Enterprise Computing: 3Par Thin Enhancements

By On October 12, 2009 · 9 Comments · In Uncategorized

3Par today took the opportunity at SNW USA to announce some enhancements to their thin provisioning technology.  The new features are:

  1. Thin Conversion. Slims down “stout” storage volumes as they are moved to a thin environment.
  2. Thin Copy Reclamation. Reclaims unused space from snapshot or replicated volumes.
  3. Thin Reclamation for Veritas Storage Foundation. Integrates with VxVM to release deleted data from the array.
  4. Thin Persistence. Dynamically releases deleted data from active volumes.

Now I thought InServ arrays already had this functionality but maybe I was jumping the gun when I mentioned thin support in recent posts.  However, that said, the ability to thin-on-the-fly is undoubtably a good one.  ZPR from Hitachi/HP requires the “offline” collection of freed blocks.

What interests me most is the detail around Thin Persistence.  The description in the  flyer for the feature makes the following claim:

“Thin Persistence achieves [the thinning of volumes] by using the built-in zero detection capability embedded in the 3Par Gen3 ASIC to reclaim unused space associated with deleted data within the InServ storage volumes”

Now correct me if I’m wrong but I thought most data deletions were done at a logical level, releasing only pointers in the appropriate file system tables.  If this is so, how does the system identify this space as reclaimable?  Is there a new “super-delete” facility that writes binary zeros over deleted files?  Alternatively I guess we could write a “block-scrubber” which allocates free space into a psuedo-file, writes zeros over it and releases it.  Of course the ultimate place for this kind of feature is the defragmenter.  As blocks are re-organised, overwrite free space with binary zeros the first time they are moved  That way the problem is solved.

Can anyone from 3Par shed light on my mis-understanding of the above?

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  • http://www.netapp.com John F.

    Or…

    You could have an agent on the host that monitors the filesystem as seen by the host and communicates that information to the storage device.

    John F.

  • nate

    The technology works by not allocating storage to blocks that contain nothing but zeros. Take for example the unix command dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1M count=100000 . With the 3PAR technology that command should not consume 1kB of disk space(and there is no associated I/O on the spindles). The file system thinks it’s there but it really is not.

    As for you thought the arrays already had it, they already had the hardware, we’ve(as a 3PAR customer) been waiting on the software for a while now, so been unable to
    use that technology. Even though it was announced today, it’s not available for use today unfortunately, apparently it will be “soon”, kind of frustrating to me as a customer I mean they semi announced it last year(with the T-class release), then they announce it again this year but it’s still not really available yet.

    I read a year or two ago some special tool that NetApp used to reclaim space from NTFS file systems, I think it did something similar though the docs if I recall right mentioned it was very I/O intensive and to only run it during low activity periods. And it was only for NTFS, not any other FS.

    MS has a more generic tool apparently that can zero out deleted data in a NTFS file system, I think 3PAR uses that for some of their demonstrations. I’m not aware of anything quite so “canned” that can work on other systems. Those systems you have to create the big files filled with zeros to free up space, no way(that I know of) to only zero out the data that has been marked for re-use by the file system, short of the new VXFS integration (aka Norton File System).

    Given the concept seems so simple(in practice it may be complex I don’t know), I would expect other vendors to follow, looking for wider adoption of zeroing out deleted files by file systems automatically as time goes on.

  • wally

    On windows you can use the sysinternals ‘sdelete’ utility (with the -c option) to overwrite free space with zero’s on a regular/scheduled interval.

  • nate

    It’s quite possible there will be fewer people needing to add more storage,
    it depends on their workload. This technology mainly helps those that have
    workloads that create and delete decent sized chunks of data. If your application/database/etc is only slowly growing(I’d say most fall into this category) then there won’t be much to reclaim.

    A good example for this I think is MySQL, when you optimize/rebuild a table in MySQL(which happens if you add an index, or want to compact the table) it completely re-writes the table out to disk, essentially doubling it’s size on the SAN, when the rebuild is complete the original table is deleted and the new table is renamed to the same name as the old table, From the file system’s view the space is reclaimed but from the SAN’s view it only got worse.

    In my early days of 3PAR usage(at another company) I spent a lot of time analyzing and optimizing my usage of thin provisioning, not knowing your data usage patterns can be dangerous if your over provisioning and don’t have much budget. But I figured it out for the most part and today I do use LVM on both linux and windows to logically restrict volumes from getting out of hand, knowing that I can do an online resize pretty easily if they *really* do need that extra space.

    My current company deployed an Exanet NAS cluster almost a year ago with our 3PAR, I was told by the local support guy that they were thin provisioning friendly based on his experience though the company’s official line was they didn’t support it, well they weren’t as friendly as I was expecting. I over provisioned up front, not thinking about the implications at the time(tight time constraints etc), the result today is the file system has roughly 60TB in it, and on the raw disks it is using about 112TB. Early on in the process I ran an online conversion going from RAID 5 3+1 to RAID 5 5+1(took a while given the volume of data and activity on the system but there was no application impact), which saved roughly 15TB of raw space, and saved us from having to buy more spindles.

    I’m hopeful to reclaim most of this space and get back to at least RAID 5 3+1 in the not too distant future.

    I’m pushing to add another 100(x1TB SATA) disks early next year, more for I/O than for space, it will again take some time to re-stripe all of the data, and give us a ton more room for long running snapshots and online backups.

  • http://www.storagerap.com marc farley

    Thanks for posting about this Chris. Yes, we do seem to have a non-intuitive business model where we think we can sell more systems by creating technology that helps customers spend less on their storage capacity.

    Nate, we appreciate your patience and support. You shouldn’t have to wait much longer now.

    The technology for zeroing out blocks on disk comes from security-oriented file system technology. The utility that Nate references for Windows is called SDelete, for secure delete. This link text is to a Microsoft Technet article on SDelete that gives some information on how it works.

    The most efficient way to reclaim storage will be a storage reclamation API, like the one that Symantec and 3PAR developed and is part of our Thin Reclamation for Veritas Storage Foundation – and is in the process of becoming a standard.

  • Chris Evans

    Nate/Marc, thanks for the comments. My preferred place is still in the defrag software, but I appreciate the VxVM standard. At some stage it will get added to native LVMs and then we’re done.

    Chris

  • nate

    defrag? You use mostly windows then ? :)

    I remember seeing alpha quality defrag software for linux back in ’96 or so, but nothing since. Defragging today on a thin provisioning volume can be dangerous actually, as it can cause the system to consume more space than it previously did depending on where the data is being moved to.

    I too look forward to file system level integration, the nice thing about the 3PAR stuff is you can just write zeros to those blocks like the MS sdelete utility, while the API is nice(actually wasn’t aware there was a difference I thought the VXFS stuff just did the zeroing), I think file systems of the future will do automatic scrubbing of deleted data, now that there is hardware that can take advantage of it(I’m sure the concept will spread to other vendors like most things do).

  • Chris Evans

    John

    I don’t like the idea of agents; (a) they have to be maintained and are not popular in a lot of companies (b) they can fail or might not get installed, so wouldn’t reclaim data. I think back to IXFP and Iceberg (STK) of the 90′s which on the mainframe required a started task running somewhere to kick off garbage collection. Not an elegant solution.

    Chris

  • Chris Evans

    Nate, thanks for clarifying the situation. I knew the hardware had it (I think I blogged on it at the time), however understanding the fact software is only catching up is interesting. So as the software comes available and is implemented, are 3Par going to see a drop in sales as a result of customers using the reclaimed storage?

    Chris

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