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back to article EMC races to catch up with NetApp

In a webcast for financial analysts yesterday, EMC admitted it was racing to catch up with NetApp in storage for virtualised servers by adding primary block-level deduplication. The good news came from Pat Gelsinger, an EMC president and its chief operating officer via Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers. Apparently Gelsinger …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    "Sole Remaining Deficiency"

    Surely there are two other deficiencies:

    a) They're too expensive

    b) You have to deal with EMC

    3 1
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Just like Netapp?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8W8v8ThjFI

    Primary dedupe was like sooo 2007... Do they really think NTAP has been sitting on sidelines smoking the bong all this time???

    3 0
  3. radurb

    You don't reign in a $5B Fortune 500 company with velocity

    You simply get out of their way and watch them continue to outgrow you, wondering all the while "what if?"

    EMC really need to get past denial if they have any hope of stopping the NetApp juggernaut:

    http://www.azureacres.com/addiction-recovery/denial.asp

    1 0
  4. dikrek

    There are more things missing from EMC's portfolio

    Dedupe is not the only gap.

    Zero-impact snapshots and clones, ultra-granular snaps and caching and low-impact RAID6 are other hugely important technologies that differentiate NetApp from the rest.

    Oh - and truly unified hardware.

    D

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  5. Dan Keating

    Hey!

    I was going to come in with the 'Just Like Netapp' tag line ... and was beaten to it. *curses* It does seem like they're the company everyone is trying to emulate.

    0 0
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Unified

    When Unified means "block emulation" on top of a file system on top of block storage, I will take the native block solution any day. Deterministic storage anyone?

    0 0
    1. dikrek
      Reply Icon

      EMC also does block emulation

      In EMC documentation it is CLEARLY STATED that the new pools (mandatory to use the new features) rely on a filesystem on top of RAID groups.

      Which is exactly how NetApp also works.

      There's no "native block" - all modern arrays virtualize most things to the extent that the statement makes zero sense. See here: http://blogs.netapp.com/efficiency/2010/10/more-questions-than-answers-emulated-luns.html

      D

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  7. Chris Mellor 1

    ZFS prescribed

    Sent to me :-

    ------------------

    Hi Chris: In reference to this article. "EMC races to catch up with NetApp"

    All EMC has to do is integrate ZFS into its kernal to make a run at NetApp's customers. BSD has ZFS integrated now and if a company like EMC put its boffins to work an creating a system based on COTS equipment with integrated CIFS and NFS they would have a winner.

    --------------------

    Seems a neat idea.

    Chris.

    0 0
  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ZFS, seriously?

    Sorry I have to go AC on this one.

    Clariion has a Windows kernel, not posix. It cannot run ZFS without a total re-write.

    As it is, new features that EMC has been releasing in NaviSphere are not working out too well. Virtual pools? Excessive SP utilization. Thin provisioning? Fragmentation leading to horrible performance, we better turn that off.

    Random storage processor reboots? Yes, please! Far more drive 'failures' than any other vendor? Yep. And I haven't even started talking about trying use Celerra.

    It is the polar opposite of NetApp's "it just works".

    VNX looks like more of the same with faster storage processors and a new name. Bravo! This will sound like opinion but it's real life results from a big EMC shop using CX/NS-4. If this isn't happening to you, then you either:

    - Use 1999-era EMC functionality with mundane raid groups , FC and no new features

    - Have been lucky

    - Somehow reached competent EMC support engineers who fixed these issues

    0 0
  9. Yazz

    blah

    How about an affordable version for the adverage consumer... I could really use an external Ethernet capable HDD with DeDupe....

    0 0
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