4 ms·

Cloud Block Storage Now In Unlimited Availability

77 points by bretpiatt 14y ago

gtaylor 14y ago
As difficult a time as EBS is having, it's good to see some other alternatives pop up. This will definitely put the pressure on the EBS team to clean up, if they weren't already under immense pressure to do so. A word of caution, though: Rackspace is just getting into this ballgame of on-demand virtual block devices. There will probably be gaffes (though, hopefully not as bad as EBS of late), so, as per the virtualization commandments, build expecting failure. Edit: Also, Rackspace had perfect timing for this announcement, the day after catastrophic EBS failure. Coincidence, or astute choice in launch dates? :)
- pquerna 14y ago
  Coincidence -- I know the Block Storage team has been working very very hard on this product for a long time :-)
- jrarredondo 14y ago
  (Disclosure: I work for Rackspace in Cloud Block Storage) Hey gtaylor, I can tell you that this was purely a coincidence. We actually were going to ship this a couple of weeks ago but decided to delay a few days to get some updates from OpenStack. I think what happen yesterday is unfortunate for all those customers who were affected and certainly not cause for celebration. We do believe however that we have a great block storage service to offer and are looking forward to competing.
  - epistasis 14y ago
    Can you share anything about the backed architecture, for example if you're using Ceph to provide block devices?
    - ssimpson 14y ago
      https://github.com/openstack/cinder https://github.com/openstack/cinder
    - jrarredondo 14y ago
      (Disclosure: I work for Rackspace in Cloud Block Storage) Hi epistasis, here is what I can say. Let's talk about two things: what happens at provisioning time and then what happens at runtime. Our provisioning engine is based on OpenStack Cinder. At provisioning time, we provision a SSD or Standard volume on our storage backend. This storage backend is a storage system we built (called Lunr) on top of standard Linux and commercially available hardware. Once the volume is created in Lunr it is then attached to the Cloud Server compute host, which exposes the volume to the guest as a virtual device. At runtime, the volume appears as a regular device to the compute node over iSCSI. Snapshots are created against Cloud Files, our object storage service that is based on OpenStack Swift. I hope that is useful.
      - epistasis 14y ago
        Thank you! That's exactly what I wanted to know, my apologies for missing 'cinder' in the article. (Though in my very meager defense, page up/page down is broken on the blog because the top framing hides content.)
  - gtaylor 14y ago
    I'm looking forward to you looking forward to competing :) Funny coincidence, though I doubt anyone would blame you in either case. Glad to see competition heating up. We all win from this.
- rsync 14y ago
  (Dsiclosure: I work for rsync.net - we've been providing cloud[1] storage since 2001) We've always positioned rsync.net as a premium offering at a higher price, but it appears this is not really the case anymore - rackspace is 15 cents/GB, per month, and while that matches our 1TB annual package, our 10TB[2] annual is down at 7.9 cents ... Zero IO cost has been our policy from day one. No disagreement there... [1] As most on HN know, it's not really a cloud storage offering, since we give people real UNIX filesystems with no abstraction layers between ... but "cloud" will do ... [2] Live, ZFS filesystem ... so you can just go ahead and send us a single, 10 TB file if you feel like. No weird limitations...
  - oijaf888 14y ago
    Do you offer some sort of iSCSI endpoint over IPSEC or similar? Or would I have to use FUSE to mount it as an actual drive/block device?
cagenut 14y ago
This is perfect timing on their part, how many people are having their post-mortem meeting today and going back to their desk to look for options.
Erwin 14y ago
I'd be curious about the practical durability. EBS claims a failure rate of 0.5% per 20 GB per year as per http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ -- I wonder how an e.g. 200 GB volume on RS would be provisioned (how many drives are involved?). The cheap storage seems to be SATA disks
cnlwsu 14y ago
Definitely been waiting for this feature, was frustrating firing up a new instance every 300gb. We have 100+ instances in Rackspace and its been interesting to watch them over last couple years. They have had their own share of troubles of course but actually having support is huge when it happens.
staunch 14y ago
Unless they're doing dedicated disks per user (which they aren't, it seems) and dedicated networking, there's really no reason to think they'll do better than AWS, once there are a significant number of users on the system. The idea of pooling large numbers of drives, dividing it up by space, and then sharing it over a network (IP or not) will never get you the kind of performance you get from dedicated locally-attached drives. For server storage, it just makes more sense (IMHO) to have local disks with unquestionably reliable performance characteristics. The flexibility of EBS-type solutions is nice, but it comes at too high a cost.
- ehutch79 14y ago
  It's reasonable to think that this will have similar performance to 'cloudfiles' as from what i've read it's pretty much just a block file on there. their cloud servers already have locally attached storage, but it's limited, because they're not just going to chuck disks in servers at user demand. if you want that you need to go with a dedicated server. I really see this product as being more for people who want to use something like cloudfiles but who's software can't deal with it.
  - robszumski 14y ago
    This is completely wrong. Rackspace's Block Storage offering is built on OpenStack Cinder which has nothing to do with Cloud Files, it's backend data store, the servers it runs on, or the regions it runs in. Openstack.org has plenty of information on how Cinder works.
    - ehutch79 14y ago
      That might be exactly what i was thinking about. I know i saw some diagram.
  - jrarredondo 14y ago
    (Disclosure: I work for Rackspace) Hi there ehutch79, just a quick clarification. Cloud Files is object storage, whereas Cloud Block Storage is block storage. The performance characteristics of both types of storage are very different. One way I use sometimes to explain the difference is by talking about how they are accessed: Cloud Files objects are accessed using HTTP (think REST), whereas Cloud Block Storage blocks are accessed using low level OS I/O operations (think block read and write operations). Because of that, you could implement a database on Cloud Block Storage, but not on Cloud Files as it would not be very performant. Think Cloud Files when you have a website that needs media, large objects, application-specific content, files, etc., or when you need CDN for improved performance at the edge (CDN is a great feature of Cloud Block Storage). Think Cloud Block Storage when you could have used a regular old hard drive: you provision it, you format it, you may stamp a file system on it, or use the block storage for MongoDB or a relational database (with the difference that with Cloud Block Storage you can pick Standard drives or Solid State Drives).
akh 14y ago
This looks like it is directly pointed towards AWS EBS and EBS PIOPS offerings so here some quick cost comparisons: - Rackspace standard storage vs AWS EBS (for 1TB of storage with 100 IOPS) -- AWS US-East = $126/month -- Rackspace USA = $150/month - Rackspace SSD vs AWS PIOPS (for 1TB of storage with 1000 IOPS) -- AWS US-East = $225/month -- Rackspace = $700/month http://blog.planforcloud.com/2012/10/cost-comparison-rackspace-cloud-block.html http://blog.planforcloud.com/2012/10/cost-comparison-rackspa...

77 points by bretpiatt 14y ago

As difficult a time as EBS is having, it's good to see some other alternatives pop up. This will definitely put the pressure on the EBS team to clean up, if they weren't already under immense pressure to do so. A word of caution, though: Rackspace is just getting into this ballgame of on-demand virtual block devices. There will probably be gaffes (though, hopefully not as bad as EBS of late), so, as per the virtualization commandments, build expecting failure. Edit: Also, Rackspace had perfect timing for this announcement, the day after catastrophic EBS failure. Coincidence, or astute choice in launch dates? :)

pquerna 14y ago
Coincidence -- I know the Block Storage team has been working very very hard on this product for a long time :-)
jrarredondo 14y ago
(Disclosure: I work for Rackspace in Cloud Block Storage) Hey gtaylor, I can tell you that this was purely a coincidence. We actually were going to ship this a couple of weeks ago but decided to delay a few days to get some updates from OpenStack. I think what happen yesterday is unfortunate for all those customers who were affected and certainly not cause for celebration. We do believe however that we have a great block storage service to offer and are looking forward to competing.
- epistasis 14y ago
  Can you share anything about the backed architecture, for example if you're using Ceph to provide block devices?
  - ssimpson 14y ago
    https://github.com/openstack/cinder https://github.com/openstack/cinder
  - jrarredondo 14y ago
    (Disclosure: I work for Rackspace in Cloud Block Storage) Hi epistasis, here is what I can say. Let's talk about two things: what happens at provisioning time and then what happens at runtime. Our provisioning engine is based on OpenStack Cinder. At provisioning time, we provision a SSD or Standard volume on our storage backend. This storage backend is a storage system we built (called Lunr) on top of standard Linux and commercially available hardware. Once the volume is created in Lunr it is then attached to the Cloud Server compute host, which exposes the volume to the guest as a virtual device. At runtime, the volume appears as a regular device to the compute node over iSCSI. Snapshots are created against Cloud Files, our object storage service that is based on OpenStack Swift. I hope that is useful.
    - epistasis 14y ago
      Thank you! That's exactly what I wanted to know, my apologies for missing 'cinder' in the article. (Though in my very meager defense, page up/page down is broken on the blog because the top framing hides content.)
- gtaylor 14y ago
  I'm looking forward to you looking forward to competing :) Funny coincidence, though I doubt anyone would blame you in either case. Glad to see competition heating up. We all win from this.
rsync 14y ago
(Dsiclosure: I work for rsync.net - we've been providing cloud[1] storage since 2001) We've always positioned rsync.net as a premium offering at a higher price, but it appears this is not really the case anymore - rackspace is 15 cents/GB, per month, and while that matches our 1TB annual package, our 10TB[2] annual is down at 7.9 cents ... Zero IO cost has been our policy from day one. No disagreement there... [1] As most on HN know, it's not really a cloud storage offering, since we give people real UNIX filesystems with no abstraction layers between ... but "cloud" will do ... [2] Live, ZFS filesystem ... so you can just go ahead and send us a single, 10 TB file if you feel like. No weird limitations...
- oijaf888 14y ago
  Do you offer some sort of iSCSI endpoint over IPSEC or similar? Or would I have to use FUSE to mount it as an actual drive/block device?

cagenut 14y ago

This is perfect timing on their part, how many people are having their post-mortem meeting today and going back to their desk to look for options.

Erwin 14y ago

I'd be curious about the practical durability. EBS claims a failure rate of 0.5% per 20 GB per year as per http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ http://aws.amazon.com/ebs/ -- I wonder how an e.g. 200 GB volume on RS would be provisioned (how many drives are involved?). The cheap storage seems to be SATA disks

cnlwsu 14y ago

Definitely been waiting for this feature, was frustrating firing up a new instance every 300gb. We have 100+ instances in Rackspace and its been interesting to watch them over last couple years. They have had their own share of troubles of course but actually having support is huge when it happens.

staunch 14y ago

Unless they're doing dedicated disks per user (which they aren't, it seems) and dedicated networking, there's really no reason to think they'll do better than AWS, once there are a significant number of users on the system. The idea of pooling large numbers of drives, dividing it up by space, and then sharing it over a network (IP or not) will never get you the kind of performance you get from dedicated locally-attached drives. For server storage, it just makes more sense (IMHO) to have local disks with unquestionably reliable performance characteristics. The flexibility of EBS-type solutions is nice, but it comes at too high a cost.

ehutch79 14y ago
It's reasonable to think that this will have similar performance to 'cloudfiles' as from what i've read it's pretty much just a block file on there. their cloud servers already have locally attached storage, but it's limited, because they're not just going to chuck disks in servers at user demand. if you want that you need to go with a dedicated server. I really see this product as being more for people who want to use something like cloudfiles but who's software can't deal with it.
- robszumski 14y ago
  This is completely wrong. Rackspace's Block Storage offering is built on OpenStack Cinder which has nothing to do with Cloud Files, it's backend data store, the servers it runs on, or the regions it runs in. Openstack.org has plenty of information on how Cinder works.
  - ehutch79 14y ago
    That might be exactly what i was thinking about. I know i saw some diagram.
- jrarredondo 14y ago
  (Disclosure: I work for Rackspace) Hi there ehutch79, just a quick clarification. Cloud Files is object storage, whereas Cloud Block Storage is block storage. The performance characteristics of both types of storage are very different. One way I use sometimes to explain the difference is by talking about how they are accessed: Cloud Files objects are accessed using HTTP (think REST), whereas Cloud Block Storage blocks are accessed using low level OS I/O operations (think block read and write operations). Because of that, you could implement a database on Cloud Block Storage, but not on Cloud Files as it would not be very performant. Think Cloud Files when you have a website that needs media, large objects, application-specific content, files, etc., or when you need CDN for improved performance at the edge (CDN is a great feature of Cloud Block Storage). Think Cloud Block Storage when you could have used a regular old hard drive: you provision it, you format it, you may stamp a file system on it, or use the block storage for MongoDB or a relational database (with the difference that with Cloud Block Storage you can pick Standard drives or Solid State Drives).

akh 14y ago

This looks like it is directly pointed towards AWS EBS and EBS PIOPS offerings so here some quick cost comparisons: - Rackspace standard storage vs AWS EBS (for 1TB of storage with 100 IOPS) -- AWS US-East = $126/month -- Rackspace USA = $150/month - Rackspace SSD vs AWS PIOPS (for 1TB of storage with 1000 IOPS) -- AWS US-East = $225/month -- Rackspace = $700/month http://blog.planforcloud.com/2012/10/cost-comparison-rackspace-cloud-block.html http://blog.planforcloud.com/2012/10/cost-comparison-rackspa...