Posts by unredeemed 100 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2010
Hyperscale datacenters are not standard 1U/2U/3U etc servers, they are not traditional blade servers, often running custom DC power supplies, custom chassis, 100Gb networking, custom ASIC 100Gb TOR switches, etc and more. Basically selling by (the highly customized) rack. They are very dense with lots of compute.
Sales, corporate jobs, support staff, development teams, field deployment. This is not totally far fetched. They have so many products, and so many redundant teams for support, development and sales.
Back in 2016, HP had about 190K+ employees. That was pre-split of course.
Cisco has around 80k
IBM? Over 350,000 employees!
The few MSP/SP's I've worked with... Veeam was installed in "pods." Meaning each customer got their own dedicated Veeam server, often a VM, writing to a DAS or large scale NAS. Never have I run into a single enterprise large scale veeam deployment measured in the thousands of VM's with hundreds of TBs of data being protected.
While many SP's mirror that of an "enterprise," veeam isn't deployed as such. I've seen asigra deployed as such. Even Netbackup and commvault in rare cases.
Roadmaps are always subject to change, you cannot definitely say this statement unless you were the CEO of the acquiring company.. New owners almost always are looking to recoup investments. Whether that be layoffs, product development and/or licensing changes. This is the norm in the industry.
In all cases, where an investment group acquires a company; it's about maximizing profits. Sure it may not be this year... But next? Who knows. Short term, it's most likely business as usual. But I'd expect pricing changes for new sales over time. Certain maintenance contracts going up in price, and perhaps some cross vendor agreements/partnerships reduced or expanded.
More importantly, where Veeam relied on SP's and VAR's to do a lot of lifting; we could see Veeam bolstering their own sales teams to break more into enterprise accounts. Something that haven't really done historically, due to their inability to scale into the 100's of TB's of data to protect, without some massive server/storage infrastructure. Yes SP's use them, but they are often single dedicated installs per customer! That is not "enterprise."
Gosh.. If only there were 3rd party backup products that can back up an organization's cloud data... If only.
"Put it in the cloud," they say. "It's always online," they say... Well it's not backed up apparently!
Fact, cloud providers make your data available as a best effort. They don't fix stupid.
You give the example of the $100,000 spend now turning into $500,000 spend. Perhaps true, perhaps not, I think it depends on the customer. I have seen, met and done business with probably close to a thousand at this point in 15+yrs in my career.
What I'm seeing in large 10,000 employee+ shops that thought, the cloud was grand, it's not. Or I should say, with poor planning it's not. DBA's taking server hardware to AWS in a 1:1 fashion, and getting billed tens of thousands of dollars per month; executives quickly realize, cost savings are only realized with a transformation of infrastructure, policy, mindsets, and people.
That CIO or VP that said, "we're going 100% cloud! And we're doing it in 18 months." Is no longer employed there (Repeated in many orgs I've worked with.). For as many cloud migrations take place, I suspect, you'll also see quite a bit of reverse directions, or hybrid models.
These days, it's not cloud-first. It's more cloud smart, or cloud ready.
This is really unfortunate for them and the employees, but equity firms are about profit and run rate, and then selling the businesses.
Or worse, taking out loans and making acquisitions and paying themselves and letting the company flounder and go bankrupt.
I had a good run working for Symantec, but saw the writing on the wall based on how product management saw my ideas to product improvement. To them if it wasn't Sun, Unix and FC; it wasn't enterprise. And this wasn't that long ago!
Most all of your posts berate on VMware to some level. The Reg could be talking about unicorns, and you seem to bring up Vmware and crap on them. It's quite amusing.
HPE used to have a great software division. Of course, they let it languish and die. I've always joked over the last decade or so, "HP, where software goes to die."
Dell, with the acquisition of EMC, has now grown their software portfolio tremendously. If you thought EMC was a storage company, think again. They themselves had to admit moving to HCI, software defined this and that, etc. But they have a long way to go, to gain trust, and the Dell selling machine isn't quite up to speed on this talk tract.
Cisco? Cisco has HUGE potential to rule the coop if they could integrate or build a best of breed set of apps based on their acquisitions. Who's taking marketshare? NSX from VMmware... Cisco just doesn't seem nimble in changing direction, and still thinks custom ASIC's are the way to go (much like HPE and 3Par).
Oh hey, another "Me too," feature that EMC has offered now for 2yrs+ if not more with VMAX3 and XtremIO with DataDomain on the backend. Or HPE for at least a year with 3Par and StoreOnce.
The downside is that you'll now have to deal with two different companies when it comes to seeing how functional/supportable this feature is....
Inquiring minds want to know, is it an app consistent backup? Or crash consistent snap? Any app integration? Both Pure and Cohesity make a shiny widget with a GREAT UI. But technically, how advanced is this feature?
Lastly, since everyone seems to be jumping on this bandwagon of snaps moving to a disparate storage array, is this the death of traditional backup?
@CheesyTheClown, you're taking a very myopic view of the market and technologies at play in the commercial and enterprise.
Tape is not dead
Mainframe is still kicking
backup software is still a thing
SAN's are not going away in the next decade
And more.
Yay for you using scale out something or another, HCI or whatever. You have something to bolster your resume, that most hiring managers wouldn't take a second glance at. You're using simply a 11mm socket out of an entire set of tools available. Your single socket cant address and fix all things.
Oh and BluRay won because it had better DRM controls, as well as more capacity. HD-DVD was the better format for the consumer.(e.g. backwards compatible) But consumers rarely win the fight for new standards..
Reading in between the lines....
We want to be an enterprise play. We're tired of being an SMB play.
Those other players I mentioned in the SMB, we're above them. But we go against them the most since I know all of their names, even the obscure ones.
Large companies don't want cloud. They actually do, but we're just gonna plug our ears and shut our eyes for the moment. Cloud is so archaic.
Hey look at me, my landing space fancy JBOD is still relevant.
You know how Exagrid wins? Under-sizing and and a race to the lowest price. I've met a lot of customers that get free expansion nodes and only pay maintenance on them because that was negotiated in to their initial sale.
It's a good kit, but post process dedupe while claiming better restores, has other items to contend with in other operations too. No different than in-line having benefits and negatives to it.
I agree that marketing, AP/AR, finance, HR and various back office type roles are on the chopping block. I mean, where has there ever been a merger in the last decade of a publicly traded company that has not resulted in layoffs???? It's inevitable and required to maintain profits.
But I disagree, that engineering can and does go on the chopping block in many cases too. from mid level managers, and in DellEMC cases, I assume products at the end of their lifeline, redundant roles, or roles that may be moved to Israel, Ireland, or China where there are significant resources and development offices for EMC there. It may be percentage points of the overall total, but no one is immune from corporate profits and shareholders.
How many times in the last 10yrs or so has this company been bought, spun out, acquired, etc? Talk about the red headed step child.
LANDesk has their own service desk product, and now there is HEAT. One is obviously a better product, the other will be tossed by the wayside over time. That's a lot of migration and PS time to make that happen.
The core LANDesk features are pretty good at least when compared to something like Altiris. Dell really killed them when they acquired Kace, and stopped selling Landesk. With no strong OEM's to deal with, they really haven't grown to their full potential.
My only gripe was if you want to be a good LANDesk employee, or be favored, or a quota concession in rare cases, you had to be Mormon (They are based in Utah afterall) or at least ex-Novell (they joked and called it the "red sweater club."). Otherwise you're stuck in the role you're in. I found out the hard way how things were done there, and I wasn't part of their "red-sweater." As such got punished salary wise when a new sales rep was brought on board.
Oh well, great product, questionable sales management. Maybe they can partner with Dell again, now that they spun out Kace back to Quest Software.
Except, I believe they didn't follow a calendar year IIRC, their year end was like Jan or Feb or March... As such, they could of laid folks off in Jan 1st, instead they are soul-less douches.
Veritas as I've seen also has changed sales, to be more compliance nazi's, rather than selling on their what I thought was a pretty good product. I hear all about various "assessments," which are really audit's and true-ups.
Do those figures provided take into account Dell probably ramping down Nutanix sales in favor of VXRail? What are they to Nutanix today, 20%-30% of revenue?
That's probably my biggest fear before investing in them. EMC had the same issue when Dell stopped selling their storage. It a while for EMC to get back on top, and they have much more resources and marketing dollars to make that happen.
While we're spewing rumors, I head Unity would be killed off in favor of Compellent.
They'll then make Compellent scaleout, borrowing from XtremIO.
While they're at it, bolt on Isilon on top of that, to replace that crap NAS Dell has now.
This will be the mid-range/high end. VNXe will be for all other workloads.
Short of a very large enterprise, that does an excellent job of controlling purchasing, I've never run into what you describe.
I now see as a common place of random crap sprinkled into DC's. A random business unit buys an AFA from a startup since it was a deal too good to pass. A different BU that bought a Nimble array. etc. The larger IT wouldn't touch that with a 3 meter pole. But the autonomous business units, or crafty purchasing skills circumventing the larger corporate purchasing rules, are able to sneak that in.
These startups are basically seeding a unit at a cut throat price, but usually for a small workload. With the hope it may gain traction in the larger whole, or to claim the new logo (Ever read a EULA lately and the use of your logo?)
But "sole sourcing," agreements are few and far between.
This looks very suspect. Now most IT folks don't give a darn about Gartner, but C levels do.
What I thin kis suspect is where Veeam doesn't do well anything in the physical realm, let alone application level backups like SAP, Oracle, etc. How is that "Enterprise?"
EMC is messaging speciifc tools for specific workloads. That Enterprises don't want a single console, that was all the rage 10yrs ago. That DBA"s, Vmware Admin's etc have more needs than a "backup admin." As such, their tools are targeted at them, with a single reporting engine on top.
Some of the other changes like removing Dell, Asigra and Acronis is a smart move.
You're on crack if you think Vmware ESX 3.x and its feature set would suffice in the enterprise today.
There have been so many improvements in 4, and 5 to make the product scale'able, and handle larger and larger workloads, etc. Not to mention compatibility with newer apps and OS's. I guess for an SMB, a stripped down "entry-level," hypervisor would be an interesting sell... But then who wants to maintain two code bases?
Add to that, Flash (which was established back then) and HTML5 which was ONLY ratified in what the last two years?... Who can move that fast to build a new UI, change the entire ship's course with that? While also building in new features.
SDN, SDDC, and automation are rather large initiatives in many orgs, small, medium and uber large. NSX, VSAN, VCAC are available to follow roadmaps of the customers, as well as the market (for their own greedy valuations) Not sure if you ever worked for a manufacturer.... But large customers drive roadmaps. If a UPS, or AMEX wants X feature, and will commit to buying 10's of millions of dollars of VMware licenses over Y amount of years, Damn straight VMware will find a way to put it in. I'm pretty sure those companies are not looking to implement Windows 2000/2k3 with less than 8GB of RAM on smaller than 2TB workloads.
I don't disagree with their lack of cloud strategy. But they keep saying it's coming... With EMC still controlling some aspects, you really think that will change anytime soon?
60 drive top loading bays are not new. 5+ years ago this was a thing. I recall the Dell Equallogic "Sumo," offering this years ago. EMC has it. etc... The fact that it's still around, means that your issues are not really issues, since it's being used in large installations with success.
Even BackBlaze I believe in their continual evolution of storage chassis and HDD testing they publish, identified this as an issue, and have since made changes.
Simplisafe as a business has a fault. They are only a smidgen of a step above a traditional alarm company, but still act like a legacy alarm company.
Their customer communication SUCKS.
Add to that, they refuse to acknowledge the "Cloud." Things like IFTTT, integration into other devices like NEST, ECHO, etc...
Ask them about it, and a single person who is responsible for marketing and communication will reply with a canned response a hundred times over with the same BS corporate line. Proof is in their user forums about that...
I've been meaning to email their head developer and CEO via linkedin, but have yet to figure out their email aliases... So I haven't been putting much thought into it.
It's the alarm I wanted due to it's sensor options. But hate their lack of internet integration (without a subscription)
I for one think this is a brilliant idea.
New policies are being created to insure from cyber thefts and attacks. This isn't new. Organizations will decide if they need to insure against this type of scenario.
As part of the process, the insurer with their acquired security firm, would provide audits, analyze risks, adjust premiums accordingly... All while collecting the premium, but also up-charges or additional revenue from consulting, the audit's, hardening, etc...
It could be just another arm to an AIG or Zurich.
This doesn't sound great as a mere person, that you have to spend more. But for a business, or large organization, a necessary evil. For the insurer, another form of revenue.
Interesting as EMC will piss off Cisco majorly. And Dell will piss off many of their partnerships like nutanix and the like. Then there is the whole overlap of storage portfolios, where one is much stronger than the other. All of Dell's non-integrated acquisitions, the competing backup products, competing security, cloud, etc... I see no good to come from this at all.
Why in the F*ing world do shareholders have to come first? Why can't it be the customers and technology?
DCIG has been on HP's payroll for years. This isn't news. Often their reviews are so flawed, it's comical and downright false.
Some companies like EMC do not allow you to publish benchmarks without prior permission. So they do the next best thing, pull down a virtual edition of the product and try to test it in production in their little so called lab. Often that VM is a major revision behind. Or pull down every whitepaper and see if the answer is there to match their little feature matrix.
On the Symantec front, they use out of the box settings without tuning buffers, etc. You know, NBU basics...
What I wonder is, how many people really take DCIG as serious? Gartner and IDC are viewed much more favorable by CIO's I've known. DCIG is a small time rag leveraged by few vendors.
Really? Since 4.0? I think huge things have been refined over the years, perhaps not ground breaking, but they have taken things to the next level, and far exceeded the competitor space.
If vmware were to stop developing anything as of today, it would be 2+yrs before the competition even came close to offering similar enterprise features from scalability, HA, failover, 3rd-party plug-in integration, etc.
While the fundamentals are the same from 4.0 to today, everything is just IMO, better/bigger/faster. Of course it's thrown in a whole slew of complexity and licensing headaches too....
The customer's quote is funny to say the least. "recovery process was long and complicated."
What exactly was complicated? The data is restored in its native format to however it was written. Ergo, you restore no different than exagrid or any other dedupe appliance. How much of that was coached, vs customer words?
Add to that, many many times product swap outs are people coming of an aging platform, going to a new HW platform. How old was the "DataDomain," they were replacing vs the newest iteration of Exagrid? Not exactly apples to apples here. But I guess if you agree to be a reference customer and the vendor gives you free equipment, you'll say whatever you are told to say...
At the end of the day though, this grid enhancement is huge for Exagrid. But 700 customers is not tooting your horn either.
<-- Has been a reference customer and has played the game of free HW, or PS, more than once, and sold my soul to say positive things. But hey free is free, and I can live with that if it helped the business and solved a business challenge.
I live in the Pacific Northwest locale (AK, WA, OR, and some surrounding states). While Hyper-V is around, it's probably 1 of 100 customers I meet. King County the largest county in WA, uses it. Since Microsoft is such a large contributor to local taxes, they support buying "local." Beyond that, hyper-V adoption is really not that big, nor accelerating. It just doesn't have the robust features needed that VMware has.
KVM on the other hand, and Oracle VM is picking up steam. I'm sure Nutanix which has a decent foot print here will pitch their upcoming hypervisor. Those mentioned, have more buzz than Hyper-V. I work for a large vendor here, and see customers from 50 employees to 5000+ employees. Hyper-V is just not that prevalent as you say. Perhaps in the SMB space maybe.
Symantec is big enough, even after their eventual split, to not do anything dynamic or game changing. They have a long development cycle, changes to the UI that would make the product "prettier," would take 3-5yrs if not more to actually see the light of day in production.
Damn the corporate world and the slow train it rides on!
*Full disclosure: Former happy symantec employee. I wish them the best, but product management is the biggest impediment to their products succeeding.
In the real world and not what a CEO says to appease investors, NetApp has been in a decline for years. The startup hybrid arrays like Nimble have been eating their lunch. EMC has taken their share, and sweetened the deals with VPLEX to make migrations easy, Of course there are the Pure's of the world and Tegile but those are isolated cases and workloads.
Where I used to battle NetApp and lose to features. I'm beating them for not being a scaleable product, or the whole story of ONTAP for storage and backup/DR is falling apart at scale; and products like Commvault/EMC/Veeam/ec are taking share minimizing the need for more expensive disk and snapshot space.
Perhaps NetApp should buy a backup software company to better round out their portfolio...
If you think RecoverPoint requires 150% additional storage, you're doing it wrong. Rule of thumb is to start at around 20% of capacity for your journal volumes. But that can vary based on change rate and retention.
A proper sizing and realistic understanding of your data is all that is needed. A blanket 150% sounds like fodder a competitor would spew.
VCE ain't cheap. Requirements for premium support, and other value added price increases over piece meal EMC/Cisco gear. However you get a single rack to install, power and uplinks. Then a single number to call for support L1/L2. With automatic transfers if needed for senior support at the respective OEM. There is value to it. But it depends on the needs of a customer.
What I'd like to hear is what VSPEX and their new BLUE gear means to VCE? Will KVM be an option next?
The sad thing about this AMA, is it was hosted by someone with ZERO clue about the products and zero technical abilities. He is a global brand manager, no more than a marketing person. His then online persona tried to be cool and collected, tried hard to have a swagger; but in reality he answered very little about Veritas and where it was headed.
A product manager would have been better, or even a technical product manager. Alas, reddit users got stuck with the marketing guy.
SPC is a relatively okay benchmark to cite, granted it may not have much real-world application to most customers, since they won't be buying a config near what was benchmarked.
A better joke on a benchmark is probably anything from DCIG, or how Symantec uses a special tool called Gen_Data to show dedupe numbers, or how DataDomain metrics are measured with a synthetic data tool as well.
Looking through the fud is half the battle!
The sad part is there are two groups to appease here.
1. Investors who want a quick pay check.
2. The business and the people that work for said business that do well together, and not split apart competing against each other.
There is no middle ground in most cases. Greedy people are greedy. You can't make them be less greedy.
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