Posts by Dave Nicholson

No biggie: EMC's XtremIO firmware upgrade 'will wipe data'

It is hard being the adult company in the room

The criticisms of XtremIO sound like Apple zealots laughing at the IBM PC. In 1981. We all know how this story plays out. XtremIO introduces all of the features that matter...integrated into its advanced architecture...and it ends up dominating the all-flash array market. In the meantime, over-funded start-ups struggle to meet unrealistic growth expectations. Most simply disappear. Some are acquired. Congratulations to the people who made personal fortunes playing with other people's money. Remember when you had to reboot Linux to rescan a SCSI bus? Speed bump. This is a speed bump.

Activist investor plans to de-federate EMC: report

Imagine...

Just think what would have happened if "activist record executives" spun out Paul McCartney in 1961.

What makes a tier-1 enterprise flash array a superior beast?

Scale what?

Chris seems to have redefined scale up versus out. Anyone else do a double-take?

The link below is more in line with how I have understood storage architectures since the dawn of the SAN and onward...

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2014/01/understanding-storage-architectures.html

Fat-fingered admin downs entire Joyent data center

GUIs are LOLing at the CLI crowd right about now

How about a button that says "Reboot All Servers"? When pressed, a dialogue box with "Are you sure you want to reboot YOUR ENTIRE DATA CENTRE???" would appear.

It is hard to call missing a dash or a pike or a space "fat fingering".

Build a GUI or hire a robot. :-)

VMware embiggens VSAN to petabyte scale

Re: Better late than never?

"Hypocrisy and late-to-market tech"

Definition : The act of developing new technology to address emerging markets when you are an existing real company.

LOL.

Another day, another VDI appliance: ScaleIO intros Nytro-driven kit

Re: Smells like Nutanix

An alternative to Nutanix, absolutely. But very different. This is very disruptive to Nutanix and puts them as the high cost, "closed" end of the Server SAN spectrum, ironically. Disrupted before you even get off the ground. Our business is getting harder every day.

Re: Is this one a bit slow

12 minutes is 720 seconds. So we are talking about .72 of a second per host.

Ahhh PCIe Flash AND parallelism.

You guys are hilarious. We can argue that booting in the blink of an eye isn't important, but you can't argue that this isn't fast.

Re: Is this one a bit slow

...So at 30 seconds per host you would be at 8.3 hours versus our 12 minutes.

:-)

Re: Is this one a bit slow

Slight correction.

That is the time to boot ONE THOUSAND desktops.

More info can be found here:

http://storagepirates.typepad.com/blog/2014/02/scaleio-at-vmware-partner-exchange.html

It should help clear things up.

Ultimate electric driving machine? Yes, it’s the BMW i3 e-car

Sheep? Yes, but very smart sheep.

When the Federal government reduces your tax bill as a subsidy, and the State government sends you a check...and let's you drive alone in the carpool lane...and let's you drive across bridges for $1 instead of $6...and let's you park for free and charge for free...

You start to understand why some people drive the cars that the government says are "good".

Not sure that information makes its way all the way to the tiny island nation of Uk, and it is great sport poking fun at silly Americans...but there are rational reasons why some buy a Plug-in Prius, for example.

If that makes us sheep, then what do you call people who pay $10 for a gallon of petrol for their 1.0 litre cars so they can wave to speed cameras every 100 yards? LOL.

Violin Memory is winning flash-supply race – Quadragon™ rivals

XtremIO is in "Directed Availability". If EMC was a startup, it would be out there as an "Answer To All Of Your Prayers" product.

Yet still, a ton of customers own and love the thing already. That should be alarming to the "high-fives in Vegas" crowd. http://storagepirates.typepad.com/blog/

The aircraft carrier is turning into the wind...

The LUN must DIE. Are you with me, storage bods?

First step? Get random!

XtremIO is built to leverage random access media. (Flash just happens to be the current shipping version of this today.) When break free of the bondage that is "the RAID stripe", all sorts of cool things are possible.

Array upstart Violin peeks at PCIe cards, goes all in with $172m IPO bid

This is a stunning and damning admission:

We have devoted a significant amount of resources to developing and marketing our Velocity PCIe Flash Memory Cards and believe our future growth will substantially depend on the market acceptance and adoption of this new product. Because we are strategically targeting the PCIe memory card market and expending a considerable amount of resources in doing so, if our Velocity PCIe Flash Memory Cards do not gain market acceptance, our results of operations, business and prospects would be materially and adversely affected.

They are saying that the array business can't sustain them? That they need PCIe success to stay alive?

What am I missing here?

Behold: Ten storage chieftains whose products hold humanity's data

That's Million with a "B"

Data Domain. *Billion* dollar biz, but what's $999,000,000.00 among friends?

A million ain't what it used to be. ;-)

Join us now for all the storage whispers: Heard about the XtremIO buy?

Re: What is the mystery here?

Apparently you will be shocked to learn that big companies invest lots of money in lots of companies.

This is the ultimate form of due diligence. Try before you buy.

What is the mystery here?

EMC, arguably the most well-informed and well-heeled potential buyer of All-Flash Array technology, shopped around and looked at EVERYONE. Then a non-trivial amount of money was spent on the company they saw as best. XtremIO. The selection methodology probably used some sort of scorecard where each of the contenders was ranked. One can imagine that Pure scored most points for "funniest video with a dinosaur". Violin racked up serious scores in the "distance from 101 freeway" and "brightest sign" categories. Avere would have received an honorable mention for "At least they don't pretend that there will be no spinning disks in three years."

Disclosure: You guessed it. EMC guy. ;-)