Re: Is it really that good?
Trevor:
While I share your optimism regarding the Azure-in-a-can from HP, the devil is in the details, and being that HP is involved, there are a couple of details that I would be really worried about:
(1) If this is anything like their VMware + StoreVirtual hyperconverged solution (which I think is the same box, but different software), it will not scale. We demoed the VMware + VSA version last year and from what the installation technician said, HP was working on being able to add another 4-node box to an existing cluster. If this were focused only on the S end of the SMB market, then that may be an acceptable tradeoff, but I could see an M (especially a higher-end M) running into problems.
(2) IIRC the 4-node sled is a part of their SL series servers, but it is a "weird" hardware configuration. From what I've seen of their "weird" hardware configurations (*cough* E5000 *cough*), the engineering is pretty crap, and hardware problems are to be expected. We made the mistake of buying one of these "engineered solutions" (*cough* E5000 *cough*) and have had TONS of problems, and even their sales people have admitted that the product was crap.
(3) Related to (2) above, often there isn't alot of knowledge in HP support about the "weird" configurations, and often even the simplest questions and fixes need to be escalated to L2 support. And even when you've been escalated (which takes time, and the response can be lacking at times), there is alot of conflicting information because of the lack of internal knowledge about the product. Compounding this is the complete and utter lack of information on the Internet about problems with this particular solution, which makes it so you MUST call HP support for even the most minor questions.
(2) and (3) above create a perfect storm of shit for an SMB admin. A critical component breaks, you're worried that the same component breaks in another blade, so you call HP support, get tossed around for a while and a week or two later it gets fixed, just in time for another critical component to break. You spend a ton of time just maintaining this weird configuration until the warranty runs out and you get the OK to replace it, and this displaces time to improve things in the business. This was my experience with the E5000, where I spent almost a year opening cases with HP every month to fix ANOTHER component.
I understand why they did the 4-node 2U sled, but IMO it would have been a safer bet to do this with 4x DL360 Gen9 servers that are heavily customized (similar to the StoreVirtual physical appliances).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
