The quest for an integrated storage stack

In prior posts I've mentioned the multitude of problems with the standard Linux storage stack. It's inflexible -- once you've set up a stack (usually LV->VG->PV->MD->BLOCK) and opened a filesystem on it, you cannot modify it to, e.g., add a replication layer to the stac. It lacks the ability to do geographic replication in any reasonable fashion. The RAID layer in particular lacks the ability to write to (and replay) a battery-backed RAM cache to deal with the RAID 5 write hole (which, despite its name, also applies to other RAID levels and results in silently corrupted data). Throw iSCSI into this equation to provide block devices to virtual machines and, potentially, to do replication to block devices on other physical machines, and things get even more complex.

One method that has been proposed to deal with these issues is to simply not use a storage stack at all. Thus we have ZFS and BTRFS, which attempt to move the RAID layer and logical volume layers into the filesystem. This certainly solves the problem of corrupted data, but at a significant penalty in terms of performance, especially on magnetic media where the filesystem swiftly becomes fragmented. As a result running virtual machines using "block devices" that are actually files on a BTRFS filesystem results in extremely poor "disk" performance on the virtual machines. A file on a log-based subsystem is simply a poor substitute for an extent on a block device. Furthermore, use of these filesystems for databases has proven to be woefully slow compared to using a normal filesystem like XFS on top of a RAID-10 layer.

The other method that has been to abandon the Linux storage stack except as a provider of individual block devices and instead layer a distributed system like Ceph on top of it. My tests with Ceph have not been particularly promising. Performance of Ceph block devices at an individual virtual machine level were abysmal. There appears to be three reasons for this: 1) Overly pessimistic assumptions about writes on the part of Ceph, 2) The inherent latencies involved in a distributed storage stack, and 3) the fact that Ceph reads/writes via XFS filesystems layered on top of block devices, rather than to extents on raw block devices. For the latter, in my experience you will see *at least* a 10% degradation in virtual machine block device performance if the block device is implemented as a file on top of XFS rather than directly to a LVM extent.

In both cases, I wonder if we are throwing out the cart because the horse has asthma. I've worked as a software engineer for two of the pioneers of Linux-based storage -- Agami Systems, which did a NAS device with an integrated storage system, and Intransa Inc., which did scalable iSCSI storage systems with an integrated block storage subsystem. Both suffered the usual fate of pioneers -- i.e., face down dead with arrows in the back, though it took longer with Intransa than with Agami. Both wrote storage stacks for Linux which solved most of the problems of the current Linux storage stack, though each solved a different subset of those problems. There are still a significant number of businesses which do not need the expense and complexity of a full OpenStack data center in order to solve their problems, but which do need things like, e.g., logged geographic replication to replicate their data to an offsite location, something which Intransa solved ten years ago (but which, alas, died with Intransa), or real-time snapshots of virtual machine block devices at the host device level, or ...

In short: Despite the creation of distributed systems like CEPH and integrated storage management filesystems like BTRFS, there is a significant need for an integrated storage stack for Linux -- one that allows flexibility in configuring both block devices and network filesystems, which allows for easy scalability and management, which has modern features such as logged geographic replication, battery backed RAM cache support (or at least fast SSD log device support at the MD layer), and allows dynamic insertion of components into the software stack much as you could create a replication layer in the Intransa StorStac and have it sync then replicate to a remote device without ever unmounting any filesystem or making the iSCSI target inaccessible. There is simply a large number of businesses which just don't need the expense and complexity of a full OpenStack data center, which indeed don't need more than a pair of iSCSI / NAS storage appliances (a pair in order to handle replication and snapshotting), and the current Linux storage stack lacks fundamental functionality that was implemented over a decade ago but never integrated into Linux itself. It may not be possible to bring all the concepts that Agami and Intransa created into Linux (though I'll point out that all of Intransa's patents are now owned by a patent entity that allows free use for Open Source software), but we should attempt to bring as many of them as possible into the standard Linux storage stack -- because the cloud is the cloud, but most smaller businesses have no need for the cloud, they just need reliable local storage for their local physical and virtual machines.

-ELG