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I’ve obvi­ously been quiet here on my per­sonal blog — as every­one who reads reg­u­larly knows I’m neck-deep in a pretty excit­ing startup call Nasuni as well as doing other projects, like the PSF Spon­sored sprints thing. That com­bined with twit­ter means my time for other addi­tional long-form con­tent is min­i­mal. So here’s a small roundup of inter­est­ing things:

Nasuni

Yup, still run­ning Python and Django! We’re actu­ally pretty proud to be a spon­sor for Djan­go­Con 2010 com­ing up in Sep­tem­ber — I’ll be attend­ing, so I hope to see all the famil­iar Django faces I know, and meet some new ones.

I’ve been blog­ging semi-regularly for the Nasuni blog itself — my posts are focused on product-things more than any­thing else. Here’s a small list of posts which I’ve done:

• The Road to Release — Fea­ture Pre­views — this is actu­ally my lat­est one, and the first in a series where I’ll be show­ing off some of the new fea­tures we’re adding in the lat­est release.
• Look­ing at Open­Stack, a Rack­space and NASA ini­tia­tive — For those of you who don’t know, Rack­space and NASA announced Open­Stack — the awe­some part? It’s all python — I had the swift com­po­nent (which pow­ers Rackspace’s cloud­files sys­tem) of Open­Stack run­ning pretty quickly. I’d rec­om­mend snag­ging the code from launch­pad and tak­ing a look. Swift (the stor­age com­po­nent) uses event­let — and Nova (the com­pute part) uses Tor­nado and Twisted.
• Stor­age Switzer­land Test Dri­ves the Filer — This is a response to an arti­cle writ­ten about the prod­uct — I actu­ally used it to pre­view some of the work going into the next release of the Filer.
• Thanks to Django — This piece goes into some detail about our use of Django, it’s one of our ways of say­ing thanks. I still need to rework it so we can send it over for the Django Suc­cess Sto­ries page.
• Thanks to the Sup­port­ing Cast — This is an ear­lier thank you post — but to the other peo­ple who have helped out a ton, includ­ing Greg New­man, Lin­coln Loop, and Revsys.
• The Donut Solu­tion — This was a fun one, mainly to show that yes — we’re lis­ten­ing hard to cus­tomer feed­back, and we’re improving/iterating quickly. Also, I get to show off UI improvements.
• Finally — The Nasuni Blog team — this is the rosetta stone for the authors of the blog, describ­ing who we are. I didn’t write this piece, but it’s good read­ing to fig­ure out who is who.

If you’re inter­ested in Nasuni — or cloud stor­age in gen­eral — I’d encour­age you to sign up for the RSS feed. We’re try­ing to keep the infor­ma­tion use­ful out­side of “just us” (despite my urge and predilec­tion to churn­ing out com­pletely product-related posts) — and if you ever have feed­back, drop us a line.

PSF Spon­sored Sprints

The project con­tin­ues on — we’ve funded two sprints so far, and have sev­eral more com­ing down the pike. We’re always in need of vol­un­teers to help us do things like the man­u­als and site maintenance/content author­ing. Here’s some highlights:

• The call for appli­ca­tions is open — The call for appli­ca­tions is open — and now I sus­pect we won’t be clos­ing it. Orig­i­nally, I thought we’d have to do things in waves of apply-approve. As time has pro­gressed, I no longer think this is the case.
• Mon­treal Python Pack­ag­ing sprint wrap up — the wrap up report for our first sprint!
• Europy­thon core sprint report - another wrap up report for the core sprint we pro­vided funds to.
• Just added the loca­tions page — we now have people/companies offer­ing up space for sprint­ers! Check it out!
• Finally - Sprints at PyOhio — PyOhio is going on this week­end, if you’re in the area you should really go check it out! Cather­ine has gone above and beyond with the entire “become a con­trib­u­tor” effort going on.

Please! If you’re think­ing about hold­ing a sprint - send us an appli­ca­tion! Heck, even if we’re not spon­sor­ing it, we’ll help pro­mote you via the blog, and the sprint cal­en­dar we have up. A lit­tle fact? The sprints we’ve funded so far, and that are on deck for fund­ing are all out­side of the US, which is both awe­some, and surprising!

PSF Board

Some of you prob­a­bly know that I’m cur­rently on the board of direc­tors for the PSF — things progress well here, but I mainly wanted to call out the excel­lent blog Doug Hell­mann has been author­ing for PSF news. You should really be watch­ing that because yes — we do do things, and hope­fully over the next year, we’ll be doing more awe­some things.

I’ve actu­ally got a big­ger post in the works for what I think the ulti­mate mis­sion of the PSF is/should be as well as “how do you get money from us” as well. Must find the time!

I've obviously been quiet here on my personal blog - as everyone who reads regularly knows I'm neck-deep in a pretty exciting startup call Nasuni as well as doing other projects, like the PSF Sponsored sprints thing. That combined with twitter means my time for other additional long-form content is minimal. So here's a ...

The com­pany I’ve worked for since July of last year — Nasuni Cor­po­ra­tion (a startup in Mass­a­chu­setts) has gone live! This is the cul­mi­na­tion of a lot of hard, but exceed­ingly fun and excit­ing work over the past months.

The Nasuni team is an excel­lent one — and one I am very, very proud to be a part of. Our prod­uct is called the Nasuni Filer — a simple-to-use, ver­sioned, encrypted and cloud-storage backed vir­tual NAS (net­work attached stor­age) server (click here for more information).

With­out going into all of the fea­tures, our goal in mak­ing this was to make cloud stor­age sim­ple, acces­si­ble and secure — and I know we’ve accom­plished all three. All you do is down­load it, boot it and start using it — once you do so you have access to truly unlim­ited stor­age. It’s an unlim­ited filesys­tem for the cloud. Here’s the ele­va­tor pitch:

Nasuni has devel­oped a vir­tual file server, called the Nasuni Filer, that deliv­ers unlim­ited file stor­age and com­plete file pro­tec­tion for busi­nesses. Work­ing in part­ner­ship with lead­ing cloud stor­age ven­dors, the Nasuni Filer lever­ages the vast capac­ity of the cloud to store and pro­tect com­pany files off­site, while retain­ing the local func­tion­al­ity and per­for­mance of a tra­di­tional NAS.

This tech­nol­ogy allows busi­nesses to use the cloud provider of their choice as a replace­ment for tra­di­tional pri­mary stor­age. Snap­shots, file ver­sion­ing, and off­site stor­age are inte­grated into the file server itself — ensur­ing busi­ness file are safe and secure at all times. No need to man­age com­plex backup and DR schemes — if the file server is run­ning, files are protected.

We’ve launched the Beta of the prod­uct today — any­one can sign up, down­load and use it. Any­one can give us feed­back and sug­ges­tions — I encour­age all of you who might need some­thing like this to down­load and give it a try. If you want — go check out the videos we’ve put together show­cas­ing the Filer (and bet­ter yet — check out the awe­some ani­mated car­toon we have on the front page).

Most of you know that my blog is mainly Python ori­ented. Suf­fice it to say, Nasuni — and the Nasuni Filer make use of Python for a wide range of tasks. We use Python, Django and as much of the Python ecosys­tem as we can to drive every­thing from the web­site, to the GUI on the appli­ance itself — Python is part of the DNA of the com­pany, and it has served us well. With­out Open Source and Python — I don’t think it would have been pos­si­ble to build what we have built in as lit­tle time as we have.

We have a strong ded­i­ca­tion to not just Python, but open source in gen­eral (and a fair num­ber of us will be at PyCon this month). As time pro­gresses, now that we’re exit­ing stealth mode we plan on pos­si­bly open sourc­ing stuff we feel would ben­e­fit the com­mu­nity. Some of us already push patches back where and when we can, but as I said — as time pro­gresses this involve­ment will only increase.

So not only am I proud to announce the prod­uct, be part of this team and to see what we’ve made, I’m also happy to thank so many peo­ple in the Python and OSS com­mu­nity which have helped us reach this point.

So go — check it out, let us know what you think.

The company I've worked for since July of last year - Nasuni Corporation (a startup in Massachusetts) has gone live! This is the culmination of a lot of hard, but exceedingly fun and exciting work over the past months. The Nasuni team is an excellent one - and one I am very, very proud ...

Before I give the links to the videos, I want to give the typ­i­cal disclaimer:

Dis­claimer: The opin­ions expressed here are my per­sonal opin­ions, views, dis­cus­sions, etc. Con­tent pub­lished here is not read or approved in advance by HDS, my wife or any­one else for that mat­ter and does not — in any way — reflect the views and opin­ions, positions/etc of my employer. This is my per­sonal, largely python-related blog. Not my employers.

That being said: A few months ago, I dis­cov­ered (much by acci­dent) that HDS (Hitachi Data Sys­tems) has started a viral mar­ket­ing com­paign involv­ing Mr. T — yes, the man from the A-Team (whose face graced my lunch­box as a child). Note that mas­sive “lulz” were attained when watch­ing these.

With­out pass­ing judge­ment or in any way stat­ing a direct opin­ion, here are the videos, in order of creation:

• Mr. T: The “T” in I.T.
• Mr. T: “T The Trucker“
• T3: MR. T — BATTLE FOR THE SMB

For addi­tional amuse­ment, I will direct you to the Archivas (before we were bought by HDS) viral/spoof/etc video that made it to youtube, here.

Before I give the links to the videos, I want to give the typical disclaimer: Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions, views, discussions, etc. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by HDS, my wife or anyone else for that matter and does not - in any way - ...

I saw this post on Slash­dot the other day — it’s a paper called ” Fail­ure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Pop­u­la­tion”. It’s a good read for any­one in the stor­age busi­ness — hell, it’s a good read for any­one inter­ested in com­puter. In sec­tion 5, under con­clu­sions, they state:

In this study we report on the fail­ure char­ac­ter­is­tics of consumer-grade disk dri­ves. To our knowl­edge, the study is unprece­dented in that it uses a much larger pop­u­la­tion size than has been pre­vi­ously reported and presents a com­pre­hen­sive analy­sis of the cor­re­la­tion between fail­ures and sev­eral para­me­ters that are believed to affect disk life­time. Such analy­sis is made pos­si­ble by a new highly par­al­lel health data col­lec­tion and analy­sis infra­struc­ture, and by the sheer size of our com­put­ing deploy­ment.
One of our key find­ings has been the lack of a con­sis­tent pat­tern of higher fail­ure rates for higher tem­per­a­ture dri­ves or for those dri­ves at higher uti­liza­tion lev­els. Such cor­re­la­tions have been repeat­edly high­lighted by pre­vi­ous stud­ies, but we are unable to con­firm them by observ­ing our pop­u­la­tion. Although our data do not allow us to con­clude that there is no such cor­re­la­tion, it pro­vides strong evi­dence to sug­gest that other effects
may be more promi­nent in affect­ing disk drive reli­a­bil­ity in the con­text of a pro­fes­sion­ally man­aged data cen­ter deployment.

These two points are inter­est­ing. In some of the labs I’ve worked in, an aston­ish­ing num­ber of dri­ves die reg­u­larly. The manufacturer/distributor excuse has always been “heat issues” or “use cases”. Admit­tedly, the temp. range Google capped at was 50 cel­sius (122 Fahren­heit). In a rack with densely stacked servers (1-2U machines, rack filled) and with those machines run­ning close to 75% and above CPU load with non-stop disk I/O (read, write, delete/format) and con­stant machine power cycles the temp. inside the racks could spike far past the 122 mark at which point the failure-trend Google marks starts to spike again.

Of course, in the labs I’ve been in, we were using these as test bed machines — total/high reli­a­bil­ity was not some­thing direly impor­tant for the sim­ple fact that these machines were disposable.

Even with that in mind: You should always assume your disk dri­ves are going to fail sooner than you expect. The MTBF on a large enough pool of disks not con­fig­ured in a “smart” con­fig­u­ra­tion (i.e. raid, arrays, etc). I’m not talk­ing about consumer-use pat­terns (although, I just had a drive go south on my lap­top) — I’m talk­ing about datacenter/IT/etc use cases.

The Google paper is a good ref­er­ence case, but you should remem­ber that all use pat­terns are dif­fer­ent. An application/test or sys­tem that really puts the disks to use can cause drive fail­ures much ear­lier than you (or any paper) might assume. A good chunk of the “stor­age indus­try” real­ized this long ago — this is why com­pa­nies (cough) work on soft­ware appli­ca­tions and intel­li­gent hard­ware “wrap­pers” (arrays, raids, etc) to work around the basic assump­tion that in a large enough pool of dri­ves, you’re going to have near con­stant drive fail­ure. Peo­ple might dis­agree with the prices or method­ol­ogy, but the fact remains that the basic assump­tion is true.

Of course, that rea­son­ing can be held for any piece of hard­ware in the typ­i­cal data cen­ter. Apply too much heat/load to a pool of machines and your fail­ure rate it going to be high unless the machines were designed with high-reliability in mind (which nor­mal indi­cates RAID/Fiber/etc storage).

In any case, the paper is a good read. I’ve gone and started ram­bling. If you’re look­ing for some tools to test drives/filesystems in gen­eral, I’d take a look at the stan­dard Bonnie/Bonnie++ and other tools, but also take a look at Rugg (built in python) and also remem­ber that it’s impor­tant to stress a drive below the filesys­tem layer. Typ­i­cally, this means raw-writing to the device — if you’re job is to test drive speed/reliability or test the reli­a­bil­ity of drive dri­vers for your oper­at­ing sys­tem, that’s a step you can’t forget.

Update: Stor­age­Mojo has a more detailed break­down.

I saw this post on Slashdot the other day - it's a paper called " Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population". It's a good read for anyone in the storage business - hell, it's a good read for anyone interested in computer. In section 5, under conclusions, they state: In this study we ...

That’s right. My awe­some employer, a stor­age startup called Archivas is being pur­chased by Hitachi Data Sys­tems, a wholly owned sub­sidiary of Hitachi Limited.

This is of course, awe­some new for us as a com­pany — but on a per­sonal level this pur­chase shows a belief and com­mit­ment on the part of Hitachi when it comes to the prod­uct and tech­nol­ogy I’ve put blood and sweat and tears into for the past 3 years.

Some of the news links:
From the HDS site
Search Stor­age
eWeek Cov­er­age
Mar­ket­Watch

When I go to pyCon this month — I get to go as an HDS employee. This is truly awesome.

That's right. My awesome employer, a storage startup called Archivas is being purchased by Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Limited. This is of course, awesome new for us as a company - but on a personal level this purchase shows a belief and commitment on the part of Hitachi when it ...

HDS, Archivas team on fixed-content archiv­ing
Hitachi Data Sys­tems and Archivas Forge Global Part­ner­ship to Cre­ate Solu­tions for a New “Active Archive” Mar­ket Space
And that’s all I am going to say about that.

HDS, Archivas team on fixed-content archiving Hitachi Data Systems and Archivas Forge Global Partnership to Create Solutions for a New “Active Archive” Market Space And that's all I am going to say about that.

You should read this: The essence of a long-term dig­i­tal archive

An excel­lent arti­cle describ­ing dig­i­tal archives in the mod­ern IT field. For most peo­ple, this arti­cle might seem irrel­e­vant (in the scope of things I have talked about pre­vi­ously — it is). How­ever, given that this is the field I work in, it’s a sub­ject near and dear to me.

Of course, in the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I work in this field, and I also hap­pen to know the article’s author.

You should read this: The essence of a long-term digital archive An excellent article describing digital archives in the modern IT field. For most people, this article might seem irrelevant (in the scope of things I have talked about previously - it is). However, given that this is the field I work in, it's a ...

First, I saw this:Ques­tion: “What exactly is python used for…

The ques­tion itself is inane — but the answer is what caught my eyes.

To Quote:
Too busy to answer prop­erly, but I’ll just men­tion that Fer­mi­lab uses a home-grown python pack­age called Enstore to man­age their data store of 3 Petabytes of physics data, grow­ing at 1PB/year. The trans­fers of ~25TB/day to and from that sys­tem is what keeps me busy.

And then he pro­vides this link: Pre­sen­ta­tion about the Enstore System

The answer was from a Mail­ing List.

The full response is at that link Googling Enstore up yields a few links:

Access to Mass Stor­age at FNAL

And: Dcache.Org

This is some code I have Got to see.

And to add: Infor­ma­tion on the Enstore Project

First, I saw this:Question: "What exactly is python used for... The question itself is inane - but the answer is what caught my eyes. To Quote: Too busy to answer properly, but I'll just mention that Fermilab uses a home-grown python package called Enstore to manage their data store of 3 Petabytes of physics data, growing at ...