HPE unveils Primera storage tech, vows 100% availability – anyone fancy breaking, er, putting that to the test? HPE has pitched Primera, its new high-end storage platform, at mission-critical applications, and it may eventually edge out the 3PAR line. "HPE Primera is for mission-critical applications and large-scale consolidation for enterprises. HPE Nimble Storage [is] for business critical applications for small and medium enterprises …
Given that high end storage is marked up something over 500% that's not exactly a bold promise. Maybe it isn't quite that bad anymore, but I've been involved with GSA schedule purchases of Symmetrix arrays at 75% off list!
There's no practical difference between 5 9s and infinite 9s. Somewhere between 3 and 4 9s human error becomes the dominant factor for outages, and even if the hardware is 100% bulletproof you can't stop stupid.
% off list is meaningless if the list price is set artificially high.
I've never understood why those buying Cisco think they are getting a great deal at 50% off (or 60%) off list, when they are still paying 2X over a different brand, for example. Is this the way the purchasing dept values themselves - obtaining 51% from their reseller instead of their regular 50% ?
Ditto storage. 75% off list may sound aggressive, but 75% off what? What are the prices for the inevitable disk upgrades? How about extended services?
I'm sure The Primera will play the same games and be priced to market.
You missed the point of my post. They have huge margins, so offering a 20% refund in the event of downtime is no different than offering a 20% discount to a subset of customers which they can easily afford to do in a world where they offer discounts as large as 75% to some. A 75% customer who gets a 20% refund would go from 75% discount to 80% discount. At that price I'm sure they still make money.
Not sure where you get your information, but having worked for multiple technology vendors, the concept of "huge margins" disappeared quite a long time ago!
More importantly though, I believe it is more relevant to separate the legacy storage vendors (you know who you are) from the next generation storage vendors from a value perspective! 20% is a pretty large commitment and not one that a legacy storage vendor is likely to make (without some kind of "cloak and dagger" phrase in their agreement verbiage).
The time is long past for this industry to keep coddling the dinosaurs, whether that is vendors or admins. Innovate your products, or in the case of admins, innovate yourself...or become a fossil!
There really is some space above five 9s. With five 9s, you know that it can go down (and almost certainly will, eventually), and plan dependent services accordingly. Somewhere past that, however, people tend to forget...
Goggle's distributed configuration data service simply never went down (by accident). It was considered a risk that folks would forget that it could go down, and so they would take it down every quarter (for a minute).
Primera sound just a bit too close to Primerica which is a U.S.-based Financial Services Provider (aka a Sub-Prime Loans -- Ooops! Sorry! a Debt Management Plans Provider!) which gives poor people $1000 to $5000 short term loans for up to 48 months or less payment plans at effectively up to 45% per year (i.e. up to 3.75% monthly depending upon your credit rating) compounding interest rate debt repayment plan which over 4 years means your $5000 US loan has cost you 10855 dollars in payments at about $226 per month giving your loan provider $5854 in interest. These plans tend to be used to pay off other loans (aka consolidation loans) What a nice loan shark way to make a living!
What a coincidence! Loan Sharking out storage at high prices using a name that is eerily similar to a Loan Shark-like financial services company.
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Not that it's relevant to this discussion about HPE, but I don't want to let this marinade in the comments section:
Primerica is a Insurance company, not a pay-day loan company. Primerica's primary product is Term-Life insurance (you know, the same thing your employer provides as a benefit) and doesn't "loan" money to people. But please, go on with your ridiculous rant...
At the time of a few years ago they WERE a finance company doing debt consolidation loans! They were NEVER a payday loan company! It was strictly Debt Management loans (aka debt consolidation for relatively poor people at high interest rates)
They sold the finance parts off to Household Finance which was then sold off to HSBC and are now mostly selling mutual funds and insurance services...and still a few debt management services. Technically they are a MLM (Multi-level Marketing) company trying to get "Associates" to sell financial products and services to friends and family and suck THEM into selling further financial services!
Sounds like HPE to me !!!
I work for a competitor, so this is going to sound bitchy, even though I think the 3PAR architecture is really clever and admirable engineering, and Nimble did a great job when they launched Infosight a few years ago, but I cant see a single thing here that couldn't be summed up as "We've renamed 3PAR, bumped the ASICs and CPUs to handle NVMe backends and wrapped it in some magical AI marketing sauce "
Those are all good things, but statements like
"incremental gains with NVMe or storage class memory, but there's no game-changer left there, because everybody expects the speed of flash as table stakes"
Huh ? storage class memory (SCM) has 100x (2 orders of magnitude) better response times than flash, used properly, it really is a game changer you just wont notice it so much if you put it behind a storage controller. Inside a storage controller it lets you have bigger caches, but the hottest stuff is already in DRAM which is faster than SCM and theres a rapidly diminishing return on making storage controller caches bigger even if you use The Magic of AI.
Then HP goes on to say ...
"Primera addresses this through the use of real-time embedded AI-driven analytics to optimise the infrastructure through predictive acceleration."
So first they say there's only incremental gains, and then they say they've "addressed" it using The Magic of AI to do something arrays have been doing since, like, .. forever .."predictive acceleration" is also called read-ahead caching, and more recently automated storage tiering,
Using ML to enhance data placement algorithms is cool, but hardly game-changing, or particularly unique, real time data placement optimisation is old tech now, and I strongly suspect theres nothing very "Learny" about the data placement algorithms which, to give the devil his due, were reputed to be pretty damn good in the old 3PAR code..
Overall this just looks like HP trying out the same marketing spin that DMC has been trying to pull of with PowerMAX, a big rebranding exercise without a lot of substantive technology behind it. Theres nothing wrong with that, but simply promising NVMe disks and SCM some time in the future and suggesting it is impossible to get the best out of either without integrating it back to the mothership's cloud analytics (good luck with getting that through in high security organisations like defence) seems not only dull, but a little bit misleading.
As stated, you work for a competitor so your credibility can be argued and for your Info 3PAR have had SCM for a long time. HW arcitecture is new, the operating system is totalally new and you use the work incremental..Yes all tech dev is incremental. It´s not a science fiction movie, have a nice day
You still wheeling that out ... find me a storage vendor that hasn't had an issue and it's down to gagging orders not good engineering. Besides, ATO ...
"It later emerged that the ATO had disabled error reporting on the storage area networks, so missed signs of things going awry. The ATO also did not have a failover rig in place in case of an breakdown because it couldn’t afford one, and was also unprepared for outages."
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