Dell EMC man: Hyperconverged is love, hyperconverged is life, but won't kill SAN yet

Guaranteed that HCI will kill SAN within 18 months then, judging by how well Dell's similar proclaimations about Cloud have played out.

So Google and others need large 'bit buckets' (storage clusters) and have applications which are super sensentive to latency jitter (eg Google search). No one needs ancient VMAX software, EMC is just trying to pretend VMAX is still relevant. All these HCI systems are basically supposed to be a Google or FB style architecture for those that don't want to move to cloud bc they get a kick out of buying generators. Why is Google able to work with zero SANs whereas DellEMCVmwareVCE seems to be unable to work at scale with latency break downs or asymmetric scale out to create storage pools?

What? The guy responsible for developing and selling _____ says that ____ are the future? Gee.

Chad does make some good points, any time you have a latency sensitive app you need to keep the hops as low as possible and that's a difficult proposition in a scale out cluster. However he breaks his own rule once again by going negative on the competition.

I would so hate ...

... to be a storage SE these days. They can already see the end of their careers and as a last ditch effort now have to sell servers with SSD's and try to convince customers its hot sh!t.

And before anyone tells me that Storage Vendors make money from software then you should ask the sales reps how they get compensated... It's tin.

Storage has for a long time been software on commodity, yet overpriced hardware.

Data management has moved back to the host/hypervisors and storage vendors have lost that battle.

There hasn't been any new developments in the storage market in recent years - with the exception of flash. And flash is not an achievement of the tradional storage vendors.

Storage these days is about as exciting as comparing prepaid mobile phone plans.

"Some workloads must have shared arrays because they need:

Consistent response being very sensitive to latency jitter"

- So HCI cannot deliver consistent response in terms of latency ?

Sakac: "Yes and No...."

As the storage industry shifts away from "buy storage array X along with software to manage it, licensing, physical/virtual nodes to unlock functionality you need, only to be forced into throwing it all away in 3-5 years due to maintenance extortion, then rinse and repeat with product X ver 2" it's completely natural that Dell/EMC, Nutanix, etc. all push for HCI because it allows them to continue the same 3-5 year buying cycle but in a new, "web scale" format!

Why sell a better product or business model when you can brainwash everyone into the new religion of "HCI" and continue the same games you did in the past because now storage is tied to compute, essentially forcing customers to rip, replace, and re-buy every node at 3-5 year intervals because not only has the storage aged and been replaced with new technology, but so has the microprocessor, RAM, and front end connectivity.

HCI is just a play to keep customers on the rip and replace money train that storage companies have enjoyed for decades.

Container cattle

Is HCI good for container cattle?

Isn't JBOServers with Docker and Kubernetes better than trying to align to the specifics required for a support HCI?

Disclosure - Dell EMC employee here – namely the interviewee.

I suppose it's inevitable that with an El Reg article a pile of snarky anonymous commenters would pile on. If you’re confident in your point of view – put your name on it.

These demand some form of response - and I hope to add to the dialog (though I'm sure I'll get a whole bunch of snark in return).

I'm on an airplane, so have time - and I've watched all the movies, so here goes. WARNING - if you want a trite soundbite, I'm not the place to go, so stop reading now, and fling the poop you want. If you want deeper dialog be willing to invest minutes + brain cycles.

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HCI and CI are being used in managed service providers, yes (and I gave examples) – but in Telco NFV / SaaS / Hyperscale clouds, they tend NOT to use HCI or CI.

Those customers tend to build their own stack via commodity HW components and SDS stacks (commercial or open source, or proprietary internal stacks they develop/sustain) because there's value in it, they can sustain it, and it's their business.

Conversely, anyone in an enterprise trying to build/maintain/sustain their own stack is wasting their time.

People who play with IT build a small test environment and say "look, it can be done"... It's so cute :-) Try running that for 3 years, in a full production environment, through multiple updates and waves of your staff turning over - then please come back and comment, at that point your feedback will be intelligent.

This is why HCI is seeing the growth that it does. It represents an easy button, so they can get on to the business of doing something that matters.

Then there is the reaction to my comments about the place for external storage.

My main point was simple: while we're already at the point where SDS stacks can support the majority of workloads. Period. The transition will take time (IT has inertia) – but is happening. But there are clear places where this won’t happen.

When I say "latency jitter" - it's nigh impossible (with current state of the art) to have a distributed storage stack over an Ethernet fabric that can deliver consistently sub millisecond response times, with latency jitter less than 200 microseconds. Most workloads are perfectly fine with that – but some aren’t – that’s my “yes and no” answer. 10GbE port to port forwarding times are on the order of 500ns - 1us + a few more microseconds for SFP+/10Gbase-T interfaces and cables. Doesn't sound like much - except that all SDS stacks are distributed in some fashion, and the software stacks add their own distributed latencies (a single IO can and will hop between multi nodes, needing multiple ACKs. This isn't magic – it is the nature of persistence. There are even computer science theorems that govern this. Learn something - look up the CAP and PACELC theorems.

I laugh right out loud at the ignorant comments in thread that lump object stores like S3 and transactional persistence models – you’re flashing your ignorance.

We have customers running 100's of GBps of bandwidth, and tens of millions of IOps on ScaleIO systems deployed at 85PB+ - and that's at a **single customer**. We have mission critical SAP and EPIC use cases on vSAN. And, this isn't about our tech - but rather a point: "this architectural model is ready for customers".

I don't suspect the SDS stacks will duplicate SRDF like data services. Want thousands of consistency groups? Want multisite sync or async replication, with thousands of consistency groups? Need multi initiator multi-target active-active? Need all of that and more? Those workloads will be with us for decades to come.

Yes, the hyper-scale players build their own “bit-bucket” object stores – but just like my point for the on-premises world, they don't run on generalized servers, but have dedicated, very proprietary dense enclosures, and even don't use off-the shelf media.

Other comments were along the lines of "HCI linear scaling = bad" and "public cloud for everything" - those are just silly.

Do you know how many different compute/memory/persistence ratios there in any HCI worth its salt? Thousands.

VxRack FLEX (which has "flexible" right in the name) can literally have any combo of compute/memory/storage in a cluster - and we have customers with literally hundreds (closing in on a thousand nodes in a cluster.

Saying “HCI linear scaling is bad” = advertising ignorance.

Re “public cloud” - of **course** more workloads will be on public cloud tomorrow than today.

Workload and data growth measured as CAGR in the public cloud currently outstrips on premises stacks by a huge factor (100% vs. largely flat). Furthermore it shows no sign of stopping.

But, anyone that thinks that means that all workloads belong in public cloud is ignorant, and doesn't talk to a lot of customers - apparently spending time posting anonymously on El Reg :-)

On-premises and off-premises choices have multiple decision criteria:

1) Economics: highly variable or unknown workload vs. steady state + compute/data ratios + nature of ingress/egress - and other factors

2) Data gravity: compute **tends** to co-locate with the data against which it is computing - and moving data is hard - note that this doesn't apply to workloads that are not latency sensitive, or have no long term persistence needs - like a lot of recursive risk/ML algorithms;

3) Governance: data sovereignty and attestation needs are real. Note this is NOT the same as “security”. on/off-premises has no bearing on security - and all the clouds are getting long lists of certifications.

The market is speaking on this topic, much more than any single voice (certainly mine included) – the answer is hybrid.

None of this is a "punchy sound bite" - but is the intellectual, data driven, scientific reality.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading!

Feedback welcome of course – including anonymous snark ... but thought-provoking public dialog = better.

Well, that was very impressive and will surely justify a huge paycheck. I'm certain this information is technically all accurate and can be backed up by stats and numbers.

One shouldn't be surprised though that there will be snarky comments in exchange for free Informercial Airtime on ElReg.

Now with all this in depth knowledge about storage and stacks do you expect that your average customer understands - or even cares to understands these numbers or acronyms? By average customers I mean the small-to-medium disk array customers that cannot afford entire teams to build their own stack.

Isn't that one of the main reasons that HCI is so attractive for service providers? They can hire 1 or 2 guys to decipher acronyms and cut through the BS (snake oil) so that the end customer doesn't have to deal with complexities anymore. Complexities that are and should be treated as commodity. We're talking about buckets for data.

In order to become sticky the traditional storage array vendors tried to move more and more of the data management function onto the array. That way the customer had to come back after 3 years to purchase the upgraded version which has a larger CPU and a bit more RAM (inexpensive commodity hardware) for outrageous prices. They didn't have a choice because by that time they'd be struggling with performance issues for the previous 6 months and the customer would be quite happy to sign the check.

Customers have woken up to the fact that hypervisor vendors now provide data management and small all-flash startups offer cost effective alternatives (without on-array bells and whistles data management), as well as startup HCI players.

Once the traditional storage array vendors realized they won't sell new controller heads and disk shelves every year, they quickly jumped on the bandwagon (some not so quick).

Now to sum up the ElReg article - "New technology(HCI) is almost ready to replace old technology(traditional Array), except where it can't"

I suggest we stop treating storage as Alchemy, so that customers can focus their time and energy on their business.

Interesting argument about latencies and throughput for on-prem storage systems but it's probably too self-comforting.

Your customers already moving to the cloud with full speed and monsters like SAP are forced to accommodate.

They already have instances with 4-16TB of memory on the roadmap...

https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/6bdi3k/ec2_instances_with_416_tb_of_memory_are_on_the/?st=J2R9HYX6&__s=v5t5rubgou2kspq2nnkq

The conversation evolves around if on-prem type of customers will continue to use legacy monster app that requires all these SAN arrays and infra. They might ignore the trend, yes. But they going to miss the boat... It's not about on-prem or cloud, it's how fast you ship and how easy to change your product. If they won't be able to figure out how to embed reliability and agility into their own software - they'll probably be out of business.

Thanks for the comments Anonymous and rnr!

1) I appreciate that you think my comments were impressive, but they aren't a function of a huge paycheck :-) They are a function of passion for this topic and this area, and frustration in anonymous, ignorant comments that are demonstrably false.

You're right - the acronyms are irrelevant, but the facts matter.

For a small customer that needs easy - that market is moving to SaaS (not generally IaaS public clouds) the most quickly, and the "easy button" that HCI (or native functions in the OS/hypervisor) represents is very compelling for the things that stay on premises.

2) Storage isn't alchemy - I AGREE. Like all things - it is science. I can't state it enough - I'm not "defending" the SAN domain. Actually, if you think about it, it's fascinating to have the market leader in this category stating that SDS/HCI models are ready for the majority of workloads. I'm just pointing out the intrinsic places where it's unlikely that SDS/HCI models will displace things that look like "external storage", and that those are important for many, many people.

3) You're right that vendors that don't disrupt themselves (both in the tech, but also in the economic/consumption models) - things are going to go from "hard" to "impossible" to "death". As a leader in Dell EMC - I have a duty to our customers and our employees to make sure that doesn't happen.

4) rnr - I believe you're right - new in-memory models (particularly as we hit the next wave of HW platforms and the early days of the Next-Generation Non-Volatile Memory (NGNVM) wave - this can have a huge effect. An interesting observation is that the highest performance transactional systems that power hyper-scaled applications already use distributed memory caches (things like memcached, gemfire, and others) that front-end a persistence layer. This has been the case well before the SAP HANA wave - but that is one of the things bringing in-memory approaches into the mainstream consciousness. This will move, over time, from the weird fringe to a more broadly applied approach.

For perspective though - some of the coolest, most scaled SaaS platforms millions use every day still sit on a oldy-timey RDBMS that in turn sits on massive SANs.

Those customers would LOVE to move into a distribute in-memory front end sitting in front of a distributed SDS/HCI back-end supporting a modern NOSQL data layer. In that process, they would replace the RDBMS and the SAN - and make a huge quantum leap. But they cannot do it in one step. We're working to help them - but it's not a light switch. They need to modernize what they have, while they look at how to rearchitect their whole application stack.

**AS A GENERAL AXIOM** if you have a dollar to spend, the BEST place to spend that is at the application layer. If it's not a generic app (in which case - go SaaS) - the best dollar is to rebuild the app stack around modern 12-factor app principles. If you do that - infrastructure dependencies go away, you have great workload portability. That axiom - while true, isn't the end. That axiom has a corollary: if you can't change the app - make the infrastructure as simple as possible.

It's fascinating to me, the power of "brand association" you can see coming through this comment thread - It's a reflection of the unconscious mental image that brands carry.

"EMC" is brand associated with "big iron storage", "Dell" is brand associated with "laptops and client computing". "VMware" is brand associated with server virtualization/consolidation.

Yes, we are those things, and sometimes that's all we are, the only way we engage with customers. When we do that - it's us at our worst.

Each part of the business is so much more than that - and when both come to the surface, that's us at our best.

We power Spring Framework (in Pivotal) - the most popular developer framework for how people transition apps, downloaded tens of millions of times per month.

We (in Dell EMC) are leading the transition from component level assembly into CI, to HCI, and to the things that are the evolution of HCI.

We are leading the open networking (in Dell EMC) and SDN (in VMware) transition.

We are pushing the Kubernetes efforts forward with Kubo (in Pivotal), with core persistence contributions like Rex-Ray (in Dell EMC) in Kubernetes 1.6 (along with other container/cluster managers).

We have the best Developer-Ready Infrastructure stack (Pivotal/VMware/Dell EMC).

We are partnered with RedHat on their cloud stack, and also with Microsoft on Azure Stack

And... yes, we are also leading in traditional servers and storage for the huge masses for whom all that stuff doesn't apply.

All true - just not "sound bite simple" :-)

Great response!