{"id":1375,"date":"2015-06-29T08:41:41","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T07:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tekhead.org\/blog\/?p=1375"},"modified":"2015-09-23T11:58:22","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T10:58:22","slug":"tech-startup-spotlight-hedvig","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/2015\/06\/tech-startup-spotlight-hedvig\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Startup Spotlight – Hedvig"},"content":{"rendered":"

After posting this comment<\/a> last week, I thought it might be worth following up with a quick post. I’ll be honest and say that until Friday I hadn\u2019t actually heard of Hedvig, but I was invited along by the folks at Tech Field Day<\/a> to attend a Webex with this up and coming distributed storage company, who have recently raised $18 million in their Series B funding round, having only come out of stealth in March 2015.<\/p>\n

Hedvig are a “Software Defined Storage” company, but in their own words they are not YASS (Yet Another Storage Solution). Their new solution has been in development for a number of years by their founder and CEO Avinash Lakshman; the guy who invented Cassandra at Facebook as well as Amazon Dynamo, so a chap who knows about designing distributed systems! It\u2019s based around a software only distributed storage architecture, which supports both hyper-converged and traditional infrastructure models.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s still pretty early days, but apparently has been tested to up to 1000 nodes in a single cluster, with about 20 Petabytes, so it would appear to definitely be reasonably scalable! \ud83d\ude42 It\u2019s also elastic, as it is designed to be able to shrink by evacuating nodes, as well as add more. When you get to those kind of scales, power can become a major part to your cost to serve, so it\u2019s interesting to note that both x86 and ARM hardware are supported in the initial release, though none of their customers are actually using the latter as yet.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In terms of features and functionality, so far it appears to have all the usual gubbins such as thin provisioning, compression, global deduplication, multi-site replication with up to 6 copies, etc; all included within the standard price. There is no specific HCL from a hardware support perspective, which in some ways could be good as it\u2019s flexible, but in others it risks being a thorn in their side for future support. They will provide recommendations during the sales cycle though (e.g. 20 cores \/ 64GB RAM, 2 SSDs for journalling and metadata per node), but ultimately it’s the customer’s choice on what they run. Multiple hypervisors are supported, though I saw no mention of VAAI support just yet.<\/p>\n

The software supports auto-tiering via two methods, with hot blocks being moved on demand, and a 24\/7 background housekeeping process\u00a0which reshuffles storage at non-busy times. All of this is fully automated with no need for admin input (something which many admins will love, and others will probably freak out about!). This is driven by their philosophy or requiring\u00a0as little human intervention as possible. A noteworthy goal in light of the\u00a0modern\u00a0IT trend of individuals often being responsible for concurrently managing\u00a0significantly more infrastructure than our technical forefathers! (See\u00a0Cats vs Chickens<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Where things start to get interesting though is when it comes to the file system itself. It seems that the software\u00a0can present block, file and object storage, but the underlying file system is actually based on key-value pairs. (Looks like Jeff Layton wasn’t too far off with this<\/a> article from 2014) They didn\u2019t go into a great deal of detail on the subject, but their architecture overview says:<\/p>\n

“The Hedvig Storage Service operates as an optimized key value store and is responsible for writing data directly to the storage media. It captures all random writes into the system, sequentially ordering them into a log structured format that flushes sequential writes to disk.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Supported Access Protocols<\/b>
\nBlock – iSCSI and Cinder
\nFile – NFS (SMB coming in future release)
\nObject – S3 or SWIFT APIs<\/p>\n

Working for a service provider, my first thought is generally a version\u00a0of \u201cCan I multi-tenant it securely, whilst ensuring consistent performance for all tenants?\u201d. Neither multi-tenancy of the file access\u00a0protocols\u00a0(e.g. attaching the array to multiple domains for different security domains per volume)\u00a0nor storage performance QoS are\u00a0currently possible as yet, however I understand that Hedvig are looking at these in their roadmap.<\/p>\n

So, a few thoughts to close\u2026 Well they definitely seem to be a really interesting storage company, and I\u2019m fascinated to find out more as to how their key-value filesystem works in detail. \u00a0I’d suggest they\u2019re not quite there yet from a service provider perspective, but for private clouds in the the enterprise market, mixed hypervisor environments, and big data analytics, they definitely have something interesting to bring to the table. I\u2019ll certainly be keeping my eye on them in the future.<\/p>\n

For those wanting to find out a bit more, they have an architectural white paper<\/a> and datasheet<\/a> on their website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After posting this comment last week, I thought it might be worth following up with a quick post. I’ll be honest and say that until Friday I hadn\u2019t [..]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1377,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_yoast_wpseo_focuskw":"","_yoast_wpseo_title":"","_yoast_wpseo_metadesc":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New Blog Post: Tech #Startup Spotlight - @HedvigInc | #storage #vExpert","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[524,449,554],"tags":[531,533,536,535,214,534,528,527,116,539,115,537,530,529,526,525,189,538,532],"class_list":["post-1375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-startup-spotlight","category-storage","category-tech-field-day","tag-arm","tag-avinash-lakshman","tag-cinder","tag-distributed-storage","tag-hcl","tag-hedvig","tag-hyperconverged","tag-hyperscale","tag-iscsi","tag-key-value","tag-nfs","tag-s3","tag-sds","tag-software-defined-storage","tag-spotlight","tag-startup","tag-storage","tag-swift","tag-x86"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/wp-uploads\/www.tekhead.org\/2015\/06\/hedviglogo.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2l3lU-mb","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1375"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1378,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions\/1378"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}