* Posts by francoiszim

3 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2013

Storage faithful tremble as Gartner mages prep flashy array quadrant

francoiszim

Pointless exercise in inventing an unnecessary market segment

Vendor X has admitted that their mainstream storage architecture can't cope with flash and so they acquire an incompatible startup and try and flog you yet another silo... Instead of looking at whether this is sustainable Gartner tries to push another market segment...

It is utterly pointless penalizing integrated architectures by only surveying systems that can ONLY do flash. Flash is no longer niche - within a few years it will start to kill off performance drives so people need to see credible strategies for flash + capacity drives in an integrated infrastructure. These niche flash only platforms will become less and less relevant as flash becomes more and more mainstream.

HDS unveils embiggened array: We HAF vays of making you flash

francoiszim

Re: Benchmark shpenshmark

Hi Alex, The whole point of an innovation like HAF is the fact that you don't need incompatible FLASH-ONLY arrays like EF540 to achieve all flash performance - If I was using an ONTAP array I'd question why NetApp is trying to sell me another silo for my high performance apps? A flash "strategy" which gives existing customers no credible upgrade path to all flash performance?

By contrast - with HAF you can just retrofit into an existing HDS array and leverage all the functionality you have built your business on (this works by embedding compute cores with every flash module so you get linear scale).

Also, if it is flash choice you're after - our customers get access technologies like Hybrid IO in Hitachi Compute Blade which gives them the ability to install 192TB of PCIe Flash inside the server bus. So whether you need to offload IOs to the edge or service them in shared storage it's covered...

francoiszim

Re: Benchmark shpenshmark

There is really no ambiguity in the benchmarks sited here. The benchmarks referred to (SpecSFS) are publicly audited and open and show that 64 HAF modules beats 500+ SSDs in the next fastest comparable NAS platform. Netapp have a very limited flash strategy and don't have performance numbers that compete with these or they would publish, no? SpecSFS is not a closed shop and any vendor can post results that they can provide evidence for - you can't bleat about old metrics being used for comparison if you haven't been able to show evidence of anything better?