Posts by irrision

Re: As exciting as this is

It's about density and you've got a workload that needs many petabytes then you'd go with something like this versus a number of smaller units. Also the incremental cost for each server, plus any licensing might be another 10k a unit though that's probably a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost of one of these loaded up with flash.

Re: Ugh!

Did you really just complain about performance in the range of 8Tb/s per storage array being a bottleneck? Most shops aren't running HPC or other workloads that need single array scalability in even a fraction of that number and those that are aren't running one array or for that matter are running something more custom rather than an off the shelf array. NVMe over FC is a clear path to the eventual adoption of NVMe based fabrics but there has to be a middle ground for the transition and this is the most logical way to do it.

FC will live on for a long time especially with the availability of NVMe over FC among enterprise customers because FC works, their engineers understand it, and the switches are extremely reliable and require virtually no maintenance once they're turned up. Not everyone is reaching for hilarious performance numbers in their environment and they're perfectly satisfied with much lower per I/O latency with their mostly random I/O VM and database workloads and not looking to push petabytes of data around.

Re: Pure has taken on R&D and manufacturing which hurts the bottom line.

"Worse, their time to market has evaporated: it's not a bad product - it works and does what they say it does, but EMC (with XtremIO/Unity)"

Unity doesn't have data reduction and won't until a promised bode update "later this year". Current pricing is not remotely competitive with Pure on Unity and XtremIO achieves real world data reduction numbers that aren't low enough to touch Pure for cost per GB, which makes sense given XtremIO isn't technically designed to compete in the mid-range AFA space. Sure XtremIO is faster at scale but the lets be realistic on how many enterprise shops actually care about the difference. Pure is selling deep into VNX/Unity territory today and EMC is giving them at least another 6-8 months before Unity 'might' be cost competitive.

I recently pressed EMC on price and suggested they should be selling me an all flash Unity config for the same price per GB as a Pure array without Unity data reduction if they want me to consider buying more gear from them. They sidestepped the question because they just can't do it and maintain a margin.

The other problem I see for EMC (and benefit to Pure) is the Dell merger. The shakeup in staff and possibly shuffling of sales teams between customers will create openings for Pure to sales teams to exploit. The uncertainty around the merger in general will also hand Pure (and competitors) customers who feel neglected or worried that Dell might decide to walk away from product direction (IE: Unity data reduction perhaps in favor of another array developed inhouse post merger? Who knows?).