Posts by Bcraig

Cisco flexes its HyperFlex hyper-converged muscles

Re:

220 is 1u, 240 is 2u, two fabric interconnects are 2u. Lot of flexibility between compute vs capacity nodes and if the customer has B200M4 nodes they can reuse those. Cisco will definitely show up to compete with this price wise.

Rubrik's cube: Storage firm founder drenches us in upstart Kool-Aid

Yep, that's the issue with VM-only solution such as this and Veeam. I think that Rubrik is powerful enough that I would buy it to cover the virtual side and use a second product for the handful of bare metal and still come out cheaper that the major vendors. Also had customers back up physical servers to a protected VM using native tools and backing up with their VM backup solution.

NetApp needs more than SolidFire: Slip Simplivity into your Xmas stocking

Re: Good news.

Netapp would not need SF for a new HW platform unless they plan on replacing the current FAS\AFF gear with SF HW. Doubtful they would jettison SF OS. More likely a dual offering with ONTAP and SF running on same platform kind of like 7-mode and CDOT.

The week before Xmas ... not a creature was stirring – except Nutanix finally filing for its IPO

Real customers with real revenue...and real expenses\losses. I'm not a financial genius, but at some point the Unicorns have to start showing profits. Or be acquired. VC cash is not an endless stream, even they want to see a return on investment. Of the Unicorns out there I see none of them putting out projections on profitability. All of them say they "the biggest disruptor of the traditional storage industry", not all can be right. The coming year should be interesting!

Could NetApp's purchase of SolidFire see the end of ONTAP?

Time will tell, but looks like a good move. Lot of sniping going on for having multiple flash offerings post integration and the failure of Flashray. All successful companies have failed products, it's how you recover and refocus. (New Coke anyone?) Funny we never hear that about other vendors having overlapping offerings (and actually competing internally).

Cisco needs to get off its backside if it's to remain storage king in 2016

Re: No real storage DNA

Beyond the obvious technical shortcomings with Invicta..... As you stated, Cisco salesforce knew NOTHING about storage sales. The Cisco AM's were heavily spiff'd and told to go sell it. Ideally, they would purchase a large enough company with an existing salesforce to handle. Netapp is the obvious choice, but who knows.

As I have said to a LOT of folks, 2016 is going to be an interesting year for the storage market!

Why NetApp shouldn’t buy Solidfire

Re: "Ditto XtremIO..."

4:1 max?....1st time I've heard that, can you elaborate? Is that just compression or compression/dedupe you are speaking of?

Could NetApp buy SolidFire? It would be outside its comfort zone

Re: NetApp needs to do something

That's FUD, not technical reasoning..

SanDisk, HP take on Micron and Intel’s faster-than-flash XPoint

Well....

http://www.crn.com/news/storage/300079140/netapp-to-make-1-2-billion-bid-for-solidfire-sources.htm?utm_content=bufferbcf3d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Does scaling out bring TCO advantages over scaling up? The Reg offers advice

Re: ScaleIO is the answer

I'm not sure another layer of abstraction is the answer technically or financially. I would prefer my cluster to have that ability natively. However the only ones I know of that can do that is Solidfire (and Netapp depending on how you define cluster).

Re: Vendor agnsotic

We probably need to be honest with ourselves on how long we will be keeping any array we currently sell right now. The technology is moving so fast, do we really think we will be scaling out OR up on any platform sold today in three years? Not likely, they will be dinosaurs. When I or one of my AM's go down that "no forklift upgrade road", we make sure to caveat the statement heavily.

I would note that different vendors have very different caveats around "scale out". I buy two nodes of scale out today, can I expand that cluster to 3, 4,...8 nodes in 3-5 yrs? Unless a solution has the ability to scale out to different node types (compute, capacity, drive types) its not really a realistic "scale out" design and will end up in several pools of storage in different management domains.If I have to repurchase my cluster nodes I bought 2-3 years ago to maintain a scale out model, that seems expensive and cumbersome. But...to the point of the article. What model fits depends on what the customer realistically needs.

NetApp's customers resisting Clustered ONTAP transition

Data migration can be a b!tch no matter if it's EMC, Netapp, Pure, whatever....not sure why Netapp should get a bad rap for those pains. Having said that, most of our customers are VMWare shops and we just migrate using Storage vMotion with no pain. The handful of RDM's we just migrate using 7MTT or other methods. In most instances the customer takes over once we test a few VM migrations. Again, breaking replication pairs and reseeding are not a unique issue with Netapp.

Now the management piece we can agree on, long overdue for an overhaul. I have 15 years of Netapp exposure so it seem logical to me, but to the newcomer I can see where it could be daunting. It should be easier, maybe "mask" a lot of the complexity of CDOT for the customers that don't need it?

Netapp pricing

Middle of June I hear that price will never be a factor in Netapp losing deals. Now if they can rebuild the sales force!

FCC Republicans slam brakes on net neutrality, but this wagon ain't slowing

330 pages

Does anyone really believe this is about Net Neutrality? That could be done in 2 pages....what's in the other 228 is what should concern people. We have to pass it to see what's in it Ms Pelosi?

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

SO...looking into the crystal ball. I read that EMC is planning on rollling Recoverpoint to some extent into the XIO in V4 or V5. To all the EMC connected folks, does it look like there will need to be platform (hardware) replacements for that? Another thought I had was that given the Bricks have to be expanded with identical units, are we to shitcan the original bricks in the next year or so when the only option it to buy newer bricks with highter capacity SSDs? Lots of thoughts that would give me pause on purchasing XIO if I were a customer.

Re: Glass House

Well that's arrogant in it's own right. I think it's fairly obvious that CDOT is not an upgrade but a platform change. I have not "upgraded" one unit, always implemented during tech refresh and its the last disruptive code update the customer will do.