Posts by lset

Re: This will be a slow burn...

Working in the UK channel here, I'll bite.

First, being aggressive in the channel isn't unethical, it's perfectly fine if your product does what it says. Start Ups need to get mind share out there because, and no offence to anyone in sales, sales guys will only ever sell the last thing that came across there desk, or what they've known has made them money in the past. The too many resellers argument is absolute bull, everyone sells HP, Dell, Cisco etc. Do they have too many revellers? No. That's why things like accredited partner discounts exist so that you can't all position the same product.

What is unethical in the channel is:

- over promising and underdelivering what the product can do (making everyone look bad)

- poaching large deals from resellers for internal sales

- dropping the ball on promised support

Your mileage may vary but I personally haven't had any of those things from Nimble.

As for the Pure IPO, this was kind of expected. Just have to see how the market goes. Their support staff have been excellent whenever I've had to deal with them so they're alright in my books.

Re: Not so fast...

As mentioned below by another poster, dedupe isn't exactly something you want for normal production workloads. It really only suits certain types (e.g. persistent VDI/RDSH) and is only a by-product of expensive hardware. Flash is coming down in price every quarter, we are at the point where we can probably have AFAs large enough and cheap enough where it isn't needed.

CASL was/is designed for Flash. If you have a look at the actual arch of the controllers and system and how it handles write commits/reads etc. then there is actually all that much they need to do to make it work fine as an AFA. Out of the younger storage vendors, I personally think Nimble are one of the stronger ones. The next couple of years will be interesting in the storage industry in any case.

Unless my memory is not serving me correctly (it happens), HP have been/are working on a version of Linux to address this in line with their memresistor tech.

Like you said, the idea of having only one pool of low latency non-volatile storage isn't a new one, this just seems like Flash players trying to prolong their product and get over the transition issue that we will eventually have to stuff like memresistor (or whatever becomes the industry standard).

I hate Flash as much as the next techie, but I've been using the new web client through out the beta and it is a LOT better than in any of the 5 variants. It's actually usable now and pretty fast. Besides from everything I've heard from them and elsewhere, HTML5 is on the cards (it's already used for the EVO:RAIL GUI).

The install for vCenter is also now way simpler and you can use postgres with the Windows installer so no need for SQL (well at least for the actual vCenter component).

Re: waste of time

Agreed with Fuzz. Still requiring SA is stupid, especially as you pay above and beyond to have a thin client with Windows Embedded anyway.

VDA is now the single biggest road block to VDI for any organisation. It's a joke. MS somehow think they are getting a piece of a pie they don't deserve, when all they are doing is accelerating the push for people to have all of their applications delivered separately from the OS and be done with even needing Windows at all.

Re: Inetersting points raised

As a VDI consultant you are 100% right. There are plenty of ways to deal with a range of different users and VMware/Citrix/MS all have ways for handling it. For example, if you are going down the Citrix route you might decide that all of your main admin staff are perfectly fine on Shared Hosted 2008 R2/2012 sessions, whilst giving non-persistent VDI to the users that are a bit heavier but can still have all of their apps virtualised/data elsewhere and then finally persistent desktops for your high end users (designers, techies etc.). There is nothing stopping you from mixing and matching within your environment.

Really you get around "one architecture to rule them all" by planning, planning and more planning. Implementing the infrastructure for VDI is quick and straight forward, where people neglect to spend time is understanding all of their end users and balancing just enough flexibility into the environment so that they can move people to a different usage model without spending too much (and going for a node based approach for the hosts/storage so that the design of the environment can scale linearly). I know it was iterated through the video posted but you really have to plan and design to the absolute eyeballs with anything involving EUC. THEN it will work.

Re: Licensing

Also I would never recommend anything less than a three node cluster in any virtualised environment. If you bring a host down for updates/maintenance then your entire environment will be running only on one box which is never desired. I would always quote three lower specced hosts, in which case quoting three nodes for any virtual SAN is enough to ensure resilience (in the case of quorum).

Re: Post PC era

Uh 1000 physical PCs for a call centre are easy to manage than 8 servers and running everything through something like XenDesktop and RES? You are kidding right? MS licensing might be a b*tch but if you are doing non-persistent VDI then you can definitely get to a similar cost as a physical PC deployment with a LOT of added benefits (easier image and application management, hot desking, remote connectivity). Large enterprises is exactly where VDI plays its biggest strengths.

It is not about cost to performance benefit, it's about cost to management benefit. You just need to make sure that the end user experience is the same level as on their PC, which is doable. VDI projects fail or are too expensive at the moment because of bad consultants/resellers. Not because of the cost of the tin or the tech itself. And flash storage does not work out more expensive in the VDI world than disks. Maybe if you are looking at having an all flash array or putting SSDs in something like a 3PAR but in that case you are doing it wrong. Use cheap local SSDs or something like Pure that has good dedup (seeing as most VDI data is identical). You don't need capacity, just enough performance.

Re: Err, know the industry much? Or just getting paid by HP?

Personally I would rather have hardly any local storage and know that I had some decent cooling going through a 2U box that had 4 procs in it. Maybe that's just my personal preference though. For something as dense as this, surely you will be hooking this up to some form of external storage anyway.

Also your comment about the PCI-e slots is misleading. The 7th slot in the R820 is used for the RAID controller, HP already has their controller built onto the motherboard. In effect they both have 6 usable slots for HBAs, NICs etc. but like you said, hey ho.