As I mentioned in my post last week I recently had the opportunity to attend Storage Field Day 19, where I got to meet with a wide variety of storage software and hardware companies in Silicon Valley. One of the more interesting companies we met with was a longtime player in storage—Western Digital. (Disclosure—I own shares of Western Digital and was gifted an SSD after the event) One of the overwhelming themes of the week was the vast amounts of data that we are generating much of which is coming from video and IoT device telemetry. Western Digital estimates that 103 zetabytes (that’s 103MM petabytes, or 103 Billion terabytes) of just IoT data will be created by 2023.

We were able to hear from a wide array of executives at Western Digital making up various parts of their business. There are a few market forces that are driving the direction of the company. The first area is gaming—building internal NVME drives with up to 2 terabytes with bandwidth up to 3480 MB/second. Performance is one aspect of gaming systems, but design aesthetic and cooling are also very important.  PC Gaming is a $37.5 billion market, so Western Digital sees this as a major market for them.

While the gaming part of the presentation focused on bleeding edge performance, the rest of the afternoon looked at increasing storage densities. While it went unsaid, I feel like much of the development in the hardware business is increasingly focused on public cloud providers like Microsoft and Amazon, as well as large scale data companies like Facebook and Twitter. Western Digital is at the forefront of this development through the develpment of zoned storage. One of the goals of this extension to the NVME standard is to  allow ultra-fast SSDs to be zoned similar to the way hard drives can now. This is not technology that you will be implementing in your data center anytime soon, however it will likely be coming to a cloud provider in the near future.

The other aspect of storage futures are increased densities. While many analysts have prematurely speculated about the death of the spinning hard drive (in lieu of lighter, faster, cooler solid-state drives), the density offered by traditional hard drives is unmatched. Western Digital showcased volumes up to 20 TB, as well as multi-actuator driveswhich can increase the performance of a spinning disk by an order of magnitude. These drives will consume more power than a traditional drive, but less than the two traditional drives. The data on these platters is striped in a RAID-0 fashion on the drive itself.

The world is heavily dependent on reliable, fast storage for all of the data systems modern life demands. As one of the leading builders of storage media, Western Digital is well positioned to support both end users and hyperscale cloud providers now, and in the future.

Last week I got to spend some time meeting with numerous storage companies in Silicon Valley. I along with another dozen or so delegates met with companies large and small, including Western Digital, Dell EMC, NetApp, and startups like MinIO. I’ll be writing posts in coming weeks to talk about some of the interesting technology we learned about this week.

Photo by Anthony on Pexels.com

In this post I wanted to focus on some interesting scenarios. It’s something I specifically noticed when we were at Western Digital but came up again particularly with the startups we met with. I had this thought, and then on Sunday Argenis Fernandez (b|t) who recently returned to Pure Storage about about after this tweet.

File systems suck.

— Argenis Fernandez (@DBArgenis) January 28, 2020

Argenis was complaining about file systems because when you have very fast (think NVME, or faster) storage, or storage-class memory the overhead of all the things the file systems does become a significant portion of the time that it takes to complete an I/O operation. This isn’t significant when your IOs take 4-5 milliseconds to complete, but when they are completing in 50 microseconds you notice the time it takes for the filesystem to timestamp a file.

This leads me to the point I wanted to make in the post. Storage technology futures are very much bifurcated (that’s a fancy word for going in two directions) –on one end there is ultra-high performance NVME storage for workloads like gaming and ultra-high throughput trading systems. On the other end there is a lot of development around ultra-high density storage for hyperscale providers (that’s basically your public clouds and Facebook).

Did you know that there were hard drives with multiple actuators (needles to a record player for those of you who are old)?

Multi Actuator Technology: A New Performance Breakthrough

The reason why this is happening is that spinning hard drives are here to stay, for density reasons (you may have heard that the world is going to have eleventy billion zetabytes by 2022 and most of it will be in cloud, or something to that effect),  and SSDs still lack the density required to say be a cloud provider or host most of the world’s photos.

The cloud providers are also part of the high-speed storage game–mostly to be able to do things like NMVE over fabric, which will allow ultra-fast disk to by virtualized and shared.

What does this mean for you as a data professional and consumer of storage? It means things probably aren’t going to change that much for you. If you are working with an all-flash vendor for performance storage, you’ll see the gains as NVME rolls in, but a lot of the ultra-high speed storage will be limited by the rest of stack (OS and RDBMS). If you are in the public cloud, I think you will see storage get gradually faster and less latent over the next 18 months, and you will see densities increase in hard drives. Your SAN admin will get some better tools, that I’m going to talk about in some coming posts.

I’m doing another precon at SQL Saturday Chicago on March 20th, 2020. The event is at Benedictine University in Lisle, IL. This time we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into Azure. While last years precon focused on basic infrastructure skills in Azure, this time we’re going to focus a little deeper into the specifics of the Data Platform in Azure. I did a variant of this topic in India last August, but I’ve made a few changes based on a number of conversations with customers I had at Microsoft Ignite last year.

Photo by Nate on Pexels.com

In this full day session, here’s what we’re going to cover:

• VMs and Storage (like it or not this is still 80% of the cloud spend, and it’s how people migrate to the cloud)
• Understanding the Azure services you need to manage your environment (this is going to focus heavily on Azure Automation, Azure Key Vaults, and Logic Apps)
• Azure Data Platform–This is a Big Topic, but here’s how it breaks down
  • Understand the differences between
    • SQL Server in a VM
    • Azure SQL Database
    • Azure Managed Instance
    • Azure Synapse (nee Azure SQL Data Warehouse)
    • Cosmos DB
  • We’ll talk about the costs/benefits/performance of each of these options, and how they are incorporated into your broader architecture
  • Don’t worry, I’m a DBA, we’ll cover HA/DR here
• We’ll also talk about a bit about cloud focused application architecture
  • Why Redis is front of your database is a good idea
  • Taking advantage of dynamically scaling resources

That’s a lot of topics–it’s a full day, and the deep dive part will be on the data platform, but any and all questions are welcome. There are still a few discount tickets left–you can sign up here.

I’ve posted about ransomware a few times before. At DCAC, we’ve worked with a few customers who’ve fortunately been able to help them recover from their attacks. But ransomware attacks are trending upward, as seen below–there’s a ransomware attacker that has pulled in $10 million dollars this year (this year being so far in 2020. 7 days in). This had been a number of announcements about ransomware attacks in recent days– a small company that went bankrupt and money exchange Travelex who was recently attacked.

Travelex's reason for not disclosing that this is a ransomware attack is because 'the police advised against it as it may harm investigation'. Yet the Met were happy to confirm it. Questions about how transparent the company is being will be asked.

— Joe Tidy (@joetidy) January 7, 2020

Several thousand Pulse Secure servers are still online, including extremely high profile US and UK companies (including telcos and MSPs). *PATCH* https://t.co/3sCt6sYlS0

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) January 6, 2020

A REvil sample somebody uploaded to VirusTotal on New Year's Day, they're asking for $850k or $1.7m. Hash = 42996516b6604ba136ff909d9b59d2a676a72eaafa30c729cdfaddd96b20fc83 pic.twitter.com/V34oPNUyiR

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) January 6, 2020

A US firm got ransomwared, paid the ransom, couldn’t actually decrypt the files and has now gone bankrupt. https://t.co/BVQzhMqYv5

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) January 5, 2020

This is what I mean when I say governments and industry needs to look at ransomware seriously. This is a subset of one group with $10m so far this year. https://t.co/OfWMRWN7xp

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) January 6, 2020

The ransomware that struck New Orleans government prevented cops from accessing and sharing data, and according to this report, enabled a serial flasher to continue to assault women for weeks before his eventual arrest https://t.co/Ulb6HStY1c pic.twitter.com/qV4ritvzcG

— Selena (@selenalarson) January 7, 2020

Ransomware attacks are quite different from traditional hacking. Traditionally hackers are in pursuit of high value data, whether it be from a government agency or a large enterprise business, or someone with a vast array of customer data like Equifax. Ransomware is targeting easy targets, that the attackers think will pay, or hope they will pay. What that means is that if you work for a smaller firm, you are far more likely to be attacked with ransomware than you would be in a traditional hacking attack. Theoretically,  large enterprises have more network segmentation, and better security controls, that make them less vulnerable to these attacks. As the the last year has shown, this is definitely not always the case.

It’s All About the Network

The way ransomware typically works, is to find a vulnerability via user accounts, in order to run exploit software on your network. If the only thing that can be reached on your network is user PCs, that’s the only data that’s going to be encrypted. Where organizations get exploited by this, is that their user network is either directly connected to their business network, or there is just one flat network structure. This means if a user is attacked (typical attack vectors are emailing infected office documents or PDFs, but others do include more advanced attack vectors like the aforementioned Pulse VPN vulnerability) the ransomware can go after file servers and domain controllers and start encrypting all of your files.

Assume Breach

One of the most important approaches to this, is that in order to build your network structures appropriately, you need to assume that your user network is going to be breached. It’s what Microsoft does with Azure, and it’s what you should do on your network as well. This means you need to do a few things:

• Segment your network
• Separate accounts, and maybe even a separate domain for your all of your servers
• Disconnected backups, you can encrypt a safe full of tapes
• Frequent restore testing
• Basically, if you can connect to a file or database server from your corporate laptop without multi-factor auth, changing credentials, and/or network, you’re at the mercy of your dumbest user to not launch an infected Word file

All of these controls make our jobs harder, and it sucks, but it’s what we have to do. The one benefit of modern technology is that the cloud makes all these things approachable to even the smallest of businesses. I can build a segmented network in about 20 min in Azure, whereas it would take me a few hours to find the the right equipment at the right price point from a networking vendor if you were trying to do it on-premises.

I’m Just the DBA, What Can I Do?

I get it, and I’ve been there–you’re the DBA at a company where IT isn’t exactly the priority. There’s a few approaches you can take–the first is the most self-serving for me, is to engage a consulting firm like DCAC. While you know what you are talking about, your management sees you as a worker bee, and may not listen to your complaints about having an open WiFi network that your regulatory agency can logon to and see the public file servers (yes, this actually happened to me). However, when they are paying a consultant $ALot/hr they tend to be more receptive of taking advice, even if it’s the same thing the DBA has been talking about for years.

Another approach is to hire a penetration testing firm–many large organizations are required to do this by regulation, and they do a good job of identifying vulnerabilities in a firm.

Finally, and the easiest thing to execute is to PATCH YOUR SHIT. This is where you can assist the most–you can patch Windows and SQL Server (or Linux if that’s your bag), and you can work with the sysadmin teams in your organization to ensure that all OS, application, and mouse software is patched regularly.  It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t fix all of your problem, but it’s a start. Also, test your god damned restores, it’s not enough to have backups if you don’t know that they work.