* Posts by tomjoyce64

6 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2017

VMware discontinues Datrium hardware and hyperconverged OS, effective immediately

tomjoyce64

Re: New Laws Needed

Sorry, the party at fault here is Datrium. They were still selling the product to new customers even though the likelihood of their being in business much longer was zero percent. Yes, it’s what VC funded startups often do, keep selling til the last light goes out and leave the customers in the lurch, but it’s not the buyer’s fault for picking up some of the pieces when the music stops.

HPE goes on the warpath, attacks AWS over vendor lock-in

tomjoyce64

HPE really needs a totally new angle

HPE still builds the best servers, and they have Aruba. That’s it. That’s their win. Just sell that. Tell that story and just that story, all day long: “If you’re gonna buy a computer and hook it to a network, here is why HPE is 100x better.” Then, shut the F Up. They’re done in storage and software and cloud. Greenlake, sure, fine, whatever, but that’s financing and PS. You’re an elite compute company. Go sell that.

And PLEASE, GOD, SOMEBODY AT HPE, PLEASE

MAKE THEIR EXECS STOP SAYING STUPID $@&! like data has gravitational force, the world is hybrid, it’s all about the data, people go to cloud and come back cuz it sucks, data moves here and there, data is the heartbeat of your company, the edge the edge the edge. The cloud-can’t-reach-the-edge thing is total effing nonsense. These are the same dumbass marketing blurbs they were spitting out 10 years ago. HPE, you are going to wither and die if this and whining about AWS Microsoft and Cisco being mean is your story.

'Not normal': Dell and NetApp price war puts crimp in Pure Storage revenue growth

tomjoyce64

Re: There's no price war

It will have to drop more to get acquired. And it will drop more, as you said it is a victim of long term decline and commoditization of storage, servers, flash, etc. This was happening with or without cloud, and with cloud it was game-over for an independent company like this eventually. HCI is also a factor but in my opinion a smaller one for Pure because HCI is really just VMware and Nutanix, not a really big market. Pure is in a death spiral ending in an acquisition but not yet.

Why not yet? I don't watch their stock but the numbers are something like 220M losses on a billion and a half in revs. Brutal. Forward multiple is low now but that is with Pure still forecasting growth and others forecasting decline. The are not going to take meaningful share. They are still overspending like crazy for revenue, as they always have, and actually accelerating this; other acquirers can sustain that and so would experience greater decline after an acquisition.And no acquirer needs their product. It is not differentiated now, the file pipeline is a non event and flashblade wasn't all that.

What's good? 7000 customers, strong gross margins, Product that works. That's all I see. At 4 beeellion+ market cap it would have to drop more to get bought and it will but I am not sure who needs it and would go through the hell of dealing with the field and HQ expense. Of course, private equity is eating the world...

To give them credit they got out fatrest on the flash trend, built a slick product and an effective and strong (if a bit weird) culture. They had a couple great technical founders. Bringing Delane in was good. But the management team is too insular and the current CEO was a huge mistake. They really flubbed the earning announcement blaming it on NTAP/Dell price war.

We grill high-end backup kid on its cloudy data protection stake

tomjoyce64

Kudos

It's about time somebody tried to break the model for B/U and recovery for cloud. This is one of those product ideas where when the lightbulb goes off and you understand what they are trying to do, it's like wow, smart, that makes sense, and why not? I think they need to a better job of marketing it so it isn't such a journey to get to the light bulb moment, and they need to publish comprehensive benchmarks to prove it works, but other than that they have a great idea here.

HPE gobbles Nimble Storage for $1.2bn

tomjoyce64

Re: InfoSight

I think they will keep the nimble array. Nimble is high gross margin but losing money gaap and non gaap, and they probably have to grow nimble another 25% before it breaks even, which is about what it has been growing at. I think you're right that they'll take out a bunch of cost to close that gap, but they are not going to throw away a 65% margin product. My bet is they sell it into the space currently covered by the MSA and let the big HP channel have at it. I assume HPE thinks that every nimble they can sell instead of an MSA is probably 25-30 points of additional gross margin, and that if they can double nimble at the expense of MSA it is a good trade, even though earnings impact this year is non trivial. If that happens, 1.1b is cheap. It is also a product hedge against 3par getting old. Problem is, they need to execute, and now they have to ramp yet another entry array play, deal with the complexity of nimble vs 3par vs simplivity positioning, and they still have what's left of MSA and Lefthand rolling about in the bottom of the boat. And Dell is ready to roll.

Symbolic IO CEO insists the IRIS i1 is more than a bunch of pretty lights

tomjoyce64

Ok i'll byte

I never post on here (first time caller, long time listener) and i am not an engineer bit will risk an observation or two. I have only seen a couple of these articles about Symbolic IO so I dont know much yet. I think the launch of this company will drive a ton of skepticism based on the claims and tone of the announcement, but I am going to err on the side of optimism for the moment, until I know more....

It sounds like a key piece of the product is encoding to stuff more through a memory bus into the CPU and back to get full value out of the obscene performance advantage of modern CPUs relative to everything else in the server/storage stack. They seem to be saying that this is not just compression but is a different class of algorithm like huffman encoding or stuff along those lines that the HPC people have talked about. So to comes down to the quality and defensibility of the math that the Symbolic IO engineers have done to implement this encoding, as well as things like how efficient it is and error handling. I dont know that they need to have invented the equivalent of cold fusion for this to be of value. Rather, if they have implemented some known academic techniques in a production computer for the first time, and potentially figured out some of the practical gotchas, then this might be pretty cool.

Another part seems to be an outboard processor of some sort that handles or assists this encoding and plugs into a dimm slot. I am not sure I quite have a handle on what this does yet so I won't try to comment but it seems like an interesting and creative design choice.

Then you have the matter of the work they have had to do to go qualify and work with a bunch of new and not-yet-standardized non volatile memory types, and probably do a ton of bios work and other pain in the butt kind of stuff to make their contraption work. Sounds like the early days of storage networking when nothing worked together.

If the result is super fast, costs less and is reliable then they are on to something.better still if the outboard co-processor and other parts are deployable on some other server vendor's standard gear. The key is how good and unique that symbolic encoding math piece is. I am going to bet for the moment that there is something good there. I am also going to look past the awkward marketing; i am not sure the blinking lights, snazzy names for everything. and unproven claims based on un-named customers are helpful (but they did get my attention more than if they said they had memory bus encoding algorithms....)