Posts by M. B. 263 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Aug 2009
Will this be VMAX2 and VNX2? Rumor has it the VNX2 will be a dual-socket family of systems (unlike the current single-socket systems), likely to be able to keep up with large pools of flash. I've been scouring the Internet and grilling account managers over the v2 models for a while, no one wants to spill the beans.
Fingers crossed for a big reveal at EMC World 2013.
...it was formerly Pillar Data Systems (majority owned by Larry) and Oracle bought up the company to try and expose it to more customers, I suppose. We have significant investments in Oracle software unfortunately, and they try to sell us the kitchen sink on occasion, but they have never once tried to sell me their storage.
Their ZFS appliances aren't bad, just badly priced. I can do NetApp for a whole lot less, especially in the entry and mid-range configurations, which means tons of good software to integrate the storage into my applications/systems.
"You don't need to license every core in the cluster - only every core within each host that will be running Oracle workloads. DRS affinity rules can help you to achieve this goal. If Oracle try to tell you any differently, ask them to point out where in your Oracle License and Services Agreement (OLSA) it states that you have to license hosts that will never run Oracle applications."
They actually have told us differently! I thought it was pretty ridiculous that they would charge us for every host in the cluster, even when only two 6-core hosts would run RAC nodes. They insisted that was the case, even after asking about CPU affinity specifically they offered nothing around configuring host affinity. F@cking b@stards.
Things like RAC licensing on a per-core basis kills Oracle on VMware for us. It's not "per vCPU assigned to the VM" but rather for each and every physical core the VM could possibly run on. I have 96 cores in my vSphere cluster. To run RAC on that would be prohibitively expensive. We've been down this road with them before, we can do it all we want but it'll cost us big.
Oracle VM allows you to do hard partitioning of the CPU cores to avoid that. The new Oracle Database Appliances allow you to use Oracle VM to deploy database nodes and use leftover compute resources for middleware or business logic, locking VMs to specific cores and driving up resource utilization, while maintaining licensing compliance with Oracle at the same time.
They've created a value proposition, which is mighty big of them because it'll save us money in the long run. We still run our application servers and core infrastructure bits in VMware and leverage that highly developed ecosystem (virtual appliance support, SRM replication, SAN integration, hardware monitoring plug-ins, etc) but now we have an easy way to consolidate the formerly unconsolidatable Oracle apps on a different platform that allows us to get the most out of the hardware.
That's what will get them market share, offering value. It's a strange thing coming from Oracle but I think it could work to a point for organizations like ours running Oracle software and wanting to get the most out of our new ODAs.
Have to agree here. SSO is garbage. Do better, VMware.
Why can't the vCenter Appliance simply scale up to dozens of hosts and hundreds of virtual machines? The whole point of this is that things should be simple and just plug in to each other, like any good relationship. Make it simple, keep it simple. Otherwise, you know, Hyper-V is pretty simple (okay System Center can be a nightmare, but SCVMM isn't required to make a cluster work).
That's the way it is in storage. The DotHill product is a good performer and doesn't break the bank for the SMB marketplace, but it's a legacy platform. There hasn't been any major innovation on the product for a long time.
The last time I had my folks do a pricing exercise for remote office storage, NetApp FAS2240 came in at several thousand dollars less than an HP P2000. As a result, we now have a FAS2240 in one of our remote offices handling file and block duties.
I guess Hitachi can too then by default!
Also, the article mentioned the resiliency of the VMware VSA but didn't mention HP's StoreVirtual VSA (running LeftHand OS 10) which I would argue is the best of the bunch. We've been testing it here on some old servers for lab purposes and it works really quite well if you have a couple NICs to spare.
...was SSO. For some reason I was completely oblivious to the database requirement and kept pointing it at the vCenter database my DBA had created for me. Once I pulled me head out of my ass and got him the SSO DB scripts it was very easy to get it running.
Next step is to cut over my ESXi hosts from one vCenter to another, then use Update Manager to bring them all up to 5.1.
...but rather the support , services, and top tier warranty. The VAR network. The 2 hour onsite response. As well as the R&D/testing and reference designs that go along with purchasing IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, or Oracle servers. Yes you could duplicate them on Supermicro hardware for much less money, but who is going to stand behind the end result?
My environment is a mix of medium business and small enterprise requirements, and my infrastructure is a mesh of HCL'd hardware and software at correct revisions, a lot of it straight out of vendor whitepapers. There is simply no room for this white box level stuff until it has the same level of R&D and support as the big players.
Unlike some organizations, we can't simply buy the cheapest thing out there, throw any old version of Linux on it, stick it in a rack, and call it done. I suspect that is the way it is for many organizations out there.
In other words, cool, but not for me.
...OnCommand System Manager which I give out to new storage guys to help them get used to managing NetApp storage, the OnCommand family is a bit of a mess. Or at least it was last I checked it out about 8 months ago. Installed all the bits and pieces and wasn't very impressed with the inconsistent interfaces and jumping between applications. I promptly went back to SSH and scripts for most of my work.
...is that VARs, at least around me, are sticking to what they know best.
On the storage side I'm still getting the EMC and NetApp sales pitches with a few IBM as well. I have to go out and ask repeatedly to see Compellent or 3PAR options. One vendor even has a golden reference on Compellent, 360TB main site with replication and all the cool functionality licensed and used regularly with awesome performance (supporting server and desktop virtualization and a significant Oracle RAC cluster), the client simply adores it.
On the networking side you're looking at Cisco. That's just a fact. One vendor is starting to slot in Brocade where HP ProCurve used to be a good fit (they think A-series is garbage and they think E-series has no future). But if you wanted to hear about them or Force10 or Arista or Juniper you pretty much need to go through the manufacturer itself and have them hook you up with someone locally, and even then they'll probably try to steer you towards what they know best.
I don't want "what they know best", I want the actual "best solution to the problem".
It sucks to see since there's a lot of cool stuff out there, and we aren't seeing very many converged offerings as a result. This has to be impacting the bottom line, at least in smaller markets with smaller VARs with narrower skill sets.
...but not perfect.
Should have made it 1920x1200, you'd be amazed at the difference a little more gives, especially in vertical real estate.
And they should drop the price a couple hundy to make it worthwhile. At $1249, I'd consider it. With 1920x1200 I'd have already asked my Dell rep about one.
"The base configuration has one Compellent SC8K array with three storage trays. The storage setup has one 24-bay SC220 tray filled with *****13 SAS drives***** that have 200GB of raw storage capacity mated with two SC200 trays (each with 24 bays) and that have them full with 600GB 10K RPM disk drives.
That gives you 48 disks with 28.8TB of storage and *****13 SSD drives***** with 2.6TB. This ratio of disk to flash meets HANA's stringent appliance guidelines."
One of these things is not like the other. I suspect you meant 13x200GB SSDs in the first paragraph, just sayin'.
Lenovo x120e. I have this little AMD Fusion-powered netbook, 4GB RAM, cheapest 64GB SSD I could find running Win 7, and 1366x768 11" display with extended battery. Totally usable as a road warrior. Has been all over North America with me for work and family vacations and works brilliantly for what I need. Charges devices. Long battery life. Plenty of performance for office apps. Usable screen resolution and keyboard to get actual work done, especially when RDP'ing back into work machines. Runs all my tools. Got it for about half the cost of an Air, including extended warranty and the SSD.
They just hit a sweet spot for a lot of people, they have enough performance to play movies on long flights and enough grunt to get "work" done without being tied to a power source for any significant period of time. And they're small enough to go into a laptop bag sideways, saving room for important stuff like my son's LeapPad.
Gonna hang on to this one. My wife has mostly taken it over anyways, such a small footprint it easily fits in chair pockets so she can get the latest celeb gossip and Youtube idiocy without moving too much and her 8-month pregnant belly makes a perfect table for it since it's so small and gives off almost no heat.
With all the exciting small storage companies out there I'd look hard at the likes of Nimble. They're even painted to match the UCS servers already.
Nutanix is a cool product but I don't think Cisco would care much about the server side of their offering.
Can't help but think NetApp might be a bit hard to digest.
The title is a bit misleading. There is some interesting things going on in the Dell world, just not ground-breaking stuff.
As an EqualLogic customer (branch offices) looking at Compellent for our head office SAN, we're very much interested in the cross-platform replication and single pane of glass management option (replacing SAN HQ and Enterprise Manager) in the hopper. Storage Center 6.3 is largely re-written and delivers much higher performance, especially with the SC8000 controllers.
AppAssure was a solid buy. It's cheap and I honestly prefer the guest-based VM backup instead of host-based that we've been stuck with for a while. I've had a number of host backup jobs fail due to VSS issues on a single guest, I prefer being able to pause individual jobs and work on specific problem servers without kicking off another round of backups or what have you.
The DR4000 appliance is neat, especially for medium businesses and small enterprises. Based on the Ocarina technology, it gets pretty good storage efficiency and makes a good backup target. A new version is coming with DAS for capacity expansion.
Dell also has clusterable FS-series NAS heads for their block storage, and standalone NAS in the PowerVault NX line.
I think the real problem is one of optics, as this clearly shows. Dell has a lot of storage offerings and things coming down the pipe. If the author had sat down with a Dell rep beforehand this would have been an extremely short article.
Writing off either Dell or HP at this point is foolish, they still have cash and solid products on offer. We're probably not going to see huge groundbreaking things anything soon from either but both are working to provide comprehensive storage solutions. If they've got holes in their storage portfolios, you can bet they're trying to fill them with something that's at least as good as what's out there right now.
Single instance storage is no longer a part of Exchange as of the 2010 release.
I generally configure a third-party archiving solution to grab anything over 13 months old, most of them offer deduplication functionality.
It's a bit of a pain in the butt and we still lose capacity/efficiency, but at least it forced an archiving solution on us (execs wanted us to "just use Exchange and tell people not to delete stuff").
Not strictly true, the Compellent SC8000 controllers have double the CPU and double the RAM and since they're based on the PowerEdge R720, they have 6 PCIe slots for expansion. Also much more granular as far as adding storage, disks do not need to be added in fours or eights, I can buy a single drive if I want, which means its very easy to tack a drive here and there into project budgets (which is a problem I face). And controller upgrades are potentially easier since there is no chassis dependency, a problem we're facing with our 4 year old FAS3140.
But I like smart, efficient hardware. Custom ASICs are just that. And as a lower midrange customer, I know I'll never scratch the performance potential of a Compellent pair or quad-node 7400. The thought of a dual-node symmetric active-active 7400 for potential expandability with an extra shelf for block storage is pretty sweet, hits our capacity, performance, and probably pricing requirements perfectly.
Now to see if they'll bring out the starter kits like they had with the F-class.
...but when I do I want you to shut up and take it.
I've been holding off on this VMware SAN upgrade project for a few weeks hoping for F-class replacements packing a SAS back-end and 2.5" drives and a controller spec on par with IBM V7000 and Dell SC8000. Touche, HP.
EqualLogic slots in there as well, I've seen some interesting stuff where the back end will consist of EqualLogic branch arrays replicating to centralized Compellent arrays, both using Ocarina and Exanet tech for file storage and dedupe/compression and everything tiered automatically across all systems and disk types as needed. It's pretty cool, but also pretty "big picture". Interesting times ahead.
Dell fluid data tiers across arrays too, so you can buy a SATA array and a SAS array, throw them in the same EqualLogic group, and it will redistribute hot blocks across the faster array.
HP's product suffers from two things, if you want a faster tier of disk you have to go out and buy new LeftHand arrays and manually move the data (AFAIK), and if you buy a starter kit with two arrays, you have to use one of them as a mirror. So a 14.4TB kit with two 7.2TB arrays gives you less than 7.2TB usable (with sparing). If you want network RAID-5 you have to add another array, and it has to be a specific part number to match the other nodes.
14.4TB in a network RAID-5 configuration (1 2-node starter kit and 1 additional array, all SAS) rings in at about $85k. A 14.4TB SAS EqualLogic array will cost me $35k, a 13TB SSD/SAS hybrid array rings in at $45k - I can buy both for less than the LeftHand stuff and get more storage capacity with automatic tiering to a higher performance array. Both quotes are on my desk as I type this (I think Dell wants it more than HP from the discount levels being offered).
HP actually offered up even stronger discounting on 3PAR, which is in a whole other class of performance altogether.
"Our new stuff is faster than our old stuff by THIS HUGE AMOUNT!" - Every storage vendor in the history of data storage
Drop the SPC garbage. Drop the marketing fluff. Storage guys should not be getting excited over statements like this, we've been duped and misled too many times before.
Show us REAL WORLD mixed workload performance with low latency and the ability to deal with huge IO spikes and give us real pricing information with real data resiliency factored in and the licensed features people actually need to make the thing do what it says on the box. Then show us how you do it better than everyone else. THEN maybe I'll care about the marketing spew. Also, tell your fanboys to shut the hell up.
Sorry for the rant, this is not EMC-specific but they're certainly a convenient target right about now. Ask me how my mid-range storage RFI is going. Long day.
Beer because of beer.
I used the IBM equivalents, two DS4300 arrays with an N6040 front end and it was... subpar. Manageability was fine since I'm quite comfortable with Data OnTAP but there was a weird timing issue between the arrays which would cause the DS4300s to disconnect from the IBM-branded NetApp at random (well not random, but at an unknown interval). We were never able to solve it (read: IBM and NetApp couldn't figure it out, we were forced to buy native N-series shelves to cover the capacity hit) so if I were to be front-ending any of the Engenio stuff at the moment, it wouldn't be with a NetApp unless they've specifically addressed this issue.
...what else about this array will be cut down to make it fit in to the DS3500 price range, if that's what the are trying to do? Are they cutting back on a couple host ports? Are they cutting the controller cache? Are they cutting out some of the options, forcing people in to the v7000 for certain functionality? I mean, they can probably lose 2 of the 4 fiber channel ports per controller, and they can maybe get away with cutting the RAM in half (can they get away with 4GB/node?) but that won't introduce a large cost savings, RAM and 4-port HBAs are pretty cheap these days.
Not that I doubt them, I just want to know what I'm giving up to get a v7000 with less capacity aside from just "less capacity", which in and of itself won't lower the initial cost (unless there's a big markup on the v7000). As someone considering SAN options for a medium business/small enterprise, I'd be an idiot to ignore this product but my local partners don't even know it exists yet.
You see this approach a lot more on the enterprise computing side, Dell acquired many companies over the past few years but hasn't really gutted any of them, they simply operate as their own division under the Dell name (Compellent, EqualLogic, Force10, AppAssure, KACE, Sonicwall etc are now rebranded Dell:Compellent, Dell:EqualLogic, etc). I'm sure in traditional business areas (IT, finance, HR) Dell has probably consolidated those companies under their internal processes, but otherwise for the most part the companies seem to retain their identities and benefit from some collaboration with other divisions.
It's not a bad approach, and it looks like the same was done with Alienware.
Work bought me one for integration testing with our corporate network. It's not that it integrates particularly well (because it doesn't), but it's certainly cheap enough to "forget" to asset tag it and small enough to fit it in my laptop bag. At home it works great, it's small, attractive case, silent operation, and decent port options made a fan out of my wife who finally figured out where to plug in the SD card and how to use iTunes to sync her old 3GS, definitely a big change from the vacuum-cleaner loud SLI i7 gaming rig which spends most of it's life in sleep mode now waiting for a World of Tanks urge to strike.
Probably my favorite iProduct.
I'm seeing exactly that lately, lots of 3PAR pitches where the Lefthand kit would be more suitable and cost-effective. Even the P2000 in some cases - I've seen some pretty wild discounts on the F-class starter kits just trying to get people on to the bandwagon. Most medium businesses and up are being pitched 3PAR when HP is asked to come to the table.
Nimble has a very cool scale up/scale out product. They might not be on the same level as the 3PARs and DS8000s of the world, but with some serious R&D cash behind them who knows how high they can get their design to scale out.
Cisco has a gaping hole in their storage portfolio that they've been filling with "validated designs" from EMC and NetApp, both of which are probably out of reach in terms of cost. Could be interesting to see how this relationship develops.
Yeah, they could have worded that quite a lot better.
I think they mean A-SIS would reduce capacity requirements by 50% over rivals.
As far as performance goes, the new bottom end FAS2220 is faster than the 3-year-old midrange FAS3140's I've got here. More cache and more cores, according the the website.
...for customers who turned away from VDI due to lack of 3D capabilities?
I would love to deploy thin clients to my shop floor (manufacturing industry) and have my production team be able to load up 3D-rendered drawings from Solid Edge and be able to manipulate them in real-time. That just doesn't happen without good GPUs. This might bring my goal one step closer to reality, worth looking into a bit further.
That's garbage. How does 37TB of RAID0 storage serving 3 hosts compare with 125TB of RAID-DP storage serving 12 hosts? One of those solutions I would actually put in a production environment, the other is designed to run benchmarks really quickly.
And actually, with that capacity requirement (162TB raw) I would probably use a lesser FAS3210 and flash cache (sorely missing) with 12x600GB shelves and the cost would go down - I would cut it down to 4 shelves total (57TB) to compete with Oracle's pitiful 37TB (and watch the cost drop significantly as well while STILL maintaining hot spares and RAID-DP protection for my data).
I think this article is only written to get storage guys all riled up about a junk comparison more than anything.
...downloaded, installed in VMware Workstation (works fine) and had a go with it. Going to take some getting used to without the Start button and needing to use a Metro-like sidebar (expanding from the left side of the screen) to run apps or power off.
On the other hand, the default server management dashboard featuring server groups, storage pools, and other stuff is neat enough. Much improved performance monitoring views. Roles install the same as before, and I have a box running AD/DNS/DHCP/WSUS configured and serving a few virtual clients so traditional services are still easy as pie to set up and work with as long as you have a GUI.
Have not tried remote admin tools yet but sincerely hoping they work as expected. I can't even imagine how annoying it would be to manage group policy from the command line.
I like it. One of the first Linuxes I've been reasonably happy with out of the box, only some minor tweaking to get it to where I want it and be very productive with it. The only problem I had with it was some resume-from-sleep problem on an old T-series ThinkPad which was resolved a few months back as near as I can tell. Great Ubuntu alternative.
Important to note that FC is an add-on for these new models. They have a "modular I/O slot" which allows you to add 2x 8Gb FC ports (or 2x 10GbE ports) per controller, but it's not included with the base model. By "default" they are file/iSCSI arrays, with 4x 1GbE ports per controller (not including management port).
The FAS2040 still comes with FC ports.
Still, under $7,500 is a good number to start at.
...probably right where it needs to be.
That's not a bad price for a content consumption device. Sure, it's not easy on the eyes like a dedicated e-reader but selling a 7-inch tablet with a bit of brand power for two hundred bucks could be a roaring success for Amazon.
I'm interested, this it the right price and right form factor for my needs.
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