Posts by JDooley

Nimbus Data CEO shoots from the hip at NetApp's SolidFire buy

Re: Means little

D - I get that you aren't a fan of SolidFire. I wish we could have talked about that more before you left.

Respectfully, I disagree with your self-serving list of "things service providers value" list. As someone who spent 6 years working at a service provider, building dedicated and shared VMware environments, and someone who spent years since then working with service providers to create new service offerings and drive revenue, I am confident that there is literally no storage product I've ever worked with, as a customer or a vendor, that comes as close to delivering on everything they want from a storage platform as SolidFire. Unlike other vendors, we didn't start at the low end of the market and work our way up to cater to Enterprise customers, we started at the top and with a product that was purpose-built just for service providers. The results of how we did speak for themselves, and nothing can take that away. There simply isn't a better, more flexible storage platform to help service providers or all kinds turn capital into revenue.

I wish you'd stuck around longer, I was looking forward to getting to work with you. Instead, I guess we'll keep meeting up in the comment section of El Reg. Have a good night.

Jeramiah Dooley- SolidFire employee, former VCE SP and Vertical Solutions Team, former Peak 10 Director of Managed Services

After all the sound and fury, when will VVOL start to rock?

Easy Fixes

Two easy reasons for the lack of adoption, from customers as well as storage vendors.

1) The VASA2 spec wasn't ever going to be widely adopted. It was a 1.0 product, lacked a number of core features, and required upgrading to a x.0 version of ESXi/vCenter to put it in place.

2) Once storage vendors started to get their heads around the resources (not just volume count) that it was going to demand, and how important the VASA provider was going to be from an availability standpoint (figure out how many VMs you can power on when the VASA provider is unavailable...) there were some major re-assessments of how to implement the tech and how to make it scalable and well performing.

All of these issues are being fixed, on both sides. The operational simplicity of the Vvols model can't be discounted, and once the back-end is ready for prime time, it'll be adopted much more quickly. Give it time.

SolidFire pulls off gloves for unholy storage ding-dong. Ding-ding!

Details Matter Too...

Chris, thanks for holding us accountable. These documents are meant to highlight the differences in architecture between SolidFire and some of the other leading AFA vendors, much in the same way Dave Wright did in his Tech Field Day presentation.

We only release competitive reviews for products that are GA, which Pure //m is not (Q3 this year and they are still only selling FA-400) and even though EMC has claimed 4.0 is GA on June 30, their own website has not yet updated their product docs to reflect the 8 X-Brick. Since we are trying to help customers and partners understand what's available today, comparing shipping features with future functionality isn't very useful. We plan to refresh our comparison docs for both Pure and EMC when their offerings are actually available in market, and the documentation is publicly available.

I think we've done a good job of walking the line between the blatantly negative "kill sheets" that we've all seen before and something that is useful to people learning about SolidFire and how we can help them bring flash into their data centers. We don't want to be negative, and we try to focus on what we do really, really well. There's always risk: this information is based on public sources from each company and aims to highlight design decisions and tradeoffs made in each approach.

Speaking in Tech: Meet the man who SURRENDERED to Facebook

Yeah, I'm probably the worst podcast guest ever. I actually *was* just catching up with some old friends. A beer or two might have made things better!

Let... the SAN shine: 2013 – the year of virtual storage area networks

Great post, Trevor. :-) Have a happy New Year!