Nutanix vs VMware blog war descends into 'he said, she said' farce Round two in the VMware-versus-Nutanix blog war has opened up with a full-frontal assault by a Nutanix exec, who claims Nutanix wants to be open about its performance advantages over VSAN, but is prevented from going public by VMware’s end user license agreements, or EULAs. In particular, Nutanix claims, EVO:RAIL sales are so …
What really chaps my ASCII about this is that the whole "just get things tested" has been brought up over and over and over and over. I have personally told Chuck Hollis and multiple people at Nutanix that I'm 100% ready and willing to do the testing for free if they'll just get the gear in front of me, and they'll relax their ridiculous "you can't publish your results" bullshit.
I've told both parties "hey guys, I'm willing to work with you to ensure that the configurations are identical, down to the firmware revisions of each component and each configuration". I've offered to work with both sides to ensure that testing regimens meet their standards and that they can see the results before I publish.
I have also told them that I will include both my own standard suite of "real world" tests - actual VMs replaying mixed workloads ranging from e-mail to database work to financials packages to VDI, all on one cluster - and I would even put the units in actual production environments for a few weeks to get a more "beyond the numbers" feel.
Beyond some initial talks that were a "well, maybe that could be a good idea, I suppose" both sides have largely gone dark on the topic of independent testing. But oh, the hatorade-fueled blog wars continue. It makes me ill. We - professionals of all stripes in this industry - should be better than this. We should be working to educated customers and better the experience for everyone. Not slinging FUD and muddying the waters.
So I'll say it again, Nutanix and VMware: put up or shut up. This childish back and forth has you both losing credibility by the day.
This is all very entertaining. However I think this performance debate is secondary to the deeper issue. Once again we have an operating system vendor with a feature deficient solution and a storage system vendor with an overpriced offering looking to “lock-in” their customers. Microsoft, EMC; Vmware, Nutanix. Looks the same to me. Chris’ photo on this article says it loud and clear.
Performance stats will change and can be tweaked, giving customers choice and flexibility is what will give them the greatest value in the long run.
After testing loads of virtualization platforms with regards to hardware and end user performance in previous jobs, I can honestly say that it comes down to "good enough performance". Ultimate performance is a pointless reference, because well before you get that embryonic thought germinated, 90% of the time the "TCO" kneecaps it with a cost benefit shotgun, and quite frankly that is correct.
Once "acceptable" performance has been reached, the main driver is one of cost per "unit" in this case I would suggest VM over the lifetime of the solution. that includes ease of Administration, ease of upgrade, how to scale ...cost of licenses and features etc. These all influence the solution architecture and that I see where vendor value can be demonstrated.
All that said though If you are an enterprise you will run your own PoC to prove things to a level of satisfaction, if not well the phrase "Sucks to be you..." springs to mind. If you are a small company, the rules stay the same, but you might want to check on the entity that is doing to the job for you. In say someone like Trevor Pott's case, you cannot say he does not test and quantify the technology he would routinely use, if you find some back street IT dealer and they had a crap reputation then "Sucks ...". In either case this war between Nutanix and VMware serves no purpose than that of marketing and should be seen and treated as such.
Personally though I laughed at this
"30 distinct steps needed to set up a resilient vCenter data centre deployment" ... The Nutanix equivalent is much more simple ..."
Seriously if you are wanting a resilient system who gives a flying pigs arse about how many steps it took, or 5 minute setup vs 1 day / 1 week set up ? You should care about it being done right.
The issue with "acceptable performance" is that it's hard to qualify with synthetics. You need to dupe actual workloads and then replay a day's worth of real world work on them. Personally, I like replay at 1.5x speed in order to allow for growth calculations, but that takes a lot of time and research beforehand to fully understand the workloads before testing.
I test with synthetics, but I find them almost meaningless. I far prefer to take the workloads I've babied every single day for the past 11 years and run them on $infrastucture. I know those workloads inside and out and i know how they respond to different types of kit. I can get a better feel for "good enough" or not using those workloads than any of the synthetics I run.
But that's me, and that's my workloads. Someone else is going to have a different mix. I think it's important we get as many different testers testing their real world mixes as possible so that we have a deep pool of knowledge available.
"understanding the workload and suggesting/doing some "real world" like tests is part of doing the job right"
Wrong. It should be part of doing the job "right", but IT isn't a profession. There is no professional association and anyone can practice IT without needing to be government by a body with an ethics board. Thus "right" becomes less about "should" and instead becomes "whatever pays the mortgage with the least amount of effort".
:(
"Advertise my services"? To whom, precisely? Maxta? Maxta have me on speed dial. SimpliVIty? They know where to find me if they want me. Same for pretty much anyone else. I don't have to advertise. There aren't a lot of people writing technical content and there seems to be an unlimited demand for it.
If you think that my offering to settle the performance dispute for free is somehow "advertising" you're quite frankly insane. Do you have any idea - and idea at all - what it takes to do a full review on a hyperconverged solution? That's weeks of work, and VMware versus Nutanix is at least two units.
Maybe - maybe - I sell enough articles to make up my time, but not likely. And, to be entirely blunt about it, I could make a hell of a lot more money by basically rolling my face around on the keyboard and "writing what I know" instead of spending the time doing hard research.
Helping wingus and dingus grow up and stop cluttering everyone's twitter and news feeds doesn't really pay dividends except possibly as a portfolio item to say "here, look, I did this". But I have a Tintri review cooking, a SimpliVity one yet to write, I have a Scale versus Nodeweaver danceoff that's waiting and $diety knows what else. I have enough reviews that I could write until December and not need to look for more stuff to do.
That said, I want to see the end to this. Spy versus spy here is embarrassing, and it's clouding the issues. I end up taking a dozen calls a week now from people looking for the straight dirt on hyperconverged solutions, and half of them are trying to cut through the VMware versus Nutanix noise. Settling even one part of this loony tunes bullshit factory would earn me precious, precious hours of sleep.
As for the rest...
I don't know that Maxta have anything to lose by by open. You're probably correct in that Kiran and his lot are in a better position by being open than closed. But I can't agree with you on SimpliVity, or really, any of the others.
SimpliVity isn't the fastest of the lot. Full stop. They are the most consistent - that would be the accelerator card doing it's job - but they aren't the fastest. This is because Simplivity lays its blocks down on a RAID of magnetics and doesn't really cache to SSD quite as effectively as they should.
SimpliVity is absolutely open about this. They have no problems letting me - or anyone else - review the toys and publish the real world results. That buys them no real hoo-rah points except showing customers that they are honest and honourable. Which actually does count for a lot with some people.
Scale Computing? Scale doesn't even have flash! They certainly don't see benefit from letting me test their stuff. Yet Scale sent me some nodes, as well as to numerous other "thought leaders" and we've all had a right good go at them. We broadly agree on the pros and cons and so a picture of just what Scale is like from top to bottom has emerged.
That picture is not one that says Scale is the fastest, or the best priced, or the, well...best anything really. (Except possibly best support.) Scale has very specific tradeoffs and it seems rather a lot of companies are perfectly willing to accept those...and they're happy knowing right up front what the tradeoffs are.
On and on. Yottabyte, Nodeweaver, Tintri, Tegile, Nexenta, you name a storage company and - with a few childish exceptions - they're all open, helpful and friendly. Seems they understand that trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
So here's an idea, mate: why don't you climb down off your high horse and learn a thing or two? The world is quite obviously far more complex than you imagine. Not to mention your terrible reading comprehension.
When you can conceive that people's motivations in the world extend beyond advertising and marketing and thwarting one's rivals maybe you'll be ready to play with adults. Maybe you'll even be person enough to use your real name, instead of lobbing accusations from behind the veil of an anonymous coward.
Until then, kindly get bent.
Thank you.
I thought he was just a blogger. I used to interact with him semi regularly on his EMC blog he never came across to me as someone who should be in charge of anything too important. I can see him probably having a good relationship with customers but making decisions at that level I don't know.
This petty social media war has been going on forever and just appears to be getting worse.
Chuck Hollis and his legendary driverless mouth have only managed to promote Nutanix. Most people reading his blog would probably never have heard of Nutanix but, by mentioning them so often, he has given them credence. ("They must be worth looking at if Virtzilla is so worried about them")
Nutanix should be paying him for the publicity he has provided.
Then on the other side you have Nutanix stamping their little feet and acting like children. Does anyone remember the idiotic iPad game put out by one of their Directors - a game that made personal attacks on a VMware employee. Their team of professional bloggers isn't much better in terms of emotional maturity either.
The sad thing is that they both have good (not great) products but seem to be so distracted by each other that they have lost the focus on their own products and how they might serve their customers better. Simplicity etc should be rubbing their hands together at this as the more effort VMware and Nutanix put into this war the less focus they are putting into their customers. Great news for their competition.
What I don't get is the pi$$ing match doesn't focus on what the end user needs. I'm a happy Simplivity customer. Sure, their dedupe card makes the IO's scream, but what got it across the line was the integrated backup and replication leveraging this dedupe. This saves my team some serious hours each week in managing our ~300vm environment.
Looking at EVO rail made me think I'd stepped back 5years.
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