Re: Storm clouds

Rewards how? It would mean they have to buy in the hardware components for their XIV, V7000 and probably some other storage platforms, or develop proprietary platforms for them which increases cost and slows down development. And also a hell of a lot of commodity servers still get bought, and it's a lot easier to attach storage to a server sale than it is to compete with someone who is!

Re: Storm clouds

Although the x86 market isn't an overly profitable one at the moment, there are other benefits for the likes of Dell and HP in remaining in it, less for for IBM which has already ditched personal systems. The buying power and economies of scale help prop up other platforms, like personal systems and storage. Many of the storage solutions on the marketplace are increasingly based on x86 server platforms, and maintaining control of design and manufacture of that is useful. Also, there is a lot to be said for the market presence and penetration that servers get you. I'd wager that HP and Dell sell a hell of a lot of other 'stuff' on the back of commodity server sales. I'm not being critical of IBM's strategy as I think it is also a valid one - the less valid approach is a half way approach where all benefits from either strategy are diluted so for IBM to increasingly get out of commodity markets is another move in the right direction.

As you correctly mention at the start of your post, you have no knowledge or understanding of 3PAR. 3PAR doesn't use traditional RAID sets either, widestriping all day across all drives in the array, so the management issue you raise isn't really a point. It also allows many 3PAR customers to drive extremely high levels of utlisation, greater than 90% in some cases. Compare that to the huge amount of wasted space in the XIV! As I said, a 243TB 3PAR system using higher performance drives and with wide striping so no hot spots, uses 30% less space than an XIV. The arguments you raise against VMAX are the same ones 3PAR would raise, so you are validating the 3PAR messaging. The difference is 3PAR is a lot more efficient both in terms of space and power.

XIV is definitely an 'interesting' architecture for the 'cloud' but has 2 main issues - power and density.

243TB usable in a rack really isn't that special and when you're building a multi PB cloud then density matters. And even more important is power draw. XIV3 used 8.4kW ... that's a lot of power for 243TB. A comparable 3PAR array, even if you feel the need to spec it fully with SAS drives rather than 7.2k nearline, only takes 31U and 5.4kW. And there are much better ways of hitting 243TB, with good performance, so in reality a 3PAR array would take less than half the space and less than half the power. Could be why 3PAR is in 8 out of the top 10 service providers.

XIV isn't really dense enough for big data, or have enough performance for Tier 1. It does seem a reasonable fit for that Tier 2 type space but so do a lot of other products!

Re: A bit of a waste for Violin to go to Dell

Is there a lot of IP in Violin? Don't they just use Symantec for the functionality? I think the hockey stick growth opportunity for Violin has been and gone ... this market is getting more competitive daily and there are players appearing with much bigger teeth than Violin. When EMC, IBM and HP really get their act together them the smaller players will struggle.

HP sold Violin arrays in theory only, the relationship never got off the ground.

In terms of latency, if you want to share Violin arrays across a few servers then you have to introduce a gateway (x86) server which introduces more latency, and then you still have the fabric latency as well. That's a worse solution than having a genuine storage array that can delivery ridiculous performance and share that as standard. If you just have one server wanting blistering performance then maybe I can see your point, but to be honest, there are even better and lower latency ways of achieving that than Violin.

And the bottleneck in traditional arrays with SSD is the controller not the network. VNX, EVA, etc, all flood the controllers after only a very small number of SSDs. 3PAR can support 200 SSDs without that issue. You're picking at straws. The 3PAR solution might not be absolutely as fast as a little flash only box but is still 500k IOPS+ so plenty for all but the most demanding of apps. But the 3PAR delivers that performance without sacrificing usability.

See, I thought this article was mostly about XtremeIO. Each brick apparently contains 16 x 200GB SSD's but now you're telling me that this isn't a flash array. Sounds pretty flashy to me, as does a StoreServ 7400 with 200 x 200GB SSDs.

And there is a difference between throwing a few SSDs in a disk array and having an architecture that lends itself to supporting very large numbers of SSDs! Throwing a few SSDs in an array will not delivery hundreds of thousands of IOPS at sub millisecond latency ... StoreServ will. Just because HP don't need to bring to market a new specific flash array, doesn't mean they don't have one already!

Re: FlashRay Interest Abounds! :)

You're right, for almost all vendors there has been a tectonic shift in the market and they are having to rethink as their architectures are 15-20 years old! However 3PAR is designed to and will deliver 300k+ IOPS at sub millisecond latency, with all the standard 3PAR Tier 1 functionality, so no need to start with a clean sheet of paper for HP! HP offers a single product line that can be flash, hybrid or disk without modification.

Re: HP's portfolio is pretty simple in all fairness! - Please

NetApp have just announced 2 new product lines in the same space as 3PAR - those announcements are the whole reason for this article. Flashray and F540 or whatever it is are both different platforms to your FAS line, and both would compete with 3PAR. All 3PARs are forwardly and backwardly compatible, so not sure what your point is there! 3PAR is the same ... if you like the 3PAR functionality then just pick the size of the array you want from a baby 7200 up to a beast of a 10800. They all offer exactly the same functionality and interoperate with each other. It seems that whilst HP is rapidly simplifying and consolidating our portfolio, NetApp is going in the opposite direction.

Not sure which market share figures you are looking at but HP is still tickling along at about 16% which is where we (I work for HP obviously) have been, give or take, for a good few years now. And that's me playing it with a straight bat, if I wanted to pick other market segments that suit HP more I could easily claim to be the market leader but by my own admission, in the one that matters most, we're 3rd. No one in recent years has managed to shift their market share by any significant amount ... NetApp are still second and EMC still a chunk ahead of you. To claim that HP lost 9% market share in 1 year is utter nonsense.

Re: HP's portfolio is pretty simple in all fairness! - Please

Try speaking to your HP storage guy and he'll make it very simple. If you think MSA and 3PAR play in the same space then you're not very sharp! You'd need to live on Mars to not know that EVA was transitioning to 3PAR. Yeah, there are some niche products around the periphery but 3PAR covers everything from very small to very very large, including all SSD / Flash and NAS. There is no other competitor in the market, who covers such a broad addressable market with a single product! IBM, EMC, even NetApp (which used o have a very simple portfolio) all have 3 or more arrays covering that same space.

You're right, there are obviously other products in the HP portfolio but I'd argue strongly that HP has the largest addressable market with it's 3PAR range and less overlap in their portfolio. For example, depending on which way the wind is blowing, IBM will position XIV or V7000 for the same requirement. And they still have their r'ship with NetApp as well. HP have 3PAR as the most appropriate product for all requirements apart from very very small and basic, or mainframe attach. Everything in between, including all SSD and soon all Flash, is suitable for 3PAR. If you include DS8000 and IBM's flash solution in there, then IBM have at least 5 products covering the same space, none of which talk to each other. And the story is similar for EMC.

Apart from the endless renaming, HP actually seem to have the most integrated strategy as recognised by Gartner.

Re: Close...

Wow, exciting changes there!! Innovation at its' finest!!!

Re: Dell

Eating HP's lunch? REALLY??

Re: yes

Shows how astute you are then as you could have made a profit on that!

Re: Compare IBM to HP

But would you have made 25% in the space of a few weeks which is what I've just done on my HP stock (which I also bought at the post-Autonomy news slump). Buying a load of HP stock at sub 13 was a right touch!

Re: Geat ideas Meg

Do you work for the same HP that I do? Everyone I know rates Meg higher than either of the previous 1 and a half CEO's. You read an article in the equivalent of The Sun for the IT community and you assume that Meg is itching to reverse the decision she reversed about selling off PSG.

If you don't like it so much, why don't you grow a pair and leave. It's people like you that are the problem, not necessarily the leadership!

Re: Lol

What was the chart?

Re: Oops!

The fact that there is a self service, non-disruptive, and no cost migration method is a big plus. And the licenses on EVA were a few grand not huge chunks of money like on some other arrays!!

And if you're worried that having mastered your EVA (which probably took 1 day), people will struggle to learn to master the 3PAR (probably 1 more day) then you are probably the sort of person who still points at airplanes!

Re: Oops!

The F class doesn't use the disk magazine idea in the same way as the T/V did/do either. Both the F Class and the 7X00 use the concept of magazines though, even if a magazine isn't a tangible 'thing'. The 7X00 essentially merges the 3PAR F Class and EVA lines into one.

Re: Oops!

Matt, totally agree, if you're replacing an array then of course it's a 'rip and replace', but with the EVA to 3PAR migration there's less of the 'rip'! The migration is actually driven through EVA Command View so is very straightforward for EVA customers. It's actually easier than if you were replacing an EVA with another EVA. People love to throw FUD around, would they be calling it a 'rip and replace' if 3PAR was called EVA Gen 6 (or whatever).

Comfortably. Up to 32 (maybe 64 actually) gateways in a cluster and over 800TB storage on the 7400.

Re: 3PAR File Services? @ Man Mountain & AC

Not in the slightest bit defensive, the new StoreEasy 3830 is really tasty! The AV thing is good, plus integration with existing backup approach rather than relying on NDMP. Have seen some really good demos of Windows 2012.

Re: I don't often throw my SME storage money around...

Yeah, the starter kits exist! Speak to your HP storage guy.

Re: I don't often throw my SME storage money around...

Matt, controller spec way beyond that of anything else in the midrange! The performance of these things, and the 4 controller capability, sets them apart. You'll be glad you held off!

Re: 3PAR File Services?

StoreEasy 3830 Gateways running Windows Server 2012, the gateways and array both managed from a single pain of glass. And they fly!! Best of both worlds, unified management but not asking the same processors to handle all the back end disk and the front end file serving.

Re: innovate or acquire?

I don't think that theory holds much water - the likelihood is that they will be able to recover very little so the impact of the negative publicity / embarrassment if this is exaggerated or manufactured would far outweigh any remedy they might get.

Re: Rack positioning

Yeah, cos the cost of a rack is really going to blow the whole business case! I'm sure the extra density fair outweights a couple of grand on a new rack!

Re: HP Violin

So I guess you haven't read the bit in both IBM and EMC's best practices where is says only use thin provisioning for workloads that can tolerate some 'performance variability'?? Whereas over 90% of 3PAR customer thinly provision everything. And no need to set up silly thin provisioning pools or reserve space ... blimey, so many rules and provisos when using thin provisioning with everyone else!

And yes moving from fat to thin will save you space, obviously but how many other vendors will guarantee that you can buy a smaller array?? HDS, EMC, IBM etc all need to land the data on the new array and then thin provision it, so you still need to buy a 100TB array if you are moving from a 100TB array. 3PAR thins on the way in so you only need to buy a 50TB array in the first place!!

Haters gonna hate, but 3PAR thin provisioning is light years ahead of everyone else's.

Re: Policy based tiering

Exactly what I was going to post. The 9730 is the high capacity member of the X9000 family - there is also a higher performance X9320 and a Gateway X9300, which could have any performance / capacity attributes depending upon the underlying array. All the different models can co-exist in the same environment and the tiering can be between models. The X9000 family has had this feature and model range right from the start so I would have expected the author to be better informed.

Re: Stick his tweets up his butt.

And we have people living off invalidity payments because they are alcoholics!! Why are we paying for someone not to work because they are an alcoholic?

And I know someone who has been getting away with it for 25 years! He's been investigated but plays the system very well. I bought my first house off a guy who was on invalidity benefit, yet he had a minigym in one room and the house had been done up (by him) to be the nicest one on the street! I don't think I know 5 people in total on invalidity, yet I know 2 people fiddling it.

You're talking about one aspect of the welfare state - and just as one side thinks that every person on benefit is a scrounger, the other side thinks that every person having their benefit reduced or removed is a victim of a callous system. The reality is somewhere in between. The overall Welfare system is a reasonably good one but abuses of all natures need to be cleaned up - we shouldn't be paying out more than people are genuinely entitled to, only people who need help should get it, people should pay the correct level of taxation and not be able to us tax avoidance tactics, etc.

Re: Chancellor of the Exchequer - no experience required

I read the wiki page, I wasn't just taking your word on the fact he'd had those jobs! He's had an 18 year career to date, so regardless of whether that was with one organisation or several, that's still relatively experienced in my book. He's held a number of advisory and shadow roles, prior to his current position, and will have a number of very experienced people advising him, as would a Chancellor from any party.

Did you read my post? I said 'despite his privileged upbringing'. So he is heir to a fortune, yet is still prepared to take on data entry and 'towel folding' jobs. Those are jobs that many people on the dole would consider beneath them. I'd rather have a Chancellor like that than one who is just lives off his wealthy parents, absolutely.

Re: What all politicians fail to recognize..

One reason they have taken huge chunks of the economy though is because they do not have to provide the same workers rights, or have the same costs associated with the welfare state, as the UK does. Our labour costs are so much higher than theirs that it is extremely difficult for UK companies to compete.

Re: Chancellor of the Exchequer - no experience required

So your early jobs were part of a relentless planned march to your current profession, were they? I worked in McDonalds, built video recorders (grand description, my job was putting 1 spring onto a board about 200 times a day), and worked in a plastic moulding factory putting stuff into boxes. Hardly career defining stuff, but now I pay enough tax to keep a couple of policeman on the streets. I'd rather we had a Chancellor who despite a priveleged upbringing, was prepared to do relatively menial jobs and has an appreciation of the value of money, rather than someone who walked straight into a position in 'daddy's company'.

Re: u

EMC are losing share slowly in the traditional SAN array segment, but that is a relatively stagnant part of the market. They are cleaning up in the NAS, Data Domain and Isilon higher growth areas.

Re: NetApp & IBM

Lefthand and Virtual Libraries are storage products so why shouldn't they be counted? Dell will count Equalogic and EMC will count Data Domain. And all NetApp products are 'server-based NAS' appliances. Internal storage as in DAS is a misleading element of some of the numbers but a storage product is still a storage product even if it is built on a server platform!

Yeah, because whilst Compellent's numbers are creeping up, 3PAR has grown triple digits for 6 consecutive quarters! There probably is a valuable lesson there ... 3PAR was Dell's first choice for a reason!

Re: Clustered Pairs < Grid Cluster

So you're aware that 3par isn't a dual controller array but can scale to 8 active acti

ve nodes, right? And that 3par has the world record spc-1 benchmark whereas xiv is the only array IBM haven't submitted? Strange that!