Posts by CIA

No Huawei out: Prez Trump's game of chicken with China has serious consequences

Too late, China is already here. Google FutureWEI. https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapid=6941005

3 is the magic number for HPE execs hopping over to AWS recently

People move around all of the time, it's no big deal. There was a lot of time between when these individuals joined AWS, it's not like there is a mass exodus occurring. We wish Ivan the best, and HPE is cranking right along. This article is an observation, and pinning disparate clues together doesn't a story make.

Dell EMC refreshes Unity arrays with splash of Skylake and NVMe

Re: LOL SCM on array

Not if you're using SCM to cache metadata tables to speed up data access...

When you play the game of storage arrays, you win or you – where are the visionaries?

Re: No Violin ?

Violin just bought X-IO after coming out of bankruptcy. It doubled their account base and that may help. Violin has a ways to go, their branding took a big hit and people consider them dead at the moment. Good luck to them, let's see if they can bring it back.

Re: HPE slipping away

Nimble guy here... You guys are way off base with your comments. We haven't raised our prices. For example, Pure Storage is more expensive than buying a Nimble system and it offers much less. Our reliability is superb. We have >15,000 customers running on InfoSight and >25,000 systems deployed. I have yet to hear a complaint. Our support has not been outsourced, Nimble Tier 3 is the same as its always been... call the 800 number and talk directly to a Tier 3 Support engineer. Try that with the competitors, you'll start at Tier 1. InfoSight takes care of those Tier 1 and 2 issues, that's why everyone and their brother is copying it and claiming AI capability. Gartner recognizes that its now a requirement in enterprise environments. And, our storage portfolio is aligned, MSA through the channels, Nimble in the general purpose/enterprise zone, 3PAR in the performance zone, and XP7 in the enterprise. NetApp is getting attention because they went back and 'farmed' their existing customer base for 3-4 quarters and made their revenue look good. We hardly saw them at all in customer accounts, what are they going to do now. Take the analysts with a grain of salt, the quadrant is a barometer that changes based upon who's tooting their horn the loudest and its very subjective. It's a starting point when you're looking for a system. Now you have the competitive scoop.

Pop that in the container, would you? HPE performs 3PAR array brain transplant

There are over 13,000 customers running InfoSight on Nimble. We’ve tested it. InfoSight collects and analyzes info coming from systems and automatically takes corrective actions. This relieves the customers of having to engage in first and second tier support calls. The logic provides the reparations. As the article states, its already identified a slew of unseen issues on our 3PAR systems and fixed them without customer issues. In fact, issues are fixed before the customer knows they exist preventing outages, and InfoSight lets them know as a courtesy. If you have doubts, buy a Nimble or 3PAR system. If you dont like InfoSight let us know and we’ll make it right. We’re confident in its abilities. We have guarantees you know. And we stand by them... thats why HPE acquired Nimble among other things. Some say they have AI, we do AI every day, and our customers love us... we have the highest satisfaction metric in the industry. Dont knock it till you try it.

US military base stores pull Huawei, ZTE kit off the shelves

Huawei is a tramp in the industry. They have stolen technology from every vendor they ever partnered with... LSI, Cisco, T-Mobile, Motorola, British Telecomm... I toured Huawei's facility when I worked at Hitachi. They did their best to try to coax inside information out of us during meetings. If they have great phones, bring them in, sell them, but secure them. Wait... we can't secure the ones we already have... so it hardly makes a difference now does it?

Pure Storage is to raise HALF a BEEELLLION DOLLARS for mystery corporate slurp

I'll offer a different perspective... Pure’s first three years of Evergreen contracts expire in 2018 (interesting timing huh?) and they are going to have to replace controllers as customers renew their support contracts, and Pure has spent the money they made initially and will need to fund the replacements somehow… their expenses are keeping pace with their sales (both are continuing to grow). So under the guise of acquisition, they get additional funding and they then have some running room to try to make enough money to pay off the notes when they come due. In the meantime, they try to come up with some viable additional products and hope someone buys them.

Should SANs be patched to fix the Spectre and Meltdown bugs? Er ... yes and no

Re: Safe enough - IF no third party code

Purity //Run is not a disabled feature. It is always on because its built into the Purity OS. They advertise all of their features as ALWAYS ON... you can't disable them. This IS the one system from the major vendors that DOES need to be patched because it can run executables within the VM's running on the system in a shared memory space on the controllers, that's what its there for (although Pure markets it as 'using the additional idle resources on the system and getting the most from your storage system'). Surprisingly Pure hasn't addressed this publicly. Likely they are scrambling to put a fix in and push it out in the next version of Purity before someone throws a bombshell their direction. And it would put a dagger in their upcoming EOY financial announcements. It's all about strategy...

Re: Of course they're not patching

The article was aimed at the big storage vendors, not the SDS vendors. Big storage vendors, with the exception of one, do not run programs on their systems. Now, SAN programs that can be loaded on commodity hardware by customers could potentially run other executables on the same shared system. They should be patched.

Spectre and Meltdown fixes: How will they affect storage?

Go Here to Check If Youre Vendor is Susceptable...

Full disclosure: HPE employee

Don't fret, go here to check the status of your Storage vendor's statements: https://www.softcat.com/news/meltdown-(cve-2017-5754)-and-spectre-(cve-2017-5753-and-cve-2017-5715)-vendor-update-status/

Bleeping has OS and Processor vendors resolutions listed here:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of-meltdown-and-spectre-vulnerability-advisories-patches-and-updates/

It is interesting though that every storage vendor except one has openly posted their vulnerability and fix. Theirs is locked behind their customer portal...

Go Here to Check If Youre Vendor is Susceptable...

Don't fret over this. Just go here: https://www.softcat.com/news/meltdown-(cve-2017-5754)-and-spectre-(cve-2017-5753-and-cve-2017-5715)-vendor-update-status/

Under par: HPE 3PAR US sales are limping

Disclaimer: HPE Nimble employee here. The opinions stated here are my own.

Providing some clarity: The sales teams were merged so everyone can sell everything across the board. Having Nimble, Simplivity, 3PAR, etc. teams separately functioning, with each only focusing on their own products creates pockets of efficiency/inefficiency, limits the engagements to specific products instead of the entire portfolio, and results in teams only selling products that benefit that team to attain their goals.

In actuality, all of the sales teams are excited to be able to have multiple products to sell especially when the competition moves into an area that a focused team has no product to offer. It's a bit of a learning curve, and HPE is a large company, so it's going to take time, however I can tell you from the inside, it is moving very quickly and as deficiencies are identified, they are being addressed.

All of the HPE products are good products, been competing against them since they were Compaq products. Everyone has glitches on occasion, not to minimize it, but name any vendor and they've had firmware, hardware, communications, etc. errors causing outages and losses. That's why systems are built redundantly, and even then gremlins figure out how to bypass the best laid plans.

Quite honestly, we love our partners, but if you're afraid to sell our products because of a news flash and go with someone else, best of luck to you, there are other good products as well, we compete with them every day. We would prefer you use ours because we believe they offer the most value and feature capabilities, and we'll do our best to make it a good experience. When theirs under performs, or doesn't offer the functionality needed, come back and see us and we'll help you out, no hard feelings.

Take note that we (HPE) have open positions for SE's in every region, as we speak. People rotate in this business constantly. Regarding the recent personnel changes, I'll provide my observation, we've seen that some: want to remain in startup environments so they leave on their own, do not like large enterprise environments and depart... it's just too big and not homey enough for some, some like being a big fish in a small pond and that's ok too, some positions overlap in areas and the personnel may not be interested in moving to new areas or the positions are no longer required -- can't have multiples of everything, or new skills are needed, and some may not have been producing -- I'm just speculating, and there could be any number of various other reasons. A company is not a charity. Just like any company it's a machine, the right tools and number of them are required and then as more or less are needed they adjust accordingly.

We're just getting it together, the Nimble and HPE union is still fairly new, stay tuned and watch the rest of the movie before completing the plot line. There are some surprises on the horizon.

Pure suggests dishing out intelligence to dumb storage shelves

Since When Is This New?

Putting intelligence on the drive shelves is not a new, novel idea. LSI put intelligence all the way down on the drive controllers themselves years ago. And coupled it with SoC's on the trays. While distributed everything always sounds good and efficient, it also increases costs and troubleshooting complexities. Who's asking for this capability? There tends to be a trend in engineering companies to take an 'if we build it, they will buy it' mentality. LSI did that, they became Engenio, then they became NetApp, now they're almost phasing out.