CTERA Networks Blog

The story of Next3® and Thin-Provisioned Snapshots

2010-06-08T04:45:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Amir Goldstein, Next3 Team Leader

Today we're announcing Next3, a file system developed here at CTERA to provide efficient snapshot capabilities on our Cloud Attached Storage appliances. I wanted to elaborate a little on how and why this came to be, and what our considerations were in developing this.

It was almost 2 years ago that I was asked to recommend a file system that will best fulfill the requirements for the CTERA Cloud Attached Storage appliances. The basic requirements were high stability, scalability to 4TB volumes and above, good performance and Linux implementation. There were a few other "nice to have" requirements, among them, file-system-level snapshots. We also had to have the file system ready in time for the planned release of our products, and with the limited resources we had as a start-up company.

Having researched all the relevant candidates, I submitted my final recommendation: That CTERA appliances use Ext3 at that point in time, and consider migrating to Ext4 or Btrfs in the future, when either has proven its maturity.

Chasing the Elusive Snapshot Capability

So file system-level-snapshots were left out, but that was not the end of it. We still wanted to provide this key capability because of the benefits it delivers in addressing accidental deletion of files and other user errors.

I started mulling over the idea of creating file-system-level snapshots in Ext3. Attempts that had been made in the past, namely Ext3cow, did not fulfill the basic stability requirements, and were completely incompatible with existing file systems.

The alternative of using LVM snapshots was not very appealing. Disk space would have to be allocated in advance for each snapshot. Even worse, when that space was consumed, the snapshot would vanish. Those limitations, combined with performance overhead per snapshot, made the LVM snapshots solution impractical for the large number of snapshots, long retention times, and the user experience which we wanted to provide.

One snapshot is worth a thousand WORDs

The basic concept of Next3 was born out of a challenge I was presented with:
"Instead of allocating space for snapshots in advance, can you allocate the space for LVM snapshots dynamically from the file system’s free space?"

After some trial and error, I realized that the right way to do this is to implement the volume snapshots inside the file system itself, and I sat down to write the first draft of the Next3 design...

Two years later, CTERA hybrid data protection and cloud storage appliances are shipping with Next3, and the Next3 project was made public to the Linux community last month.

So What’s Next(3)?

Among those in the community who looked into Next3, some commented that they would be happier if the snapshot feature was merged into Ext4.

Forking from Ext3 was a decision I had to make 2 years ago. Then, Ext4 was still in developmental stage, and due to our own development schedule we could not consider it as the base system for our snapshots capability.

Now that Next3 is out, however, I intend to invest efforts in developing it further and eventually merging it with Ext4, something I recently discussed with Ted T'so, leader of the Ext4 project. Ted has been very supportive of Next3 and we are currently in the process of finalizing Next3 on-disk format and adding Next3 fields to libext2fs.

CTERA is also committed to the Next3 project and will continue to provide support to the Linux community and in due course, the snapshots feature will be merged into Ext4.

Of course, I could not have done this on my own, and I’d like to thank both my colleagues here at CTERA as well as members of the Ext3/Ext4 projects for making Next3 a stable, usable system.

You can download Next3 source code here.

- Amir

CTERA named “Coolest Cloud Storage Vendor” by CRN

2010-02-16T03:51:00.000-08:00

I'm glad to announce that Everything Channel’s CRN has named CTERA one of the “20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors.”

Winners were announced online at www.channelweb.com and are featured in the January 25 issue of CRN.

CTERA at the 2010 International CES

2010-01-06T03:35:00.001-08:00

Last year at CES, CTERA unveiled Cloud Attached Storage™, our hybrid cloud storage technology, and previewed the CTERA CloudPlug, which was dubbed "the world's smallest file server" and was received with great enthusiasm by our customers and press community. This week, we will attend CES again to preview Cloud Attached Storage 2.0 - a significant software upgrade to the CTERA CloudPlug and C200 appliances.

CTERA's Cloud Attached Storage solutions are intended for small businesses, but that doesn't mean that we skimp on performance or features. On the contrary, the upcoming new version we're introducing has many enterprise-grade storage capabilities that, until now, were only available in much more expensive systems.

We will also be demonstrating the CTERA Portal™ management platform, that enables our channel partners to offer their own private cloud services.

Meet us at CES to learn more about the upcoming Cloud Attached Storage 2.0 release, and how to offer cloud storage services with CTERA.

See you there!

How to meet us?

Our booth is at the Marvell PlugComputer Partner Pavilion (LVCC - South Hall Upper Level), booth# 30344

We will also be hosting demonstrations at Showstoppers @ CES, Wynn Hotel – Lafite Ballroom, Thursday 6pm

To schedule a meeting email us at: ces@ctera.com

Let’s get down to bare-metal

2009-12-02T03:45:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, a customer asked me whether it's possible to perform bare-metal backup of an Exchange server to his CTERA CloudPlug. He was happy to hear that it's possible and even quite easy, using standard Windows tools.

Before I explain how to perform a bare-metal backup and recovery with your CTERA device, let's discuss what bare-metal backup and recovery are and examine the advantages and disadvantages.

When you buy a new hard drive, or when you've reformatted your hard drive, the drive is "bare metal". That is, it has no operating system and no files. In this situation, it's very convenient to have a special backup containing everything you need to install on the bare-metal drive. Such a backup is called a bare-metal backup, and using this backup to restore data to a bare-metal drive is called a bare-metal restore.

The main advantage of bare-metal backup and recovery
is its usefulness in disaster recovery. Your system is restored to the exact state that it was in before disa
ster struck, including all installed software and configurations. It's also useful when upgrading your drive to a larger drive, since it saves you the work of installing software and configuring the system.

On the downside, bare-metal images take up a lot of s
pace: A typical Windows Vista installation will take at least 7GB of space, and usually more, depending to the amount of installed data and applications.

"Ok," you may say, "That’s fine for local backup, but can we back up such large backup images to the cloud?" Well, the great thing about CTERA's Cloud Attached Storage devices is that their de-duplication capabilities minimize the amount of traffic. In a sample case that we tried, the size of the bare-metal image was 7GB. However, due to the effects of compression and deduplication, only a much more compact 3.5GB were actually sent in the first online backup. When a daily incremental backup was performed, subsequent backups were typically less than 150MB each, in our trials. Furthermore, when you use bare-metal backup for multiple computers in your network, your Cloud Attached Storage device is smart enough to detect similarities between the images (for example, if you have two Windows Vista computers, the system files are all identical) and backs up identical sections of the bare-metal image only once.

It is a good practice to maintain 2 partitions on your hard drive, one dedicated for system & applications, and one for documents. This way you have the opportunity to perform bare metal backup for the system files & applications only, and backup the documents separately, using CTERA’s more convenient file level online backup.

Now that I've explained bare-metal backup and recovery, let's see how to perform these tasks with your CTERA box.

You'll need a computer with Windows Vista, Windows 7 (Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions), or Windows Server 2008. These operating systems all include built-in support for a backup tool called wbadmin, which allows bare-metal PC backup to a network share.

To perform a bare-metal backup, you need to open an elevated command prompt (run as administrator) and enter the following commands:

net use z: \\MYDEVICE\SHARE /user:{your username} {your password}

wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:\\MYDEVICE\SHARE -allcritical

Where MYDEVICE is the IP address or host name of the CTERA box, and SHARE is a share with write permissions.

If you like, you can schedule automatic bare-metal backups, by preparing a batch file with these same commands and using the Windows Task Scheduler to schedule automatic execution.

To perform bare-metal recovery, boot your PC using the original Windows DVD, enter the Windows Recovery Environment, click on the Command Prompt option, and enter the following commands:

startnet

net use z: \\MYDEVICE\SHARE /user:{your username} {your password}

wbadmin get versions -backuptarget:\\MYDEVICE\SHARE

This last command will display the existing backup versions. Choose the relevant backup set, and enter the following command:

wbadmin start sysrecovery -version:MM/DD/YYYY-HH:MM -backuptarget:\\MYDEVICE\SHARE

Where MM/DD/YYYY-HH:MM is the backup set's date.

If you have multiple machine backups in the share, you'll need to add the -machine:xxxxx parameter, where xxxxx is the name of the machine you're recovering. If you're recovering to a volume other than the original, you may need to add the -recreateDisks parameter.

For additional information about CTERA and bare metal backup, click here for the full knowledge base item.

I hope this has been helpful! Comment on this post, if you have any questions…

A 'Plug' for Marvell

2009-02-25T13:10:00.000-08:00

Hi all,
Yesterday was a major milestone day for our friends at Marvell. They’ve officially announced their new Plug Computing initiative (see the official press release here), and we are very excited to be one of the first companies to partner with Marvell and deliver products based on this new technology.

Last month at the Consumer Electronics Show, we unveiled the CTERA CloudPlug, the world’s first plug-top computer that transforms any USB drive into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with an integrated secure online backup service. Some have called it the world’s smallest server.

Why is the Marvell partnership important for us?
Marvell is a leader in System-on-Chips for network attached storage (NAS) appliances. Their cutting edge Kirkwood CPU allowed us to squeeze the same levels of performance that were previously possible only on high end PC servers into a compact device that consumes a fraction of the power of an equivalent PC (very eco friendly). That’s really important for a device that is expected to be always on.

Having a powerful CPU enabled us to develop innovative embedded software to power our cloud backup services without our users needing to download extra software on their PC. Simply connect your USB device into one end, a router/modem into the other, and plug it into the wall.

It’s easy for the user, and even easier for our ISP partners. With no client download, the ISP doesn’t have to worry about IT support issues that can arise with any software (driver conflicts, performance degradation, security issues, etc).

As for a CTERA update, things have been crazy since CES. We never could have imagined the level of interest! We’ve been keeping our heads down and our focus on the future as we prepared for the product beta stages. We’re on track to bring both the C200 and CloudPlug to market later this year. We’ll keep you updated.

Thanks to everyone for your support!

Liran

Travelling in time with the CloudPlug

2009-12-07T03:00:00.000-08:00

People tend to think of data restoration as involving all the files and folders on a drive when a major disaster strikes, for example if your hard drive fails or a virus wipes out all your files. However, far more often, you just need to restore a single file or folder. Take the following scenario, for example:

You're sitting at your computer editing an important file stored on your CloudPlug. You work for hours on the file, chage this word, that sentence, and finally you hit Save. Just as you're leaning back, pleased with a job well done, you get an email from your boss requesting the older, unedited version of the file – which of course no longer exists. You're left desperately wishing you could travel back in time and save a copy of the file before editing.

Well, the CloudPlug allows you to do just that. If you've performed online backup of your important files and folders, then the previous version of this file is safe and sound. Better yet, you can restore just this one with only a few clicks, right from your familiar Microsoft Windows interface.

Here's how it works.

You'll need Windows Vista (Ultimate, Business, or Enterprise editions), or Windows 7 (Home Premium or higher). If you are using another OS, see this knowledge base item.

In order to restore the previous version of a file, do the following:

1 Right-click on the file, and click Properties.

2 Select the Previous Versions tab.

3 Select the version you want to restore from the list, and click Restore.

4 Presto… your good ol’ file is back again.

You can also use these same steps to restore whole folders or recover deleted files.

I hope this has been helpful! Comment on this post, if you have any questions…

CTERA Launches Cloud Attached Storage; CloudPlug and C200

2009-10-06T04:05:00.000-07:00

(In the SF Bay Area tonight? Please join us for a launch TweetUp at the Horizon Lounge in San Francisco from 6-8 p.m. Register at: www.cteracloudplug.eventbrite.com)

Official Press Release

Today, CTERA transforms from a start-up team of dedicated professionals with a unique idea, to a company.

As of a few minutes ago, professionals and small businesses can purchase our first two new storage and data protection products designed to dramatically improve and simplify data storage for ‘prosumers’ and small businesses – the CTERA CloudPlug and the CTERA C200.

I’d claim they’re revolutionary, but it would be more appropriate to call them evolutionary – importantly so. Yesterday, if you were a home-office professional or small business looking for a new data backup solution, you likely would have choosing between an external USB HD, NAS appliance, tape drives, or a online backup service.

Each have their plusses and minuses, benefits and shortcomings. Yet interestingly, several of those competing solutions are actually quite symbiotic.

This realization is how we first came up with the idea for Cloud Attached Storage. Why not take the best of NAS and the best of the cloud, and combine them into a single, unified product?

Cloud Attached Storage™ integrates NAS with online backup designed to be very easy to use, fully integrated and entirely seamless.

The result? Today, home-office professionals and small businesses can select a single solution offering blazingly fast LAN-speed file sharing and local data storage combined with the peace of mind and convenience of online backup to provide an extra later of safety in case of a local disaster (i.e. hardware failure, natural disaster, fire etc).

We've posted more detail about the CTERA CloudPlug and CTERA C200 here. Pricing for the CloudPlug starts at $199 including a year subscription of 10GB online backup, and is available for purchase online here. The C200 starts at $499...please visit our Web site and we’d be happy to connect you to a channel partner to deliver any of our solutions to you.

Lastly, we want to thank all our new partners: Rackspace, who is working with us as part of their Cloud Tools initiative to market and promote the CloudPlug to their customers (and more); Marvell, developer of the Sheeva CPU technology; and Interwork Technologies, an SMB focused distributor who announced CTERA’s selection yesterday as part of their new Security-as-a-Service Suite.

And a special thanks to the entire CTERA team…congratulations on a successful launch! See you when I get back.

Liran Eshel

CTERA Wins at Under the Radar

2009-04-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

After two long red-eye flights, I’m back home from a week in California and the Under the Radar event. It was a great conference. Plus: CTERA won a Judges Choice award, in the category of Data Management!

You can see the video of the presentation here.

Our press release with more detail is here.

The rest of the week was extremely productive as well. Zohar and I met with a number of potential partners, and the feedback was incredibly positive and promising. I’m encouraged by our progress and hope we’ll have more to announce soon.

In the meantime, the beta is progressing smoothly. We’re working with our beta distribution partners and have units being tested live at customer sites. We’re about to move into an expanded beta phase, and we’re on schedule to launch later this year.

Many thanks to the team at Dealmaker Media for a very successful event, and for the invaluable presentation support. Our story is better as a result. I’d also like to thank the judges for the recognition – it extends far beyond my presentation back to the team here in Israel. They deserve it.

Liran

CTERA on the 'Radar'

2009-03-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

Everything you’ve heard about start-up life is true. It’s crazy-busy, with pieces moving, morphing and falling into place almost daily. No one wears a single hat, everyone has a common goal, and the camaraderie is high - even while the nights are long. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

As CEO, one of my challenges is appropriately splitting my time between building the product and getting the word out. At the office, the team is constantly building and innovating products, services and solutions for tomorrow and beyond. But to turn those innovations into a profitable business, I need to be on the road meeting with customers, partners and press a healthy amount of the time.

Events help significantly. We launched at CES in order to leverage the concentration of potential technology and service delivery partners. It turned out to be a prescient decision. We’re hoping to announce at least one partnership soon resulting from CES meetings.

Now, we’re very excited to have been invited to the Under the Radar conference next month in Mountain View, Calif (April 24th…we sent out a press release this morning here). This show’s theme is all about Cloud Computing, so the audience should be very relevant for our story.

If you aren’t familiar with the show, it’s a unique format designed specifically for start-ups. Essentially, I will have six minutes to present our story to an influential group of potential technology partners/customers, industry leaders, investors and media. It’s not a lot of time, but the CloudPlug is impressive both in its capabilities as well as its tiny form factor, service providers are looking for new services to offer, and small businesses need cloud storage. It’s a straightforward story.

Plus, I’m looking forward to checking out all the other presenters. If you’re going to be at the conference please say “hi”, or shoot us a note if you’re interested in hearing more about our plans. I’ll be in town for a few days before the show too.

More updates on products soon…

Liran

Day One, CTERA Networks

2009-01-06T00:35:00.000-08:00

There are few things as thrilling and nerve-wracking as announcing your brainchild to the world (only the births of my children have exceeded it).

For my new company, CTERA Networks, that day is today. This morning is our formal announcement. I am very excited, and looking forward to your feedback, advice, and opinions.

My name is Liran Eshel, and I’m the CEO and founder of CTERA Networks, along with my partner Zohar Kaufman. In our past lives, we led SofaWare, a Check Point company. We started CTERA last May with a single goal: to take our expertise in managed appliances and services for small businesses and channel it into developing a new kind of cloud storage solution.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, cloud computing is the latest and greatest innovation helping to advance the Internet industry. But for all the hype, your average small businesses and consumers have not yet moved their files online.

It reminds me of 2000-01, when businesses first started to consider using the Internet for business communications traffic. The adoption of VPN networks over traditional leased lines was initially slow, especially for small businesses. That was because Internet links were still sluggish and not so reliable, and the VPN technology too difficult for a small business user to understand and configure. We are seeing the same thing today with cloud storage. It offers infinite storage that is accessible from anywhere, and without any need to buy expensive hardware. Just pay for what you need. Great, huh? So why isn’t everyone using it for their office needs?

We believe that we have created the right combination of technologies (Cloud Storage with Network Attached Storage - NAS) at the right time to make this vision a practical reality. We’re calling our new concept “Cloud Attached Storage”, because we see it as a convergence between Cloud Services and Network Attached Storage. We’ll be demonstrating a key element, called the CloudPlug, at CES later this week. The CloudPlug is a tiny appliance that turns any USB device into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with automatic online backup. It’s very cool, here's a pic...

You can read more about Cloud Attached Storage and the CloudPlug here: www.ctera.com.

If you're going to CES and are interested in a meeting, please send a note to info@ctera.com.

Thank you for stopping by to help us celebrate our “grand opening”. We look forward to hearing from you.

Liran Eshel