equal in terms of reliability.

That's not necessarily true. Adding Network latency on top of Disk latency is clearly a net loss. However, network latency and disk seek latency stack in a different fashion and most servers don't really hit there disk all that hard. Which opens arbitration opportunities between those who need R/W and disk space.

Network and disk io vary in other characteristics. The most obvious being the block vs packet size. Lose a single packet and the block device has to ... Block.

Inside a data-center packet loss is practicably zero.

More importantly you probably don't want the full TCP/IP stack for disk access inside a data-center. At the OS level disk IO has become fairly abstracted just read up on Native Command Queuing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing or even TCQ to get some idea what's already going on. Which opens a lot of doors for optimizing and makes it hard to generalize when it comes to network failures.

I'd agree that packet loss is generally zero. But dirty fiber, bad ports, bad device, congestion, etc are pretty dang frequent in a large deployment. And those "edge cases" are the ones that are going to kill your poor network block iops.

I do agree on the "why tcp?" point. Funnily everyone is running the other way and wrapping up IP inside another abstraction layer. Nvgre vxlan etc are slipping yet another complication under your "simple" block device.

As difficult a time as EBS is having, it's good to see some other alternatives pop up. This will definitely put the pressure on the EBS team to clean up, if they weren't already under immense pressure to do so.

A word of caution, though: Rackspace is just getting into this ballgame of on-demand virtual block devices. There will probably be gaffes (though, hopefully not as bad as EBS of late), so, as per the virtualization commandments, build expecting failure.

Edit: Also, Rackspace had perfect timing for this announcement, the day after catastrophic EBS failure. Coincidence, or astute choice in launch dates? :)

Coincidence -- I know the Block Storage team has been working very very hard on this product for a long time :-)

(Disclosure: I work for Rackspace in Cloud Block Storage)

Hey gtaylor, I can tell you that this was purely a coincidence. We actually were going to ship this a couple of weeks ago but decided to delay a few days to get some updates from OpenStack. I think what happen yesterday is unfortunate for all those customers who were affected and certainly not cause for celebration. We do believe however that we have a great block storage service to offer and are looking forward to competing.

Can you share anything about the backed architecture, for example if you're using Ceph to provide block devices?

https://github.com/openstack/cinder

(Disclosure: I work for Rackspace in Cloud Block Storage)

Hi epistasis, here is what I can say. Let's talk about two things: what happens at provisioning time and then what happens at runtime.

Our provisioning engine is based on OpenStack Cinder. At provisioning time, we provision a SSD or Standard volume on our storage backend. This storage backend is a storage system we built (called Lunr) on top of standard Linux and commercially available hardware. Once the volume is created in Lunr it is then attached to the Cloud Server compute host, which exposes the volume to the guest as a virtual device.

At runtime, the volume appears as a regular device to the compute node over iSCSI. Snapshots are created against Cloud Files, our object storage service that is based on OpenStack Swift.

I hope that is useful.

Thank you! That's exactly what I wanted to know, my apologies for missing 'cinder' in the article. (Though in my very meager defense, page up/page down is broken on the blog because the top framing hides content.)

I'm looking forward to you looking forward to competing :) Funny coincidence, though I doubt anyone would blame you in either case.

Glad to see competition heating up. We all win from this.

(Dsiclosure: I work for rsync.net - we've been providing cloud[1] storage since 2001)

We've always positioned rsync.net as a premium offering at a higher price, but it appears this is not really the case anymore - rackspace is 15 cents/GB, per month, and while that matches our 1TB annual package, our 10TB[2] annual is down at 7.9 cents ...

Zero IO cost has been our policy from day one. No disagreement there...

[1] As most on HN know, it's not really a cloud storage offering, since we give people real UNIX filesystems with no abstraction layers between ... but "cloud" will do ...

[2] Live, ZFS filesystem ... so you can just go ahead and send us a single, 10 TB file if you feel like. No weird limitations...

Do you offer some sort of iSCSI endpoint over IPSEC or similar? Or would I have to use FUSE to mount it as an actual drive/block device?

This is perfect timing on their part, how many people are having their post-mortem meeting today and going back to their desk to look for options.

Definitely been waiting for this feature, was frustrating firing up a new instance every 300gb. We have 100+ instances in Rackspace and its been interesting to watch them over last couple years. They have had their own share of troubles of course but actually having support is huge when it happens.

I'd be curious about the practical durability. EBS claims a failure rate of 0.5% per 20 GB per year as per http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ -- I wonder how an e.g. 200 GB volume on RS would be provisioned (how many drives are involved?). The cheap storage seems to be SATA disks

This looks like it is directly pointed towards AWS EBS and EBS PIOPS offerings so here some quick cost comparisons:

- Rackspace standard storage vs AWS EBS (for 1TB of storage with 100 IOPS) -- AWS US-East = $126/month -- Rackspace USA = $150/month

- Rackspace SSD vs AWS PIOPS (for 1TB of storage with 1000 IOPS) -- AWS US-East = $225/month -- Rackspace = $700/month

http://blog.planforcloud.com/2012/10/cost-comparison-rackspa...

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