Posts by rvandolson

Keep an eye on your lunch, integrated systems. Hyper-convergers are hungry

Re: HCIS - Attractive Option for Managers

What sort of issues are you running into?

Ray

Google teams with Iron Mountain for LTO-to-cloud migration

Re: Let's see...

Hah, yep. We do LTFS on site for just this reason. Considered cloud, but when the users need the data back they don't want to wait very long, and paying for a 5+Gbps connection to whereever chews away at all your "savings" pretty quickly.

Upstart brags about cheaper-than-Amazon private cold data cloud

Or go LTFS with LTO6 and spend even less, use less power and consume less space... probably can keep all your tapes in your library to boot. Easier to expand storage too (and at $25/TB) by adding more tapes.

Reg man has the cure for IBM storage: Just swallow 10 firms

@danXtrate - Yes, definitely interested in Unified, but have shied away thus far more or less waiting for it to mature. At EDGE this year a number of folks I spoke to indicated they still were hitting bumps in the road and felt it didn't match up close enough with FAS. I want to revisit again in 2015 though.

So far we haven't run into BW issues with the BC chassis -- could be a side effect of our workloads, but we also do dual 16Gb connections from each in-BC switch (two switches) up to our SAN96B's. I think we may switch to using pass-thru instead of an in-BC switch for our next round though. Using Dell BC's, btw.

Discounting? We've always gotten better pricing on N-Series vs. equivalent FAS. Maybe we could have been more thorough on checking more VARs.

Also, there is value in minimizing the number of vendors you're doing support renewals with if you've got a large footprint (yes, and conversely there can be value in having multiple vendors to play against each other).

Dan -- thought many of the same things as I read the article. No hybrid solution? What do you call the V7000's I have mixed with SSD's and HDD's? I still find them a better fit (and less expensive) than the AFA's out there today where you also have to rely on getting advertised compression and deduplication rates... also it all fits nicely under TPC and I can virtualize my older storage (probably even my N-Series boxes which will be fine for years to come with third party support) behind SVC (standalone or built into the V7000).

I'm hoping their unified solution continues to mature -- we have lots of N-Series and that disruption has been a messy one for us.

Count me in as a customer who still likes most of IBM's storage portfolio. The Storwize line is great, and I even prefer LTFS/LTO for cold data archival rather than the latest trends like Glacier (it's less expensive and when someone needs to pull satellite imagery they don't need to wait for it to get pulled down via our internet circuit!)

With all of that said, we'll likely dip our toe in the hyperconverged space sometime next year. Don't know that it'll be cheaper -- just a different way to get much of the same things done. We're blade center based with FC infrastructure already built out, so costs would seemingly shift to needing more network ports to accommodate the Nutanix-style pizza boxes (maybe there will be more blade-based options soon).