Maybe ask the Bluebox guys at IBM how well things went
with their acquisition and integration into IBM. Oh wait, they are all gone
80 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Nov 2010
cisco courting nutanix and will be offering their sw on cisco kit soon enough, the springpath stuff was half baked and not ready for prime time. looks like this was a failure to launch and yet another example of cisco failing to do any form of due diligence. obviously not as bad as invicta given that cisco wasnt out half a billion for a non-functioning product with no customers. this time they were out a few million for a non-functioning product with no customers.
things are looking up, obviously.
Its odd to see Cisco still continue down the road with the partner with everyone strategy, their strongest alliance right now is Netapp, the EMC/Dell deal will slowly dislodge them fully from the VCE and EMC pairings that they have had in the past. The Data Center Group who pushes UCS has zero real storage ability, yet Cisco brass seem to think that they are capable of selling storage products, guess what they are not. The Whiptail team has some good people, but lets be honest that company had 70 people in it when they got bought, Cisco has more people working as door greeters in the San Jose campus.
Simply put they have no real storage ability, they have always had to partner for it, and without building a legitimate storage business unit with a dedicated team that sits on par with their DCG and Networking arms, they will always struggle. They will probably end up buying Netapp at some point, and that, while not the best technologically sound decision, will give them an end to end team with the right experience to determine a market path.
Far too much hype around the hyper converged market. The reality is that yes if you are a greenfield customer or someone with a small number of VM's in your environment (say sub 500) then HCI is a good fit, but the reality is, the inability to independently scale compute and storage will always leave gaps. Some customers are ok with that, think shops with 5 total IT people, also think large orgs who have very specific projects that they want hardware isolation, thats where its a good fit. But, HCI will never replace core infrastructure for sophisticated customers, anyone who still has bare metal workloads won't be able to use it, anyone who operates at legitimate scale won't use it either (they already have been building their own HCI solutions) and the price point for a HCI platform is ludicrously expensive.
TL:DR works great for specific use cases (think VDI mostly) and small customers with unsophisticated environments. Everyone else will go the converged infrastructure route.
still have yet to see an EVO system at a customer site anywhere. HP wants a stupid amount of money fort their system with zero value add. HDS hasn't released theirs in the wild yet. Dell pushes the far more flexible and profitable Nutanix offering. The other bottom barrel players have crap supportability and no sales teams capable of articulating the value.
Those are just the OEM issues. EVO doesn't integrate into existing VMW environments, its an island of resources. Who wants that? SimpliVity and Nutanix offer services on top of the base HC delivery vehicle, and they tend to be cheaper solutions when compared to EVO, far more feature rich, and far more flexible (multi-hypervisor support). So again I ask, who will buy this?
Answer, no one.
influencer community types can get access to the nutanix POC lab pretty much anytime they want without having to incur the time/effort to spin up a neutered community edition of the product. Your comment has zero merit. This isn't thought leadership, this is list building. Most of the people you mentioned are paid for commentary types, they are not going to waste their time playing around with something that they dont get paid for. As for the various other groups, I'd hazard a guess that they dont have the required HW on hand to build out a nutanix cluster.
there's a good reason that you cant sign up for this trial without a corporate email address, and why they are giving away 3k towards a home lab.
All those stupid cat pictures on your facebook profile that you have not accessed in a year, they go on a box like this because FB users are inpatient twits who can't wait the 10 seconds it takes to pull those archived images off of disk, or DVDROM media. There is a very deep market for all flash archive storage, its just not remotley relevant for 99% of companies out there today.
They will sell a lot of this, and you will never hear about it.
That's where this system (and many others) will be from a market perspective. When technologies like DSSD eventually come to market (and similarly architected solutions) these old dinosaurs will be regulated to the scrap heap. The plain truth of it is, very few customers actually need those performance numbers. And for the performance they do require, they can gain that a fraction of the cost of this array, or any of the other monolithic boxes designed in the 90's.
Storage vendors need to drop the speeds/feeds crap marketing that they have used for the last few decades and focus far more on the actual benefit that their products bring to an organization, that will drive sales of their product. Everything else is just chest thumping crap that no one who pays for these products cares about.
Netapp had it all at one point, but the failure to truly innovate or adjust to the changing storage landscape has harmed their long term prospects. The storage space is highly competitive. One need only to look at the success that many of the new storage startups have had during the same period that Netapp has fallen. Taking a strong look at an architecture that simply cannot keep up with the future of data might be a good start if they want to remain relevant in the changing data economy.
Bold prediction, no one except Netapp zealots will buy this. There are a number of vendors jumping into the EVO stack who are absolutely clueless about the hyper converged space, and Netapp appears to be the most ignorant of all. The entire value prop around hyper converged is to remove complexity of the multi-system traditional infrastructure stack. Netapp jumping into this space shows once again that they just don't get it anymore, and why Nimble, Pure Storage, Tegile and others are feasting on their carcass.
There is a big difference between a non disruptive upgrade, and an upgrade that requires a data migration / restoration event. Far too many times I've seen people take the vendors word for it when it comes to the upgrade/update process only to get burned down the road. The onus is on the purchaser to ensure that they fully vet a solution(s) that are being considered for purchase. Any decent storage admin worth his salt would have a set test routine to put a solution through its paces, as well as the proper questions to ask. As always the devil is in the details and its up to the purchaser to do their own due diligence.
If you get bit by something like this its because you didn't do your homework.
You can't treat flash as standard disk.Sure it may be faster but you will burn it out. Nutanix ran into that early on when they were burning through Fusion IO cards because they did all their read/write cache in the SSD space. Since their dedupe isn't in-line for all data, they rely on post process for capacity savings which is a fools errand. If you look even deeper you will realize the performance hit is significant when they do turn dedupe on, then there is the issue of not being able to do dedupe and compression at the same time, or having to turn it on or off for specific workloads. Essentially you are injecting significant amounts of complexity into a platform that was meant to be simple, which is the one key benefit that hyperconvergence is supposed to provide.
You can have it cheap or fast, you can't have both. There will be a breaking point, its up to you to figure out what is acceptable. I'll also throw out, one size doesnt fit all, especially with storage today.
The adage of "you get what you pay for" comes to mind. I'm not saying rush out and pay 12k per TB for JBOD, but if there are features outside of what everyone offers and there is a price premium, to many shops that 12K is acceptable. It takes an incredible amount of R&D effort, time, and capital to bring a product to market. No one is in this business to lose money.
I dont want cheap and easy. I want it to work.