We three kings of Dell EMC are; bigging up storage we traverse AFA

Re: With EMC leadership team effectively out, storage is just a commodity for Dell

I don't think you can argue that traditional SANs are a commodity. There are multiple places where that architecture will survive - and thrive - for several more refresh cycles, even outside of unix and mainframe.

This is not to say that HCI doesn't have its place - as does commodity server-resident storage.

3 examples:

Do I build an infrastructure from traditional 3-tier, or do I roll out a VSAN?

VSAN wins hands down in many cases, but what if I have legacy applications that don't migrate, nor sit well on next gen kit? What if my storage is mucho petabytos?

If I'm standing up a Hadoop data warehouse, do I build compute and data nodes from x86 boxen or do I put an Isilon or a NetApp on the back as the data lake? All-x86 is cheaper, no doubts, but a dedicated data lake brings certain capabilities to the table for specific use cases.

Do I want to host my Splunk environment in HCI or should it stand alone?

Nice to have the bare metal pure play and I save on capital costs, but containing inside HCI removes a lot of operational headaches (and costs there).

A lot of these questions are going to depend upon the preferences of they that will maintain the gear, their biases, their budgets and the outcomes they are looking for.

Re: Dell is a server vendor at heart

I don't think that much money was spent to acquire EMC to carry on, business as usual.

Re: Dell is a server vendor at heart

You only have to look at what happened to HP, to see that Dell are on that downwards trajectory, albeit with some slightly different dynamics.

1. Starting with traditional post merger hubris "We are number One or Two in all our business segments. Are we not clever? What analysts?"

2. But that's by acquisition, not organic growth. "Quick, reorg. Accelerate the layoffs"

3. Results still not pretty "change leadership" Import new suits from Austin to Boston

4. Yikes, Nettapp and HPE grew storage. "Focus on sales execution" read, cut some quick refresh deals.

5. Struggling to make the debt payments, etc

6 A few years pain. But keep repeating the above. "ah the Analysts..."

Re: Eh?

It's probably long past time to for breaking out AFA systems from non AFA.

It maybe made some sense in the early days, especially when most of the AFA systems were somewhat unique designs.

But it's been years since pretty much all existing array controllers/software etc support flash just fine. Makes even less sense for vendors to ship such configurations that are AFA "only", when the only reason they are AFA only are for marketing.

I can understand not being able to put much/any spinning disk into a Violin system. But makes no sense for Dell or HP or IBM or whomever to to support disk as well.

Maybe makes sense for the likes of Pure Storage whom I think have only ever been flash.

Re: The problem is implementation

"NetApp on the other, who finally figured out how to get scale-out clustering and all-flash working"

Oh man, this statement really bends the truth lol

First, it took NetApp only FOURTEEN YEARS to get Spinnaker finally working. Congrats, I guess?

Second, "working". Working it does but scale out it is not. It's a federation, not scale-out.

Re: So if this crap is so expensive?

because the cloud is more expensive?

Re: So if this crap is so expensive?

The cloud is not cheaper in most cases and in very large environments it can be quite a bit more, just ask Dropbox. The cloud gives you agility and additional capability and that is the value and you pay a premium for it.

Seriously? Coattails of VSAN?

Dell EMC IS VSAN.

Your comment is ridiculous.