Posts by itsmith

Cloud, what

I was explaining what hyper-converged was to someone the other day and while it's not only SDS, software defined storage, that's pretty much most of it. The rest is bells and whistles. If you look at Nutanix, it's hardware that's supposed to be generic, a hyper-visor, which is typically VMware, their special storage sauce, a network ( a little simpler then normal), and a single pane of glass for monitoring. The fact the VSAN/VMware doesn't own this space is shocking to me.

Re: Where's the Data Fabric?

When I first heard it, the Data Fabric story was really good, it was eye opening, this is the bridge between private and public could as well as multi-cloud.

As implemented so far it's half vaporware and half a series of hacks at a pretty hefty price point.

From my testing a lot of what Val/NetApp mentions is true, we could just never get the price to justify it and ran into strange roadblocks along the way. We tried cloud ontap on AWS, wow, we could see it get pricey. The plus side is the ONTAP overhead is only the file system and ONTAP itself so it was only about 15%.

So we looked at NPS, and yea super pricey, with the added bonus of getting more expensive. We were told he uncapped interconnect fees were about to go up in price and have bandwidth limits added.

If you're going to arbitrage between two public clouds, you're going to have to find some mighty hefty discounts or be huge to cover the two active interconnects, and if you're huge enough to arbitrage I don't think you're looking at spot rates, I'm pretty sure you've got some special pricing already.

The Data Fabric value, at least today, isn't deduplication and compression to save storage space or bandwidth, or snapshots, it's just being able to move data, which is, don't get me wrong, really valuable, The other things don't really matter because the bandwidth savings and storage savings never really make up for the cost, although thin provisioning is kind of useful to reduce pay per month.

I really like NetApp, I've been using it for well over a decade, I was an early adopter of Cluster mode and really like it, even though I think I cut myself on just about every sharp edge possible. NetApp just needs to get the Data Fabric practice, up to the Data Fabric vision, stat. Every vendor pretty much has a <vendor> Private Storage at this point and there's other software that can do the data replication.