N1005 IBM Research: storlets

Storlets: From research prototype to open source technology

<br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs1tf1YT-VtgO5V9ftIFwb3GyuuBk24QSwOdmwaS03j46aJsjxq5Ir27KO43ghLoo_2QeoOPm6IDUnSqfsREZ7vR9R9Y8E0uJxidUHR-ivNtBv1cDLXlXCYa69dJljBe357XBTJyDAiPQ/s1600/DSC_0064_Fotor_Fotor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgs1tf1YT-VtgO5V9ftIFwb3GyuuBk24QSwOdmwaS03j46aJsjxq5Ir27KO43ghLoo_2QeoOPm6IDUnSqfsREZ7vR9R9Y8E0uJxidUHR-ivNtBv1cDLXlXCYa69dJljBe357XBTJyDAiPQ/s1600/DSC_0064_Fotor_Fotor.jpg" width="132" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Researcher Eran Rom</td></tr></tbody></table><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Editor’s note, this article is by Eran Rom, storage researcher at IBM Research – Haifa.</span></i><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">In a <a href="http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.co.il/2014/05/storlets-turning-object-storage-into.html">previous blog</a> post devoted to storlets, IBM Fellow Michael Factor highlighted how storlets can be used to turn a software-defined object store into a smart storage platform. This is done by allowing the computation to run near the data, rather than bringing the data to the servers doing the computations. Michael's post addresses the potential of storlets in cost reduction as well as in enabling new services.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">While in this post we want to concentrate on the technology itself, here are a few things that have happened with storlets since they were a research prototype.</span><br /><a name="more"></a><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;"><b>Storlets advancements</b> </span></div><ul><li><span style="color: black; font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"></span></span></span><span dir="LTR"></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Storlets played a central role in a <a href="http://www.research.ibm.com/client-programs/foak/">first-of-a-kind</a>solution, called Active Media Store, developed with Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI).</span></li><li><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">The <a href="https://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-paris-summit-2014/session-videos/presentation/docker-meets-swift-a-broadcaster-and-39-s-experience">work with RAI</a> was presented at the Paris OpenStack Summit, and adopted by OpenStack as a "<a href="http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/docker-meets-swift-a-broadcaster-s-experience">superuser story</a>".</span></li><li><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">A reference implementation of storlets is now publicly available under 'Open-I-Beam' in <a href="https://github.com/Open-I-Beam/swift-storlets">github</a>.</span></li></ul><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">We started interactions with the OpenStack community on the question of ‘if and how’ to add storlet support into the official Swift release. We will be having a design session discussion on this topic at the upcoming <a href="https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Design_Summit/Liberty">Vancouver OpenStack Summit</a>. We encourage all interested parties to attend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Storlets on OpenStack Swift</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Our implementation of storlets is integrated with OpenStack Swift. Swift is an open source implementation of an object store and is behind several public object store services, including the IBM SoftLayer object store. Part of the idea behind storlets is to provide a flexible means of extending the function of the object store, by giving Swift users the ability to upload code to be executed near the data. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Running user-written code inside the storage system calls for adequate security and isolation measurements. This is where Docker comes into the picture. <a href="https://www.docker.com/">Docker</a> is a popular Linux container management framework.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Linux containers (LXC) are similar to virtual machines, only instead of virtualizing the hardware they virtualize the operating system.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">In addition to providing security and isolation, Docker has tools for packaging and deploying executable images. Using Docker our implementation allows the user to upload the storlet’s code, along with a tailored image where the storlet will execute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Thus, if a storlet relies on some non-trivial software stack, that stack can be packaged into a Docker image and deployed in a Swift cluster, to be later used for executing the user's storlets.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Writing a storlet involves implementing a single method Java interface called IStorlet. That method - called invoke - has two major parameters: an input stream and an output stream. The input stream is used for consuming the data of an object on which the storlet is operating and the output stream is used to write the results of the storlet's computation. Storlets work in a streaming fashion, i.e., they start outputting data before reading all the input data. This is due to the synchronous fashion of storlets’ invocation as part of the upload or download operations as described next.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Once the Docker images and storlets are deployed, they can be invoked on data objects in Swift. Storlets can be invoked in two ways:</span><br /><ol><li><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Invocation during object download. In this case the storlet transforms the object before it is returned to the user. This can be used for scenarios such as pre-filtering data being retrieved for an analytics engine or as an on-the-fly resolution reduction when downloading to a mobile device.</span></li><li><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Invocation during object upload. In this case the data stored is transformed from the data PUT by the user. One example use case is metadata enrichment, where a storlet can tag a data object with additional metadata while it is being uploaded. </span></li></ol></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; text-autospace: none;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt 0cm 36.0pt 72.0pt 108.0pt 144.0pt 180.0pt 216.0pt; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">In our current implementation, invoking a storlet during the upload or the download of an object involves adding a single header to the upload / download request.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">   </span>This header identifies the storlet to execute on the object that is the target of the request. Once the request is received by Swift, a pluggable middleware intercepts the request at the appropriate point: During download this point is when the response data is on its way back to the user, and during uploads this point is along the input path of the request. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">Our code then routes the data to the storlet using file descriptors that are passed over Linux domain sockets to the storlet code running inside the Docker container. Other than these file descriptors, the Docker container has no access to any I/O device. This means the storlet's code has no network access and no access to Swift's own disks. All I/O is done via the file descriptors provided by our Swift plugin.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt 0cm 36.0pt 72.0pt 108.0pt 144.0pt 180.0pt 216.0pt; text-autospace: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-layout-grid-align: none; tab-stops: -36.0pt 0cm 36.0pt 72.0pt 108.0pt 144.0pt 180.0pt 216.0pt; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: Helv;">For those interested in more, <a href="https://github.com/Open-I-Beam/swift-storlets">github</a> has comprehensive documentation that includes storlet samples and automated installation and configuration, which gives you a quick start.</span></div>   <br /><br />

Storlets: From research prototype to open source technology

Researcher Eran Rom Editor’s note, this article is by Eran Rom, storage researcher at IBM Research – Haifa. In a previous blog post devoted...

Storlets: Turning Object Storage into a Smart Storage Platform

6:00 AM N1000 0

<br /><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwU4RDCtEOxkH6uxGkWdTY_8oU9bNHuFNMIosRfsMRSgdad9Rv5sT4LNhUl8JhSBjJ0mg6iPbIkhpA2fDHDyo9hNHeSxYZhmGuSReFdUBWWcGafgDtNceXJVYuftwnXLWYPhLNDlIvw7Lx/s1600/michael5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwU4RDCtEOxkH6uxGkWdTY_8oU9bNHuFNMIosRfsMRSgdad9Rv5sT4LNhUl8JhSBjJ0mg6iPbIkhpA2fDHDyo9hNHeSxYZhmGuSReFdUBWWcGafgDtNceXJVYuftwnXLWYPhLNDlIvw7Lx/s1600/michael5.jpg" width="191" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michael Factor</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Editor’s note: This blog posting was authored by Michael Factor, Distinguished Engineer and expert on Storage Systems at IBM Research - Haifa</i></span></span></div><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Traditional file systems store our information in a tree structure. Although this works fine for small collections of data – like those on our local hard drive – they are not designed for the massive volumes of unstructured content most businesses are collecting, storing, and accessing on the cloud. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">A new method of storing information is called object storage. This approach stores information as objects. Each object contains the data (the bits and bytes of our documents, movies, images, and so forth), together with metadata that holds user- and system-defined tags. These smart data objects include rich information – or metadata – that describes the content of the data, how the object is related to other objects, how the data should be handled, replicated, or backed up, and more.</span></span> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div align="right"><table align="right" border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: medium none; margin-left: 6.75pt; margin-right: 6.75pt;"> <tbody><tr style="height: 71.5pt;">  <td style="border: 1pt solid white; height: 71.5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 144.1pt;" valign="top" width="192"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><span style="color: #0070c0; font-family: "Times New Roman"; line-height: 150%;">“But what if we could turn a software-defined object store into a smart storage platform?”</span></b></span></div></td> </tr></tbody></table></div><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Although object storage can store objects, manage them, protect them, and so on </span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">– </span></span></span>it doesn’t by itself dramatically increase the rate at which we can extract value from objects. But what if we could turn a software-defined object store into a smart storage platform?</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b><span style="line-height: 115%;">Storlets bring the computation to the data</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">A new research prototype called "storlets" holds the promise of greatly increasing the value we get out of storage and the speed at which we can access what we need. A new software-defined mechanism, storlets allow object storage to move the computation to the data, instead of the system having to move the data to a server to carry out the computation. </span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Imagine if every time you wanted to cook a meal, you had to bring all your ingredients to a central neighborhood depot where stoves, appliances, and cooking utensils were available to "process" the food. That’s similar to the current situation with data on the cloud. Storlets come to remedy this situation by moving the heavy lifting to where it’s needed </span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">– </span></span></span></span></span></span>similar to allowing you to cook everything in your kitchen, where all your raw materials are already located. </span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">The impact of storlets is substantial. Stored data can be processed locally, and no longer needs to be transferred over the network to a remote computer, processed, and then put back onto the storage server – all of which incurs both network transfer latencies and thus real dollar costs.</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Our vision is to reduce costs, increase flexibility and improve security</span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span>by turning the object store into a platform, and allowing the functionality of the object store to be extended using software.  </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><b><span style="line-height: 115%;">Getting more value from data – much faster</span></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Aside from saving bandwidth by eliminating unnecessary data transfers, storlets are an ideal way to introduce new services. Storlets can analyze each object and extract its metadata, including size, subject, resolution, format, and more. Since storlets are dynamically loaded code, the function is only limited by the developer’s imagination.</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">For example, a media company could upload a movie to an object store and have it automatically generate a representative image. A physician doing rounds could have the object store send only the portion of a patient’s x-ray needed to her wireless device for immediate viewing. A lawyer could request that the object store provide a document from a previous court case in a specific format. Or pathologists could have images analyzed in the object store itself. All this sophisticated computation is moved into the storage infrastructure via the software of dynamically loaded storlets, making it faster, more flexible, and far less expensive.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">IBM researchers in Haifa, Israel have been working on prototyping storlets for several years in the context of European Union Research projects such as <a href="http://ensure-fp7-plone.fe.up.pt/site/">ENSURE</a>, <a href="http://www.visioncloud.eu/">VISION Cloud</a>, and <a href="http://www.forgetit-project.eu/">Forget IT</a>. In short, we’re looking forward to seeing more value from data in faster and more flexible ways.</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div>

Storlets: Turning Object Storage into a Smart Storage Platform

IBM Research - Haifa object storage SDS software-defined storage storage storlets systems storage Storlets: Turning Object Storage into a Smart Storage Platform

Michael Factor Editor’s note: This blog posting was authored by Michael Factor, Distinguished Engineer and expert on Storage Systems at IBM...