Olocity Blog

Olocity has been doing quite a bit of end-user listening, research and development in the past few months with our StorageIM product, specifically performance monitoring capabilities. We found that end-users did not have the performance visibility they required to make suitable decisions regarding their hardware and fabric.

The challenge from our perspective is determining from a heterogeneous point of view the following:

• What vendors support standards and to what extent
  • SNIA SMI-S
  • Web Services
• If SMI-S is supported, what version of SMI-S does that vendor and hardware models support?
• If SMI-S is supported, what vendors support statistics and in what SMI-S profiles do they reside?
  • What vendors support the SMI-S Block Server Performance (BSP)?
  • What ’specific’ vendor’s hardware supports the BSP capabilities?
  • What ’specific’ BSP metrics are available for each vendor’s hardware model (e.g. Top Level Computer System, Component Computer Systems, Ports, Disks and Volumes)?
• How does one determine the above and test ones development against each and every hardware platform?

What has become clearly apparent after years of working with standards is that unfortunately most end-users do not recognize the SNIA SMI-S standards and how it should assist them in determining their hardware and aid in avoiding vendor lock-in. From our perspective during the development of these core metrics it also became apparent what vendors are invested in SMI-S and what vendors really have not sunk their teeth into standards or have rejected standards completely.

Below list what we have chosen as our 1.0 performance metric based on our test customer requirements:

Storage Array

• Support for component computer system port statistics
  • IOPS
  • Kbytes Transferred / sec.
• Support for volume statistics
  • IOPS
  • Kbytes Transferred / sec.
• Support for disk statistics
  • IOPS
  • Kbytes Transferred / sec.

Switch

• FC Port Statistics
  • Bytes Transmitted
  • Bytes Received
  • Packets Transmitted
  • Packets Received
  • Link Failures

Results

The below screenshots are sample StorageIM performance charts of a Symmetrix array and QLogic Switch utilizing the SNIA SMI-S. In my opinion EMC has done a superb job constantly extending their SMI-S implementations and ensuring that as their product lines grow their implementation of standards grow alongside. The primary switch manufacturers have also made sure their product lines implement standards as their product lines grow.

We’ve also had the opportunity to implement these new features at sites around the globe. We were actually quite amazed at some of the feedback.  Below is the feedback we received from one of our test customers. We’ve taken out the name of the storage vendor and their product to protect the innocent.

“I really like the improvements on the hardware stats.  The numerical values for the IOPs and KB/sec is exactly what we’ve been looking for.  I’ve already been able to identify our busiest LUN, which we were not able to do before given the tools we had.”

What is becoming quite obvious is the lack of visibility of performance metrics for storage administrators.

I will also note that quote above also mentioned lack of SMI-S performance statistics for the storage vendors Disk Drives. This is a definite issue with the user citing a need and use case, “Last week, we had so many disks fail that it didn’t rebuild one of the arrays, and while we were noticing degraded performance,  we had no indication of why until the storage vendor’s technician showed up with disks in hand…”

If you are interested in testing StorageIM we would be more than happy to give you a 60 day evaluation.

Screenshots

In order to better utilize cloud computing and its resources, the SNIA Cloud Storage TWG is in the process of defining a Cloud Data Management Interface Specification (CDMI) in which the objective is to expose standardized methodologies using a RESTful architecture and leverage existing standards such as SMI-S and XAM to manage capabilities of storage, objects and metadata. SNIA has also announced the public review of the draft CDMI specification, http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009.

The overall goal of Olocity is to initially create a Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) reference implementation that will coexist with the open source StorageIM™ storage management application and leverage existing standards such as SMI-S. This reference implementation will utilize the SMI-S standards to assemble containers for primordial pools, concrete pools and storage volumes as well as define reference CDMI capabilities.

Technology and Documentation

Cloud Data Management Interface Specification: http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/publicreview

StorageIM: Open source monitoring and reporting tool for storage systems and storage networks built around SMI-S, DASH and SMASH standards.
http://www.olocity.com

SMI-S: SMI is a membership-based initiative created by the SNIA to develop and standardize interoperable storage management technologies and promote them to the storage, networking and end-user communities.
http://www.snia.org

Jersey (JAX-RS): Jersey is an open source, JAX-RS(JSR 311) production quality implementation for building RESTful web services.
https://jersey.dev.java.net/

Read the document and results

Download /View the StorageIM CDMI Reference Implmentation Code

Sourceforge.net has opened up its voting for the fourth annual community choice awards. If you are using StorageIM and feel it adds value as an enduser, please vote for StorageIM.

Thanks!

Olocity Team

Building Adobe Flex applications using Ant would seem like a no brainer.  It appears the Ant builds using Flex has issues with understanding image paths. My CSS and any image embeds for our flex application StorageIM needed to have the image paths modifed in order for our Ant flex build to work appropriately. Below are modified image paths from a CSS and mxml file.

1. CSS Example: icon:  Embed(source=”../../assets/images/icon_close_up.png”);

2. mxml image: folderOpenIcon=”@Embed(source=’/assets/images/icons/folder-with-file-16×16.png’)”

Hope this helps with your flex ant builds.

I’ve been getting some end-user emails lately regarding StorageIM and the inclusion of performance monitoring. Because our road map is based on end-user feedback, ask and receive. These emails however were quite telling as to where storage monitoring is in general.

So the bad news is some end-users have serious issues with their storage vendors from a performance monitoring perspective. The key issue I’ve been hearing about lately is performance metrics. These issues consisted of what do the performance metrics truly mean and how are the performance metrics implemented such that you can can find an ‘immediate’ solution.

The good news is SMI-S supports performance metrics via their Block Server Performance Profile. We are now in the process of implementing these metrics. I will write a follow-up, Part 2 on post development and whether the SMI-S vendor implementations create a valuable solution based on end-user feedback.

Welcome to the Olocity Blog. We are an open source software and professional services company that is primarily involved in open source software and standards primarily pertaining to SMI-S and XAM. We started by developing an open source product StorageIM back in late 2005. During the inception of this project, the founders of Olocity were brainstorming on ways to collectively bring product and services that would be beneficial to our clients and software end-users.