Posts by smt789 21 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2010
I know Chad and Vaughn. I don't care who you are in life, if you can't admit, and most publicly here, you made a mistake...well, that's a you problem and it is no way to go through life.
Both are great human beings. They are like my brother and I. We love each other but don't agree on much.
Like my brother and I, they have a deep respect for each other but it is in our and their nature to never quit and never lose.
Pure and Tegile and the two best platforms. Both do inline dedupe and compression. Tegile is great because it is truly multi-protocol and smoking fast. Pure on the other really know their shit with regarding to writing to disk. They REALLY know flash. To add to that a guy 1 week out of Devry could manage it. Not sure they will ever do true multi-protocol, but otherwise it is a great box.
SolidFire is really nice as well for the SP community.
Of course it reads like a press release. Most stuff here, and everywhere else, does.
However what the Zerto guys are doing is very cool. This is real-time replication with a lot more built-in. If I want to move from a VMware-based cloud to Azure, I point and click. When it syncs I can failover over a multi-VM application in a few minutes. That includes full network failover.
Converting formats is one thing. Doing it with zero data loss and a downtime window of a few minutes is very cool. Doing it with software that is completely independent of the hardware and hypervisor infrastructure is also very cool.
I have commented on Maxta before, but that stuff is great. We have a few clients using it. Still may not be ready for a large scale-out environment, but the product is solid. As pointed out in the article, you can add nodes and storage as needed, they are not correlated. It is basically a hybrid array you can run in sw.
As more and more is moving into the virtual realm, traditional storage sw is really losing its appeal. When you have a non-virtualized app, protecting and performing storage level services at the LUN/volume level made sense. It makes no sense to this when you are running many VMs on a LUN/volume.
You get a lot more flexibility and better protection doing it at the virtual disk level. Whether it is something like Veeam, Zerto, etc. it is just generally the better way to go for "storage sw". And it is storage sw, after all they are performing storage sw services, only it is at the hypervisor level.
You also can remove vendor lock-in by not adopting their replication in particular.
Depending upon the AFA, there are other value props for leveraging the technology than just performance. Some incorporate the promise of what DataDomain wanted to do prior to EMC buying them - inline dedupe and compression, etc. This makes them very space efficient which in turn impacts power, data center footprint, etc. You can buy X amount raw but get X*3-5 usuable. There is management as well. There are some neat implementations of how you manage these systems. Others not so much though.
I see the workloads for these being OLTP. Those apps drive the business. And from a vendor perspective, that is where the money is. VDI and VMware a good plays, but OLTP is where they should play. To the author's point, how enterprise ready are the AFAs? Replication is key but there are alternatives - namely app level replication for OLTP (DataGuard, etc.). That said to be truly enterprise ready, they need true sync and async replication with consistency groups.
Not a Pure employee here.... We have tested Pure and really, really like. Uber freaking fast. As well their story on how they handle writes to SSDs is a totally different conversation than any of the other all flash players, including XMtremeIO.
Many of the EMC claims are misleading and appear to be marketing spin. If this is what they telling their field teams to lead with against Pure, they won't fair too well.
Full disclosure, I work for an integrator. Pure and EMC are both partners of ours.
We have done extensive testing with Maxta and really like it. It does everything they say. They need to improve scaling at a cluster level for larger environments, but they seem confident it is coming soon.
We have looked at Nutanix. Maxta gives you the same value prop with commodity servers and some MLCs and SATA drives at a significantly lower cost. It is uber easy to manage as well. We have historically shied away, er ran, from recommending VSAs. Maxta is the first we have moved forward with.
Even though they are in stealth I have already recommended it to a few clients. One has already purchased the sw.
You should look at Maxta. Similar to the vSAN but they present everything as an NFS datastore on a VMware cluster basis. Lots of enterprise functionality like read/write caching in flash, zero footprint snaps and clones, dedupe and compression. We tested it for a client and came away impressed. We have not recommended VSAs in the past because the performance is terrible. We really like Maxta though.
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