Howdy folks,

I just spent the last few days standing around IDF in Beijing showing off Adaptec’s latest 7 series controller. We also had on display our new range of HBAs. Yes, Adaptec is back in the HBA game … it’s been a long time since we had one, but SAS HBA is back on the menu at Adaptec and we are pretty excited about getting back into this business, especially in light of the growth of datacenters and operating systems that make good use of HBAs (as well as RAID).

That’s all great, but where does the 735MB per second per drive come from in the heading?

In the corner of the booth we had a system (lent to us by our good friends at Chenbro) that has a 12Gb SAS backplane. Installed in that were 4 Seagate (as yet unreleased I believe) 12Gb SAS SSDs. All that was connected to a prototype 12GB SAS RAID controller that our backroom boffins are working on (and I was lucky enough to borrow for a few days).

A simple Iometer script running a 1MB streaming read off the 4 drives set in RAID 0 (on top of a Windows filesystem) produced 2950Mb per second. Sit down and do the maths and you’ll see a speed from each drive that is way, way faster than anything we’ve ever seen (or in fact is possible) from 6GB technology.

So I stood there wondering … who actually needs this sort of amazing speed? Well datacenter is an obvious choice. Along with the amazing MB/sec speed comes some pretty crazy IOP numbers which is really what the datacenter operators are looking for, but the streaming speed will also excite (I think) a lot of the video world.

Whichever way you look at it, these new drives, and the associated technology that goes along with them, are an exciting step forward in performance for disk-based systems. Yeah yeah yeah … I know you can get some amazing speed from your flash drive, but that’s a finite single source of storage – whereas SSD disk-based storage can grow exponentially, which simplifies management and allows for massive implementations of high-speed storage.

So I really wonder … who is looking for this stuff?

Ciao
Neil

There are two different types of backplanes in this world – passive and active. Passive are just really devices that allow a connection between the drive and card – there is no expander involved.

Active backplanes on the other hand have an expander – a chip device made by third-party vendors to the backplane vendor. These expanders have firmware and intelligence and allow connection of many drives from a much smaller number of ports on a raid card.

So what is the issue here? … compatibility.

Sometimes you’ll plug a card into a backplane, plug in the drives, boot up the system and not see any drives. If this happens to you don’t panic. Contact your nearest Adaptec Tech Support office or go to ask.adaptec.com, describe your card and backplane model and ask the Adaptec Tech’s if they have an updated firmware for the card to get around the problem – they almost always do.

Why does this happen? Well, there are standards and there are standards, and there are companies that do some odd little things just outside the standard so that a competitor who adheres to the standard won’t work with their product. I’m not talking Adaptec here – we’re the ones on the side of the standard. Sometimes you could suspect people trying to stop our products from working with certain products because they know we stick to the standard … no wait, that would be ridiculously suspicious and paranoid of me wouldn’t it?

So if you have an issue with a backplane, contact us and let us help.

Ciao
Marvin
(special award for the person who can tell me where that name comes from – in relation to my paranoidness/depression )

I wonder if Steven Spielberg had any idea what a phrase that would become …

Adaptec have taken up the idea and released a new series of HBAs. So what is an HBA I hear you ask out there in Channel storage land? A Host Bust Adapter of course. Think back to the 90s … Adaptec made SCSI controllers – simple devices that connected hard drives to your computer so that you could do things with them. They didn’t do RAID, they just showed a disk to the computer and you did what you wanted from there.

Step forward 20 years and we’re back in the same game. In fact, it never really went away but we just didn’t bother with it. Well now we have bothered and have produced a thumping powerful HBA product range that does … well in fact it does just what the old SCSI HBA did 20 years ago – it presents a bunch of single disks to the computer, and you do what you want from there.

So who would want one of these things? Surely you want a RAID card so you can do all that wonderful technical stuff in the background and not have to bother with it at OS or application level? Well no, not really. The datacenters of this world love these things. The big players in the world do their own redundancy and performance work at a much higher level than a RAID card – often even across system or datacenter levels, so they love these things.

Products like ZFS don’t mind HBA too much either. Take a bunch of disks and do your own storage configs – you don’t need a RAID card, you just need connecting to lots of different types of drives – something the HBA does perfectly.

So are we the only players in this game? Did we just stumble across this and think … hmm, can we make a buck of out this business. This is big business with big competition, but that just happens to be what we love.

Ciao
Neil

All I ever hear about these days is “big data”. It’s a like saying “old Neil” – pretty much a natural consequence of getting out of bed each day.

Big data is a nice term trying to point out that we have lots of data, and we are more and more often putting it in the cloud (that invisible thing out there in la-la land). I do, and while pushing that data out there I’ve made an interesting (and somewhat obvious) observation.

Big data in my place is photography. I have a mac (great machine), which stores all my family data. These days that consists of music (not as dominant as it used to be) and photos. Once upon a time video was the big driver of space in my systems, but now it’s still photos. How do I know all this? The mac has a fantastic component called “time machine” which is very similar in nature to say ShadowProtect (which many of you server lads would be familiar with) – the ability to roll back to a certain point in time etc, while keeping a copy of all your data on an external device (in my case a USB drive) in case the hard drive in the mac takes a powder.

But is that safe enough? Not for me, so I purchase some space up in the cloud and make a copy of my data to that location. Because I’m anal and somewhat organised (at least I like to think so), I’ve filed everything into year folders, then each folder has a separate folder within it for each “event” throughout that year.

I then push a year at a time up to the cloud repository, so that when I’m finished I only need to update the last year, then make a new year folder on the mac and start putting files in that. OK some clever person is going to tell me there is some wonderful software available to do all this but you know what? I actually like being in control of what is happening and what is going were, so like Frank said “I’ll do it my way thank you very much”.

So the interesting thing has been looking at the data that is in each of these folders. 6-8 years ago it was grainy video from dedicated video cameras that we lugged around from BMX event to BMX event. Those days are gone. With the price reduction of quality Digital SLR cameras I know find three of them lying around the house (none of which are mind and who knows how they work out whose is whose), but these babies are the generators of storage requirements big time for me.

With the speed of the cameras, the size of the memory cards and the resolution of the photos – it’s a perfect storm of data being dumped into the mac. Yes it is supposedly possible to delete unwanted copies of horrible photos that will never be printed, but that never seems to happy in my house. So I have to be organised, manage the proliferation of data happening on the machine in the other corner of my office and have a regularly checked system to keep track of and copy of, these photos. You can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be the one in trouble if something does and something is lost (I am, after all, the “computer person” in the house).

All this is great business for computer companies. The average business is starting to put it’s compute power in the cloud, store it’s data in the cloud etc, but I believe the real driver of cloud data is not business, but social media and personal data. At Adaptec we are just going along for the ride – happy to sell product to whichever cloud vendor (often called datacenter) needs more storage so no complaints from a corporate perspective, but … and here’s what I want to know …

What is your “Big Data”? … and how are you making sure it’s safe.

Ciao
Neil

I recently copped a slam from one of my customers due to the fact that they had stability problems in their system and the customer was pointing the finger at the RAID card.

When I pointed out to the customer that yes, the drive was on our compatibility report but no, the firmware the customer was using was not the same version as we had tested, this did not seem to matter and the problem was still my fault.

Hmmm …

Can I really be put to the sword over this issue? RAID card vendors happily produce new firmware to fix anything and everything that crops up all the time, but disk drive vendors are little more loathe to create new firmware for their products, and even more loathe to tell anyone about them.

My basic take on this is that drive firmware updates are (a) not as common as RAID card firmware updates, but (b) they are every bit as important. Since the vendors seem so loathe to actually tell anyone about them, when they do produce an update it is very important (and therefore should be used).

So on our compatibility reports, beside the drive is a firmware revision. This is just as important as the drive being on the list in the first place. If it’s on there but your firmware is an older revision, the drive may as well not be on the list. So make sure … is the drive on the list and if so, is the firmware on your drive the same or newer than the version listed on our website.

Compatibility Reports for Adaptec cards can be found at: http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/_common/compatibility/
I suggest you make this a “must” web-page for your purchasers.

Ciao
Neil

For those of you with a technical bent, there is a new standard around in backplane land called IBPI. It’s a new format for LED function on backplanes. In reality, to my understanding, it’s an extension of the SGPIO standard we’ve been living with for a while.

So there is SGPIO “Standard” and SGPIO “IBPI”. In reality people call it SGPIO and IBPI, but technically they come from the same family – the IBPI pattern just extends the function of the SGPIO basic LED function.

So what does all this matter? Very little if you are directly connecting drives, but if you have a hot-swap backplane in your new server, and the Christmas Tree on the front is doing some weird and wonderful things (ie the leds are going crazy), you might need to change the “Backplane Mode” in the BIOS of our controller.

Plane old Series 6 (6405, 6445 and 6805/6805Q) don’t support IBPI. However the 6805T and 6805TQ, plus all the 7 series controller, support IBPI as well as SGPIO. No, it’s not possible for a RAID card to detect the difference between SGPIO vanilla flavour and SGPIO IBPI, so the user has to do the work. We took a punt, determined that IBPI will become the new next big thing and set that as default on our 7 Series Controllers.

So if your Christmas Tree looks like a server and vice versa, check the backplane mode.

Ciao
maxNeil

Big call, with absolutely no stats to back it up … but I’m making it anyway.

Every time I talk to a customer and think to myself “they should be using SSDs” I then think to myself “no, they’re too expensive”. And when I start talking to customers about such products as Intel 520s, they all jump on their suppliers website and look at the price … and every day it’s cheaper than the previous.

I’m staggered at the price of decent SSDs – they are dropping like flies. I presume there is plenty of margin to be had which is why they can keep dropping the price, but it’s pretty amazing all the same.

The biggest hurdle I find customers struggling to get over is not cost, but the fear of drive failure. For some reason people seem to think the SSD is an unstable, unreliable, cantankerous piece of equipment. However my experience shows that to be far from the truth. People using “brand name” SSDs are having great success with them, and are not troubled by the stability or failure rates in the slightest. Even in such price conscious markets as China, the SSD is making big inroads into the 15K SAS market – I personally think it is going to wipe it out.

As we move more and more to 2.5″ form factors in servers, the 10K 2.5″ SAS drive is making it’s place felt, with the SSD taking over for the high-end data needs. Certainly they are not being used for video surveillance servers, but as the world moves toward the clouds the low latency and high IOPs of the SSD are making themselves felt in the datacentre (not my non-American spelling of that word).

There is also a serious push going on in the datacentre to run at higher temperatures, and the SSD has the one amazing ability over a 15K SAS drive – it does not get hot (or produce enough heat to cook my dinner as a bunch of 15K drives will do). Combined with their low power use, they make great fodder for the masses in the datacentres, and are being used in massive numbers in China for just such purposes.

There is also the question of RAID levels and SSD drives. Traditionally we have kept database-type data to non-parity RAID (eg RAID 10), which is expensive and space-consuming. However I’m finding quite a few people putting raid arrays together on SSDs in RAID 5 with some pretty amazing performance results. I won’t say that the SSD completely wipes out the handicap of RAID 5 in write performance on small writes, but it goes a long way towards doing such – and combined with a healthy chunk of write cache on the RAID card RAID 5 is holding it’s own in SSD environments.

So there are a lot of factors coming in to play here – 2.5″, low power, low heat, high speed, high IOPs, low latency and high cost (yes initially they are more expensive) … but the cost factor needs to be looked at for the life of the server – the good old TCO – and when you look at SSDs in that light, they make a lot of sense.

So I’m calling it … 2013 will be the year of the SSD …

Then again, I’ve been wrong before

Ciao
maxNeil

Welcome to 2013 …

The hand is back in working order (thanks to motorbike and deer meeting) – so now it’s time to tell you about our new firmware release for our Series 6 and Series 7 controllers. It was actually released in 2012 but since most of you were on holidays by then I’m calling it a new year release.

For the Series 6 this update brings about a lot of changes, the most significant of which are UEFI bios support and a new Storage Management Software – maxView. We’ve gone to the max when it comes to naming products – I’m now called maxNeil, but the new software is a web-browser-based html GUI that a lot of our customers have been asking for – for a long time.

So here it is. I still have to wait for the boss to fork out for a new lab machine with a UEFI bios so I can do some testing, but the software is easy enough to use and retains the same functionality as the old Adaptec Storage Manager only with a new look and feel. Therefore I’m strongly recommending that customers look at upgrading their firmware and drivers on their 6 Series controllers, and look at the new management software as this is it for us moving forward. In fact it’s the only management product available on the 7 Series so let’s all get used to it

Ciao
maxNeil

We seem to be back on the drive firmware update path again. I recently had an issue with a customer system running desktop drives (yes, I know they shouldn’t but they do).  I checked the drive firmware with what I knew to be the latest from my drive vendor mate … and it was out of date.

So very quickly told the customer to check for latest/later version with vendor. Lo and behold they came up with an even newer version than I was aware of.

So the moral of the story is … contact your drive vendor and ask them what the latest version is for that drive. Don’t tell them what you have, just ask what the latest version is.

I don’t see why my friends in the drive business should escape all this firmware fun!

Ciao
Neil

Can’t remember exactly what that line is from (possibly a TV ad from my younger days), but it basically tells a story in the RAID industry. I’m continually getting customers (a) telling me what they are doing, then (b) ending up asking me how to put it all together because “they are not really experts at this” etc. Considering the fact that normally these people are doing something pretty bizarre or high-end, this is somewhat strange.

So …

Basic tips for looking at how to build a system. These are very, very generic, but there are some truisms to these, with one basic proviso – IF YOU ARE NOT 100% SURE OF WHAT YOU ARE DOING – CALL YOUR RAID VENDOR (in this case Adaptec of course).

Capacity – performance – redundancy (paranoia) – cost

These are the basic building blocks of storage – and you can’t have them all. Of course if you disregard cost you can get whatever you want in this world, but there are not many customers who actually mean it when they say “we are not worried about the cost, we just want the best” etc (they pretty quickly change their tune), so I’ll base everything below with a strong eye towards the “cost” of the system).

Capacity – it’s pretty easy to get big storage these days – 3tb drives are commonplace, but keep an eye on performance while you are calculating this variable. A general rule of thumb would be that the more spindles you have working for you, the quicker the box will be. Eg – 4 drives in a RAID 10 will be quicker than 2 drives in a mirror. So keeping cost down too much can often hurt your performance, though it generally doesn’t hurt your redundancy.

So think carefully about capacity, but don’t let it be the only consideration.

Performance – what exactly are you doing with your data, and what sort of data is it? Notice that we haven’t even bothered looking at hardware yet – the data type will determine most of the configuration. This can be broken down into basically streaming and random data – streaming can be in either direction (capturing or delivering content) and random is generally read (with a lesser degree of write – eg database).

So if you are doing streaming data then you will go for a parity raid (5, 6, 50, 60) as the parity calculations won’t hurt your performance and you’ll get a lot more capacity for your dollar. If on the other hand you are doing random data like a database, then you’ll be more interested in a non-parity raid such as 1 or 10.

Streaming data works fine on SATA drives (7200rpm), but random data (database) tends to work much better on SAS (10K or 15k drives). Of course SSD comes into play here but the cost generally wipes them out for anything except small specialised installations.

So if you are doing streaming data you are probably looking at SATA drives in a RAID 5, 6 or 50, while if you are doing database you are probably looking at SAS drives in a RAID 10, 1E or 1 (in that order please).

Of course, after all that, you need to work out which card can give you the raid levels and drive connections you are looking for, but that becomes the easy part.

So … back the heading … if you’re not sure, call

Ciao
Neil