BlackPhone 2 Review

I've been excited about the Blackphone 2 for quite some time and finally switched over to it.  Partially because I want to make it harder for criminals, companies, and the government to intrude on my privacy, partially because I want to encourage the tech industry to implement smart security measures.  Why in the world does pandora demand access to my iPhone's calendar?  This has gotten out of hand.

Unfortunately, the Blackphone 2 is not ready for prime time.  Here's a short list of why.

• Any attempt to update the OS is met with "Download failed" with no debug data for why it failed.
• It's freaking huge.  One handed, fully 50% of the screen is out of your thumb's reach.  And the weight of it is killing my wrist.  And in a world where I need map on my phone while driving or coffee in my hand while texting, a phone this big is basically worthless. 
• The touch screen is really inaccurate.  I'll tap the same icon 5-10 times before it's registered and acted upon.  Sometimes I'll tap an button in an app and SilentOS will pass the tap back to the home screen, opening a completely application
• Google maps keeps failing to find my location, even though I've given it permission. 
• Even though I blocked Facebook from accessing my location, it is able to access my location via Google Play Service.  So what's the point, Blackphone?  It's not granular permission if you're giving them a giant back door.
• The volume/power combo for taking a screenshot is very hit or miss.
• No built-in visual voicemail.  Gotta download your carrier's app.
• Notifications take a TON of configuring.  Let me put it this way: new applications should not be able to display full notifications on a locked screen.  For example, Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger shouldn't default to publishing the entire text.  A private-by-design phone should at least only show the name of the contact, but preferably only show that a message exists.
• The phone's usability is 5 years behind an iPhone.  Some examples:
• My mom texted me a picture and I wanted to send it to my sister.  There's literally no way to copy/save a picture in BlackPhone's text app. 
• Highlighting text is a real, real pain.  But copying it is impossible, because the copy button is at the very top the screen, 4 inches away from your thumb.
• The triangle-circle-square buttons at the bottom of the screen are endless torture for me.  Apps like outlook have a set of buttons at the bottom of the screen and it's completely counter-intuitive to have two layers of buttons.  I accidentally reply to emails several times a day. 
• To open the camera from a lock screen on an iPhone, you swipe upwards.  To do the same on the Blackphone you have to unlock the phone.  This is a big deal because I frequently want to record events transpiring around me, and I might miss it while unlocking the phone.
• It takes forever to reboot.
• It's noisy.  Why did I just get a notification that I took a screenshot?  I know I took a screenshot.  Why did the keyboard icon just appear in the upper right?  I know I'm using the keyboard. 

Some good things:

• The display is great
• Tethering works great
• The wifi by GPS feature works great
• I love the granular control "security center" where it works.  
• Apps seem to be compatible and work just fine usually.

Google play services (as mentioned before) kills the whole point of the phone by handing control over: https://charlescarrollsociety.com/2016/02/03/silentcircle-blackphone2-is-not-secure-patriot-privacy-privacyproject-review-part-3-of-3/

I'm going to be asking Silent Circle if there's a new, smaller version coming out in the next couple months.  If not, I'll probably give this to some kid to use as a tablet.

Content Delivery Networks

I've been doing a bit of research into both Data Science and the hyperscalers and a few things have struck me.  One is that Google Fiber is incredibly strategic for Google Platform.

The ability to ensure QOS and cache by controlling the last mile of delivery is a huge advantage.  Everything AWS does is dependent on the telcos, because all of their wonderful technology is designed to deliver something (data, a website, a database) from AWS to somewhere, or from somewhere to AWS.  And that something almost always goes through Verizon, ATT, Comcast, Time Warner, etc.

So one of the most innovative, client focused, fast-paced tech giants is completely dependent on the most change resistant, oligopoly, entrenched companies in the US.  ATT and Verizon do some good business in the private-cloud enterprise space, but I've seen up close and personal that their company culture is bureaucratic as it comes.  And of course, there is cost involved: as all of us commercial users of ISPs know, the oligopoly always gets its money.

That's why Google Fiber is so forward thinking.  They're going to leapfrog AWS on this one, and if Google succeeds in laying a network quickly, in 15-20 years it could give Google Platform a killer competitive edge.  

SolidFire and ONTAP

I had a reseller ask last week "Now that NetApp bought SolidFire, are they going to kill all-flash FAS?"  My answer: not on your life. 

NetApp has sold tens of thousands of all-flash FAS (AFF) systems, which run CDOT, our flagship operating system.  It's a great product that enormous enterprises (and governments) are spending a billion dollars a year on: there's no way we'd back down from continuing to invest in R&D there.  

Besides that, SolidFire has a completely different architecture than AFF.  One way to understand it is that AFF's architecture starts with smaller building blocks.  Here's what I mean:

1. AFF dedupes each volume individually: SolidFire dedupes the entire cluster.
2. AFF protects each disk using RAID: SolidFire protects each node using two copies of everything.
3. AFF puts QOS on each volume: SolidFire shows you whether your QOS promises exceed the cluster's ability.
4. AFF deals with node failure by having a redundant partner take over: SolidFire deals with node failure by having ALL the other nodes pick up the slack.

These are different architectures, which solve different needs.   I thought this was a great overview of SolidFire as well:
http://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/solidfire-a-quality-storage/

Performance Archive Part II

More on performance archiving: it collects data at the highest granularity possible for each statistic, often 1 second.  The time range of each dataset is up to 6 hours long, and each node preserves its own set of this performance data. 

There is nothing like this in 7mode (rolling perf data collection) on-box.  You’d have to run perfstats. 

NetApp has tools to analyze the data, but they are not customer facing.    You provide the case number in the command line and it auto-uploads.

You can specify the exact time window you’re looking for:

cs001::> system node autosupport invoke-performance-archive -node cs001-pn01 -start-date "02/22/2016 8:00:00" -end-date "02/20/2016 14:00:00"

There is minimal impact on the netapp system of running this – it already runs in the background and keeps up to 28 days of data.

SolidFire

SolidFire is a "make private cloud easy" solution primarily designed for service providers.  It's a "born in OpenStack" all-flash whitebox solution that aims to be stupid-easy to deploy and manage.

The goal for SolidFire is not to be the fastest, the most resilient, or the most features.  It aims to answer one question, best in class: "How do I easily deploy Storage as a Service?"  You can see this in their design choices:

1. Because this is a product service providers sell, they're flash only, have required QOS policies, and skip all the management tools, leaving that to OpenStack.
2. Because they use two copies of everything instead of RAID, they achieve node level resiliency and skip expensive hardware and software, using inline dedupe/compression to recover the space delta.  This also spreads performance requirements across the entire cluster.
3. Because they expect you'll be deploying a single configuration thousands of times, they support only 1 protocol and have very limited configuration options.
4. Because this is for a cloud, not a single-purpose, the cluster (up to 100 nodes) auto-grows when you add a new node and recovers quickly when you lose one.

A few technical details:

• Platform today is Dell servers.  Now that Dell owns EMC, it'll probably convert to Cisco.
• 10 drives per node
• SF2405: 5-10TB and 50k IOPS
• SF4805: 10-20TB and 50k IOPS
• SF9605: 20-40TB and 50k IOPS
• SF9010:  20-40TB and 75k IOPS
• Features:
• Inline dedupe and compression
• For QOS you can set min, max, and burst limits.
• Mix any node platform
• You can hot remove nodes
• iSCSI, FCP (with a gateway device)
• native snapshot capability and can backup to any Amazon Web Services S3 or OpenStack SWIFT-compatible API. 
• Under the hood:
• Nodes are connected via 10GbE over your shared network.  Not a private intracluster network.
• “All connections for a particular LUN presented to storage go back to the primary node for that LUN. IE: multipath doesn't help you weather a failover. They're dependent on long iSCSI timeouts to give them time to fail a node and redirect traffic.”
• Performance and QOS: http://www.solidfire.com/resources/provision-control-and-change-storage-performance-on-the-fly
• Node Loss Demo: http://www.solidfire.com/resources/demonstration-of-solidfires-automated-self-healing-ha

SolidFire wins Gold in the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2015 products of the Year Storage Systems: All-Flash Systems category.  http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/feature/SolidFire-SF9605

CDOT Tip: Performance Troubleshooting

NetApp is engineering simpler, more elegant tools for our clients to manage their large technology deployments.  We’ve found recently that clients are relatively unaware of one tool that can make your life much easier when you are investigating a performance issue: Performance Archives.

Performance Archives has existed in ONTAP for a long time, but beginning with 8.3 (released November 2014), the payload was updated to specifically enable diagnostic use cases, trending use cases, etc.  In 8.3, there is a command “system node autosupport invoke-performance-archive” which allows customers (HTTPS enabled) to ship back up to 6 hours worth of data at a time, collected a much higher resolution than off-box PerfStat ever did (per-second for many counters) AND allows you to “go back in time” up to 28 days, depending on customer configuration. 

The tool we recommended pre-8.3, PerfStat, will continue to function through 8.4 per current plan but we recognize it is post-failure collection mechanism, which is not ideal.  In other words, after you run into a performance issue, you have to set up PerfStat to run and wait for that issue to recur.  Performance Archives gives you the ability to instantly look back several hours and catch what the problem in the act.

We’re also making big improvements to Performance AutoSupports:  We are focused on efficiently streaming real-time performance information to our cloud and making it easier to access this content within the client-facing NetApp ASUP infrastructure. This will allow for our customers and NetApp support engineers to do trending, analytics, diagnostics and more.

And of course OnCommand Performance Manager remains your go-to tool for retaining, graphing, and machine learning analysis for your entire NetApp footprint.

Read more here: https://kb.netapp.com/support/login/p_login.jsp?page=content&id=3014366&locale=en_US

Cloud ONTAP

  We’ve all seen the cloud coming for years, but now suddenly our clients are finding hyperscalers compelling and maybe essential.  We encourage our clients to use the public cloud wherever it’s optimal and we’d love to partner with customers as they make the transition.  One of the ways we can help is with Cloud ONTAP.

  Retaining the security, standards, and integrity of your data as you start to use the cloud isn't easy.  If your data is already on NetApp, it's a cinch to deploy NetApp's OS in the cloud and replicate the data over, solving all those problems. 

Cloud ONTAP is purchasable in two forms:

• Pay as you go – By directly from AWS and pay per hour.
• Bring Your Own License: 6 or 12 month “everything included” license quoted by NetApp.
• I heard NetApp can put together a 48 month license quote if needed.
• Includes up to 368TB of capacity.
• Neither of these options include the cost of AWS, which depends on several factors, including:
• Which instance size you choose (M4.4KL, M4.2XL, M3.XL, M3.2XL, R3.XL, R3.2XL, etc).  This is a menu of RAM/CPU combos.*
• If you’re using NetApp aggr encryption, you can only choose M4.2XL
• What type of disk you chose (SSD or HDD).
• How much capacity you need.
• How utilized you expect the CPU to be.
• How much data you expect to be transferred out of the instance.  Transfer into AWS is free.

You can use the AWS cost calculator to estimate the cost: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

*Testing indicates a M3.2XL instance caps out at ~10k IOPS (100% read) and 1.5k IOPS (100% write) at 20ms latency.  M4.4XL should accomplish roughly 2x the performance of M3.2XL.  

  In most situations, using storage in the cloud is going to cost you 3+ times the acquisition cost of the same on-prem storage array over a 4 year life.  After accounting for datacenter costs and hardware management though, you may find the TCO comparable.  NetApp offers a free cloud workshop to help you identify which workloads are great cloud candidates to help you sort through your real requirements and costs.  Feel free to reach out to your friendly neighborhood netapp engineer or myself if you're interested!

All technical information is as of CDOT 8.3.2, CDOT 8.4 is expected to have big improvement for Cloud ONTAP.