Posts by mtuber

HPE CEO Meg Whitman QUITS, MAN! Neri to replace chief exec in Feb

Re: Whitman did the right thing

Really? Return to shareholders means nothing? Go tell that to Western Digital, Seagate, IBM, NetApp, Checpoint SW, Intel, Intuit and many more

When you've saturated the market and you've become opportunity bound like most large organizations are you become what the market calls a "value" player (vs a growth), then some very large shareholders will squeeze you for additional returns in terms of dividents and/or stock buybacks. The alternative would be some large fund manager(s) trying to oust you or force you to sell the company or break it up or all of the above. THAT is a much larger distraction.

So yes, CEOs do give a sh** about shareholders, very much so.

Shares tumble at flash-disk array maker Nimble: Time to crack open the all-flash?

Re: Perception is reality

So let me see, they missed by 7-8%, they grew by 35-36% YoY, they acquired some 600 new customers and yet they lost 50% of their market cap when by comparison the entire storage market sucks and EMC and NetApp have been supporting their stocks with multi-year, multi-billion dollar buy backs, IBM has been on a land-slide, and HP has barely staying above ground.

How sound is your reasoning in the above context?

Want to know the key to storage happiness? It’s analytics. Yeah, it’s that simple

Re: OnCommand InSight

On Command Insight is a nice product but it's not related to this discussion. It's a different product for those who have primarily fabrics comprised of a diverse set of vendors and assuming they can afford it. What is discussed in this article would be comparable to Autosupport and the combination of On Command Unified Manager and Performance Manager.

HP's 3PAR trifecta soups up entry-level, AFAs and software

Re: impressive

Yes very because 100% 4k reads using RAID 1 across 8 controllers is as real a workload as Donald Trump intent to run for president.

New HW

In the famous word of Bugs Bunny "That's All Folks"

Nimble Storage revenues soar as mainstream rivals experience droop

Re: On the right track

Growing from 500 and 1000 is much easier than growing from 5000. The companies you mentioned have no more than 1500-1600 customers combined.

Some of you disquised netapp or ex-netapp people now working for competitors (ie RollTide14 - EMCier) just won't learn anything from history...

Re: Look like solid #'s

Yes numbers look solid but the 50% yoy is still impressive considering that:

1) A ton of startups buying business at impressively low margin or even at a loss

2) Larger competitors have slashed their prices in order to compete

yet Nimble's driving 50% yoy growth! That's even more impressive!

On the right track

The primary focus for companies like Nimble is to grow the top line and acquire new customers thus they must expand sales, administrative and marketing capacity. I'm sure they could sacrifice growth for profit if they wanted to, but any CFO would tell you this is not how it's done. It appears they've already made good progress and are a cash flow positive operation. Furthermore, it looks like at this pace of growth they'll probably turn a profit within the next 12mos.

So far, it looks like the company's being run well, have built a strong customer base and their customers seem to have nice things to say about them which is a plus.

All in all they seem to be on the right track

Radian ready to replace the flash translation layer

If it's that good

why eMLC and not TLC or MLC

VMworld content catalog hints at VSAN upgrade

Selling Futures

A classic attempt by VMware to freeze the market and sell futures. A clear signal that VSAN's has not been as successful as they've thought it would be in spite the ferocious marketing attempts.

Georgens out at NetApp – new chairman, interim CEO named

No Silver Bullet

So Tom Georgens is gone and rightfully so. In fact, should have happened 2 yrs ago things may have been better already. Having said that, Georgens is not Netapp's only problem.

Georgens' departure will not make clustered ontap easier, will not make the migrations go away, will not make customers love a platform they're staying away from.

If netapp is to change course, they'll need an outsider and he/she'll need to clean the executive suites, get rid of non-producers, establish a vision and make investments that can drive growth.

Repackaging and spit polishing ONTAP every 6mos as something "new" and a "great fit" for a new use case (cloud) is not a strategy but a hope.

I view George Kurian as nothing more than an interim CEO unless of course he hits a home run and shocks everybody but with no catalysts, netapp is more dependent than ever on their competitors screwing up than them succeeding.

Drama in the dingly Dell as it embiggens its data centre range

"Specialized"

means we have no clue what problem it solves

Cheap

Fast

Good

Pick 2

Pure Storage flashes SAP credentials for HANA platform

hahahahaha

but wait, it'll load the data into memory much faster. This is laughable.

How do you really know if a storage array will perform for you?

Bring back Byte and Switch!

It's a combo of pretend journalism and advertizing. It's Jadvertising at its best!

NetApp layoffs loom as biz 'operationalizes strategy', 'prioritizes investments'

Netapp needs a change of direction

I don't believe the current management is capable of turning it around. In fact, you probably wouldn't want the people who created this mess to try and pull a company out of it because chances are they'll dig in an even bigger hole.

layoffs and huge stock buybacks don't create growth. Investments do.

NetApp veep: 'We've shifted 750,000 all-flash arrays'. Er, really?

Pure Storage Guy

When you post, it's always good to disclose your affiliation.

ONTAP isn't putting NetApp ONTOP

Re: Tom Georgens = Mr optimistic

4) NetApp's Flash Strategy is wishywashy. EF is Fast but no Features, All Flash FAS is WAFL with SSD. We all know WAFL is optimised to write to disk in the same way VNX and HUS is.

Well, after reading this I stopped reading any further. That was enough for me because clearly this statement shows a complete lack of understanding of how wafl writes to disk.

NetApp gives its FAS range a 4 MILLION IOPS dose of spit'n'polish

And one last thing...Does the HP unconditional warranty cover all of SSDs qualified for the 3PAR platform (100,200,400,480,920,1.9) or 3 specific models..?

If the optimizations are so grand and effective in write leveling then why not apply the 5yr warranty to all models? Why even force fail to begin with? Even more so, with inline dedupe there will be fewer writes and since the super dupper wide stripping is so effective in evenly utilizing SSDs per HP claims why not do it? I assume the inline dedupe is also available with hybrid configs too since the ASIC offloads everything. Right? and all that with a default R6 config right?

Good luck

NetApp offers a 5 yr unconditional warranty regardless of the failure nor to they force fail their drives at 95% like HP does and claim victory!

Do a search on google and you'll find it

here's a start...

http://www.tympaniinc.com/advanced-technology-blog/PostId/98/netapp-closes-the-gap-with-all-flash-fas

Is that it? Writing in 4k pages instead of 16k and flushing 4k? How about write coalescing? In-place updates? 3par has made a couple of modifications and is considered an all flash array yet ontap which has done all these and much more is not? what planet do you live on?

I think you have no idea what you're claiming because you keep changing the conversation....dude

and btw...how's ASIC use and wide stripping different with SSDs than with HDDs? It's not. It's the same stuff with 3PAR, (different packaging in HDSs case) but under the covers there have NOT been any meaningful changes.

Re: Mental Investment Required

Like what? Name them please. What are the "clever" things that they have done? netapp also offers unconditional 5 year support and if netapp were to offer cMLC drive support would that change your stance..? Be prepared to insert your foot in your mouth with regards to cMLC support on FAS...

Re: Mental Investment Required

You choose intentionally to ignore how ontap writes which is fundamentally no different than how afas do it. So while they made the changes for multicore, the underline fundamentals are the same as an afa which is NOT how the VNX does it. so what he is really saying is "if i write the same as an afa, and i have multicore support, why would buy an afa?"

I guess HDS, and HP are also "stupid" for modifying their code...

Re: Mental Investment Required

The internet produces more fools and trolls by the minute than your ability to educate them.

It was a good post man and those of us who care found it very enlightening.

IBM officially biggest all-flash array shipper - analyst

Re: Stale data

I think you're right. In a developing segment there's a constant leapfrogging so looking backwards to determine the future is less than ideal. Never mind that Gartner seems to have left out quite a few vendors from the list using a very narrow definition. It seems like they are trading flexibility for silos.

Top dog EMC’s dilemma: Seasonal dip or long-term problem?

2, 3,4% are seasonal dips. 22% is a massacre and while one quarter doesn't show a trend the drop is so significant that it tells us something.

Fusion-io tinkers in lab, unleashes fresh wave of MUTANT FREAKS

Apples vs Oranges

How does this compare to XtremeIO or Pure? These are AFAs, this thing is a Hybrid. Furthermore, neither Xtreme nor Pure target the SME space. The better comparison would be someone like Nimble

NetApp and Microsoft: We're 'close' to virtual ONTAP on Azure

Re: Microsoft FAIL

You're confusing the terms "Data Management" and "Storage Management".

DataONTAP provides Data Management and IS the OS

Unisphere provides Storage Management but IS NOT the OS

The actual comparisson would be ONTAP vs OE File/Block or whatever it's called these days.

HP storage bods: We're not up there with EMC, but we're CRUSHING IBM

Re: HP Storage...

Well, looking at these numbers it looks like you missed the class on reading charts...

PernixData shows off write-caching, clustering one-trick FVP pony

All these dedupe/compression, "I/O optimization" outfits are on the clock as I can't fathom vmware doesn't incorporate these techniques into vsphere in the next couple of releases. There are just too many of them already.

Storage rage: Like getting a nice steak and being told to only eat 80% of it

Re: It makes perfect sense...

Yes, deduplication will stop working when the aggregate is full. In fact, if there's no space to write to, it doesn't matter who's disk array you're using or what you're doing things will go wrong.

You can't reserve space when you don't know exactly how much space metadata will be needed, and that's dependent on the amount of duplicate deta. Netapp recommends when dedup is on to have 5-6% free space, to accommodate for that. However, If they reserved 5-6% but the metadata didn't occupy that space the complain would have been that space is wasted by such reservation. So it's a catch 22.

There's nothing wrong with implementing Thin Provisioning but doing it without monitoring the free space and setting aggregate and volume alerts is fundamental to the TP technology for all vendors.

Reclaiming space on the aggregate is not a netapp issue everybody else has the same issue. Once a block has been written to the array considers that block as used regardless of what the host filesystem thinks, unless you're dealing with an OS or a hypervisor that provides block reclamation capabilities.

That said, netapp does provide a block reclamation mechanism for windows physical and virtual machine and that could have been used to return free FS blocks to the volume and aggregate.

So, while the implementation may have been fine, the process or monitoring/alerting TP doesn't appear to have been in place and that's really what caused this.

Cheers

Mike

Don't bother competing with ViPR, NetApp - it's not actually that relevant

Benefits and Tradeoffs to tightly coupled scale-out vs Distributed archs

Without a doubt there are benefits and tradeoffs between these types of architectures. Lets examine a few from some who is NOT a vendor although i am biased.

1) I don't know about you, but i'd prefer my failure domain to absolutely be "non-linear" as is the case for Netapp's cluste ontap (tightly coupled) vs Isilon's (distributed). In former case a dramatic failure will be isolated to the specific domain, in the later case it will affect the entire cluster. Conceptually, this is similar to creating FC zones. Did you dump everything into a single zone or did you isolate and logically partitioned the fabric? Why? Because we wanted smaller logical failure domains.

2) Performance - Aggregating performance across multiple nodes with file stripping and load balancing is certainly important, however, I would claim that this was an essential component 10-12 years ago, with older nodes with limited CPU power, limited amounts of memory and slower buses. However that's not the case any longer as it is evident from the VNX 2 benchmark. With the advent of multi-core CPUs, memories into the hundreds of GBs per node, multi PCIe buses and Flash, a single node will rarely be the bottleneck for a LUN or a file.

3) Is stripping the answer to good performance? - Well, VMware taught us that it's not and certainly i don't see anyone complaining that a single VM is not stripped across multiple vsphere nodes. What VMware has taught us is that intelligence, data mobility, fine grained control, QoS and workload isolation provide more benefits and good performance than just cross-node stripping. How different is clustered ONTAP from this concept? I'd say it's not.

4) HW Upgrade path - What does it take to do a HW upgrade on a distributed scale-out architecture? Well, cash. You need to upgrade all the nodes that comprise it, at one shot! Do tightly coupled architectures have this requirement? They don't.

5) SW Upgrade path - What does it take to a SW upgrade? See #4

6) Node failure - Can a node failure impact performance on the entire distributed architecture? It sure can. How about a SW failure? It can as well.

7) Isolation - Do distributed architectures provide complete workload isolation (SW and HW)? Unfortunately they can't.

Does this mean distributed architectures such as Isilon are not good? Absolutely not. What it means, is that they need to be positioned for the environments for which they were initially developed.

VNX-VMAX - The Symm came into the picture in the early '90s, a wonderful, rock solid array with thousands of satisfied customers, well ahead of its time, and the company's cash cow for years. If I were EMC would I consider replacing the current version with a VNX? Would you do it? I don't think so. Instead, I'd milk that cow until she was bone dry. Customers are happy it, EMC's happy, and with the company being publicly traded, and a for profit organization, so are its shareholders.

VNX 2 - Active-Active - I think this option is great, and i'd have liked to see more vendors go down that route (do you hear Netapp?) but what does this mean if I'm a VNX customer? Does it mean I have to bypass my pools and use Flare LUNs only? And what about the space efficiencies tied to pools? Do I lose them?

EMC can't on one hand beat the drum of scale-out with Isilon, XTremeIO, VMAX and Scale-IO and at the same time extoll the benefits of the VNX2 scale-up architecture. Why not have them both? Why not provide customers with the option of a dual controller system that can scale out? You can still sell them 2 controllers if that's what they need.

Does anyone have any reservations, that if EMC were to truly re-write the VNX codeline and not just update 10%, the VNX wouldn't make the transition to a scale-out? I don't.

As far as ViPR is concerned, what active need does it serve? Well, If you're an EMC customer there's a good chance you will need ViPR. EMC can positioning it any way they want to, but at the end of the day, the primary need it serves is data services enablement and management across several different platforms. If i'm an EMC customer, in this position, I will, without a doubt, consider ViPR to centralize data services and management functions and that's good thing.