Posts by smooter

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

Nimble/HPE leads the way...

Legacy Nimble/Current HPE guy here...

First and foremost, Nimble is still alive and kicking, trust me! Our Support team is still the same/still awesome, and R&D is running on all cylinders (keep your eyes/ears open!), and we are having a blast!

Second, Sincerest form of flattery and all set aside...

5 years ago (actually longer, but I am trying to be nice) there were ZERO Predictive Analytics/AI/Machine Learning offerings in storage or anywhere else in the IT industry...Nimble comes to the plate with InfoSight and now everybody has something they are "calling" PA/AI/ML...but do the research yourself, if it isn't ACTUALLY InfoSight, it most certainly IS NOT InfoSight... "like" or otherwise!

Case in point: Ask a new Nimble customer what they like about their array 4-6 months after install and they will tell you they like the performance, ease of use, integration, features, etc. Ask them the same question 12-16 months later...there response is "I Love InfoSight"! They take the storage for granted, not because it isn't an outstanding product, but because storage should NOT be something to focus on, it should just be a resource that does its job without babysitting!

Speeds and feeds are old news, what vendors do with the hardware, and what they do above it, is all that is relevant! Don't get caught up in buzzwords, non-ratified protocols, and smoke and mirrors. Things ARE, or they ARE NOT...there is no "like"!

HPE is interested in IT running at the speed of business, not the traditional business at the speed of IT!

Just my $.02

Ex-Nimble CEO grabs controls at microservices monitoring biz Sysdig

The Man has Skills...

Nuff said!

NAND chips are going to stay too pricey for flash to slit disk's throat...

Disruption has happened, just not everyone joined the party...

Agree with you that the difference between disk sizes and costs from just a media standpoint can be a tricky discussion, and even with those that are "educated" sometimes we still suffer from the "can't see the forest for all of the trees" issues.

However, "disruption" has happened, not sure if I would include Nutanix in that mix, not that they aren't "disrupting" things, but their storage effort is a consequence of another disruption that they (pretty much) started which is HCI. The point being that no one is purchasing Nutanix, Simplivity, etc. for storage "ONLY" solutions. Tintri, and Violin also didn't really "disrupt" storage, they just offered it in neat, or "different" packages. Nimble, Pure, even Infinidat truly have achieved disruption from the standpoint that they moved away from traditional RAID, relied on compute for performance, and include enterprise reliability on commodity hardware. I would also note that most of the "true" disrupters include all of those "value added/enterprise features" as part of the initial product, no more licenses to buy, features to obtain, etc.

Suffice it to say, if a storage platform is still requiring RAID 5,6,10, Hot Spares, tiering, upgrade downtime, performance degradation from data reduction or snapshots, or replication outside of the storage platform...it is still legacy storage and not "disrupting" anything but your checkbook!

Today's data center requires more than just storage, compute, and features. It requires intelligence that allows administrators and managers to do their jobs outside of those traditional technology silos and consume, administrate, support, and tune the entire technology stack from minimal/single GUI's. Tools like HPE Nimble and InfoSight give the extra legs to an already disruptive storage experience to truly allow customers to leverage not only the performance, but also the stability of a next generation data center!

Say HCI is an enhanced server. If you don't already sell 'em, it could be game over, man

Re: Yep, and no...

I agree with you, there are a lot of "dead" companies out there...reality is, most of them are still making a LOT of money, and none of them are going anywhere anytime soon.

I don't play favorites, I call it like I see it...Doesn't mean I am right, i just see some folks lining things up to possibly be impressive in the long run. May or may not come to fruition, but the seeds are there.

Appreciate your enthusiasm, but if a fortune 500 company ripped and replaced their ENTIRE infrastructure with HCI from anyone, the whole freaking world would be talking about it, there simply would not be any way to keep that quiet. Not saying it didn't happen, but I can't find it (just checked with my friend Google), so maybe you could share the news? I mean we are both playing the "anonymous coward" cards after all! LOL

Seriously, even if they did buy 800 nodes, and deploy a large portion of HCI to replace HPE servers/storage/etc...their entire infrastructure still isn't HCI, and you can be rest assured...They will be back!

Just sayin'...but I could be wrong(ish)