Posts by Equals42

That means his division sold that amount. He didn’t take that home. His expected salary and commission was stated to be around $540k.

I disagree. There's nothing stopping a dev from releasing "MyApp 2019" and then updating to "MyApp 2020". While there's no built-in way to connect these two in the App Store, you can easily have an update to 2019 version to link folks to the new version to buy. I fail to see how it was any easier to upgrade a MacOS app back when you had to run down to the store to grab a box with a new CD or floppy containing the version.

I'd personally rather have this constant version updating feature most of the time but if I like an app enough, I'll buy the next version if that's what they need to keep getting paid.

Re: It's not China it's the cloud

Not likely. That's a known longterm trend but this looks to be a CapEx spend reduction or postponement by enterprises. Trade uncertainty, Trump's <cough> unhelpful economic statements on Twitter daily, and the signs of looming recession (already happening in manufacturing) in US, EU, and India showed large slowdown. Those things make large enterprises hold back CapEx spend. Might help cloud providers if OpEx moves forward with uncertainty but I can't see how a cloud spend that's locked in is better when looking at an uncertain next few quarters.

Re: Makes me feel old. No love for Doom any more.

It was quake servers at one point too.

Re: Azure may win despite shortcomings

The trick for a few of my clients is that Amazon seems to enter every market eventually. Healthcare providers/insurers can't get out of AWS fast enough. Why? Who want's to give money to Amazon when they are now your competition to some degree.

Retail? No way.

Office products? Nope, they have a new division to replace OfficeDepot and CDW.

Entertainment industry or cable cos? Nope. Amazon distributes video/music and now produces content.

Car manufacturer? Just wait. Well, he's already making rockets so why not planes, trains and automobiles?

Microsoft Azure is a comfy place since you know what they sell: software, mice, tablets, video games. They suck at video and music so who cares.

Google is just that cheap, sleazy guy who reads your email and sends you junk mail but at least they aren't really trying to get into your business unless it's IoT or taxis/self-driving cars.

Re: Can someone please explain the logic?

NetApp has a lot of features the Pure doesn’t and I think have the better platforms. To answer your question though, Pure has their active/active cluster which lets you write to both sites fairly simply. It’s much simpler than ONTAP MetroCluster and doesn’t rely on whole system failovers and such.

The Pure AI stuff is fluff and repackaging basic capabilities with a new PowerPoint deck. They still don’t have a real NVMe over Fabric solution for sale yet but “it’s coming” the future. Not sure how Gartner rates things, but whatever.

EMC still doing the forklift upgrade thing? Want NVMe or deduplication with flash on a VMAX? Here’s a truck full of new kit for you. Have fun migrating legacy systems onto that for the next 12 months! Where’s the PO?

Re: My Favorite line

It affects system performance? Not sure how they justify that other than FUD that most customers don't really like from vendors. And what if the answer is "no, we are looking at block only so there is no such worry." Even if true with some vendors, at least it's an option to run NAS.

Really weak story against some of the competition. Pure has a roadmap for NVMe over Fabric and NetApp has two platforms that already run NVMe over FC and IB already. DMC has a rebooted VMAX with NVMe with a taped on NAS that ticks more boxes than IBM's. IBM has no cloud angle either.

Maybe they should just hurry up and sell this division to Lenovo too.

Re: NFSaaS

What's missing? It's NAS file storage in the hyperscalers - billed and managed fairly simply through the AWS/Azure/Google marketplace and at all-flash speeds. As long as the price is decent, what more would someone want up there?

Apparently all three major hyperscalers chose to use NetApp behind the scenes to provide native NAS services. Not sure end users really care whose kit is behind the curtain but it seems fair that NetApp can brag a bit. (And deposit the money in the bank I suppose.)

Re: Eh?

Well said. I agree with the post but see the future merger of these two as a trainwreck. It'll inevitably strand customers of the current line(s) when the merged version is available. Either that, or it'll take to long to build the transition bridge and then VSAN and others will be too far down the track.

Re: EMC would theoretically be affected

Most dedicated storage arrays don’t allow other code to be run on them so there is no avenue for Meltdown or Spectre to affect them. You can’t run a user binary on a NetApp ONTAP array or an HDS array.

Where there is danger is shared-core HCI or some cloud offerings where your storage OS is running on the same cpu as random VMs.

Re: It's not the guns, it's the culture.

"If you look at murder rates (roughly 25% of the gun deaths in the US are homicides, most of the rest are suicides), and the number of guns, and the severity and restrictiveness of gun laws, across all countries, it is not the presence or absence of guns or the strictness or laxity of the gun regulations, but the economic and cultural nature of the environment that dominates in determining murder rates."

That was such a convoluted sentence/paragraph that I fear I may have misunderstood your intent. What does the statistic in parenthesis have to do with the murder rates? They aren't directly correlated, cited, nor likely correct. The US CDC lists firearms deaths as such: The two major component causes of firearm injury deaths in 2014 were suicide (63.7%) and homicide (32.8%). (pg 12 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr65/nvsr65_04.pdf)

Your opinions on cultural sources for violence is probably something I'm in agreement with. I have always found it strange that you could not show a bare ass or sex on television but easily see extremely violent scenes regularly on network TV during early hours. Shooting a suspect or blowing up stuff is apparently OK but the natural functions of procreation which almost all adults engage in (somewhat) regularly is taboo.

Re: Everything eventually will go NVMe

I agree that FC-NVMe (or I've seen NVMeFC) will be an early winner with strong Brocade support and simple story for enterprises with existing FC skills. ROCE and iWARP over 25/100g ethernet is still not fully baked or the battle won so RDMA over 25/100g ethernet is still unsettled. Not to mention 25/100g ethernet is still a bit of a unicorn in the field. Eventually the service providers and hyperscalers will push an ethernet solution into the forefront but I can see FC hanging on again because of enterprise.

The new connectors are great but leave much to be desired as far as a CRU (customer replaceable unit) for enterprise storage manufacturers. I lave the density but it will be a challenge to create serviceable hardware designs. I'm looking forward to innovation in this area.

Re: There are viable alternative

I have large clients (Fortune 500) who look at HyperV every couple years and tell me it doesn't scale for management. I'm not an expert so I just listen but it must have issues if they won't take it for free. These guys are frugal and still send VMware checks.

Re: Engines

I disagree that they wouldn't take a chance. The A380 has lost money on every unit. It may break even per unit but the total program is a huge loss. The 787 is $33 billion in the hole so far. Taking a chance on an innovative plane that addresses an untapped market (getting somewhere a hell of a lot faster) might be interesting to Boeing and Airbus since other than 737s and A320s they haven't a lot of new ideas in the pipe. [The 797 is simply a 757/767 replacement that has a narrow market segment with 737 MAX10 and A321 encroaching in the medium single aisle category and 787, et al right above it in wide body.]

They both need a new winner.

Re: no no no no no no no, Apple

"There was no risk with what they did" - are you sure?

--Yes, based on the description of what they did.

What's the point of testing if the outcome is certain?

--The outcome of the test was not certain. The outcome to the end user (no change to the in-use filesystem metadata) was certain since they would not apply the changes.

why it was rolled back despite being successful

-- Because again you misunderstand what was being tested. They didn't want the active filesystem to change in that update. They were checking the updater itself.

(to wear Flash memory?)

-- get real. The flash in those devices aren't going to wear out.

and what was the risk of failure (of the whole process including rollback or the rollback alone)

--if they never actually changed the active filesystem and only practiced building a new filesystem metadata there is little risk as long as they checked for enough space, didn't overwrite real data, or made sure the changes were separate from real active data.

and who would be liable for data loss.

--you should have backed up before the upgrade anyway. You backed up the iPhone first, right?

Re: No, they will completely disappear

The fixed capital requirements will be higher for spinning disk simply because you have less revenue to justify it. If the market for spinning drives reduces too much, there is not enough of a market to justify the expense of building a factory.

Your argument that raw capacity/TB is sometimes completely preferable to speed is possible but I doubt it. If the cost includes the lower power for such endeavors and much smaller rack space, the difference in $/TB would be factored out quickly as the SSD sizes ramp up. Not to mention you can already get a bigger SSD than any spinning media right now. How does the argument work when spinning drives are much, much smaller? The manufacturing costs are being driven down with SSD and very little R&D is going to spinning rust. The latest shingled tech involves relatively little capacity gain and terrible reliability. I may be missing something but from what I see, spinning drives are going the way of the vacuum tube. It's OK. They really were great engineering but it seems silly to have spinning disks when you can have solid state and not worry about vibrations, vacuums, helium, and such.

Re: Is it Possilbe this is a good thing???

>It sounds like VMUG won't lose anything.

Umm, independence and a VMware focus?

>This would have happened anyway, so I'm glad the VMUG is leading it.

Why is it inevitable? Why couldn't these remain what they were: a useful place for VMwae admins and others to gather and discuss VMware products, exchange ideas, share horror stories, and get some occasional assorted vendor SWAG and beer?

>It isn't feasible for EVERY member to make EVERY decision- not for a $15M organization with 150000 members.

This wasn't a plebiscite, nor was that requested. Not even the heads of VMUG standing groups or others deeply involved were consulted. You don't need to get everyone's permission but you should run it by the day to day leaders of the organization.

This makes it less likely that members will get to hear from Veeam, Nutanix, IBM, Cisco, HPE, HDS, NetApp, Commvault, etc. How is that good for everyone? It's not like everyone runs VMware only on Dell servers and network. Heck they already booted the Nutanix folks which were very involved and useful because they weren't towing the DellEMC line. If they want to have meetings to sell Dell equipment, they should rent a steakhouse like they always did and feed a bunch of admins/architects while they stare at the Powerpoint slides.

Re: Does AFA matter?

"There is a big difference in architecture and how systems handle flash when it's built from the ground up for that purpose."

Really? What part of it did they build from the ground up? Let's see:

1980s SCSI command set? Not until NVMe over fabrics is in the wild. Until then you're speaking SCSI.

Intel CPUs and DRAM? Nope. Same stuff in all the arrays except special ASICs from 3Par which are always late to the party... makes nice slides though.

Fibre Channel? Nope. Still works. Cisco and Brocade are pushing 32g FC for NVMe over Fabric.

Ethernet/FCoE/NFS/SMB? Nope. Not invented new for AFA.

Inline Compression/Dedupe? A lot of the AFA have those whether built from the ground up or not.

Scale out? Well that's not really an AFA feature and many of them fail that one.

Simple GUI or admin? Simplicity is nice until you need a feature. I agree some platforms are too complicated. It's a feature though not intrinsically tied to AFA.

SSDs or CFM? Most of them use SSDs and they should. My money's on SSDs. Going your own way on chips hasn't worked on for a long time. See Sun, DEC, SGI... Heck, the chipset landscape is cleared of competition. Where's Adaptec, AMI, LSI, National Semi...

Really it's just a storage array tuned for much faster backend access. It gives the manufacturers some new ability to tune their stacks instead of waiting for spinning rust to respond and lessen the need to buffer as much. There's great advances possible in AFAs but it's still just faster storage until we change the protocol. Even then, it's just faster. It's still retrieving the same old bits faster; not adding chocolate flavor to your bytes.

Does faster storage effect other things in the compute stack? Sure does. That still doesn't mean that it's fundamentally different from another array other than speed and with a neat bezel.

Re: Product margin!

First, I may be old enough to be your grandfather. Second, product margin is only part of the whole story. Pure states a 63% product margin (down 3% YOY). If you think Pure is making a dime of profit even with their 63% product margin vs NTAP's 46% you'd be daft. Support and services are high margin. Anything wrong with that? They count too as long as new sales aren't tanking. Take the whole picture into account.

Let's see if I remember this correctly. I think the previous poster is referring to the problem in iSCSI when you either have MPIO on the host aggregating multiple links or when you setup LACP on the host to a switch. In both cases, the host is exposing those as a single logical path even though the underlying paths are still separate below that level. Take a 20g LACP of two 10g paths. Any one iSCSI session can only actually get 10g of bandwidth because the aggregation doesn't actually bond the physical layer (or was it Layer 2?) to give you a 20g path. It only gives you a single logical path that masks the two separate 10g paths. That single iSCSI stream will saturate the chosen path at 10g. LACP and MPIO do that for good reasons and generally behave like a 20g path except in some cases like iSCSI sessions.

The new 100g and 40g solutions they describe do not evidence that behavior because that single iSCSI session would be multiplexed across all those individual channels and recomposed at the other end unbeknownst to the iSCSI protocol. They will act as a single path with their combined speeds.

Your analogy sucks. Photography industry is still doing fine selling cameras, lenses, and other associated equipment. Film companies died. The market changed but optics didn't change because the recording medium changed.

What you do with any medium matters greatly. You can easily make a platform with SCM and it can suck. Really suck. I think you have misunderstandings on how many engineered products work.

Re: And then spinning rust

The power and space savings of 60 and 100TB 3.5" flash is hard to beat with spinning rust. I have an affinity with it as well having spent some time up on the hill above Almaden Valley where a lot of good research was done. However, >1 watt at idle vs 8 watts is huge especially when you have to have 10 or more spinning disks to get the same capacity. That's nearly 2RU in a typical 12 disk per 2RU config (though I know you can get denser) and 80 watts vs ONE 3.5' drive and <1 watt for your typical archive storage where it should be idle quite a bit. Even when busy you save power just not as dramatically. Add in the crap durability of SMR and I don't see how spinning disk even competes going forward. if your needs are more in the speed and capabilities range, then MLC is your buddy.

I'm not going to argue about tunneling vs arcing. Call it what you want. It works and is proven. You worried about arcing while you fill your tank at the gas/petrol station and read email?

Feed the troll I guess. This simply validates that FlashRay was a mistake. AFF and cDOT are still excellent products in their market segments. Good to see NetApp isn't too hardheaded to change direction when they fail.

All in all, a good thing for the market if SolidFire is a good product since it will now have financial and distribution legs to keep progressing. I haven't had personal experience with it.

Re: Where's the corresponding tape silo?

These systems have replicas and for serious outfits they have multiple geographies with rules in place to make sure there are always replicas in multiple geographies. If the burly men can be in several places with sledgehammers and transit vans, you are in big enough trouble that backups aren't a concern. A good lawyer or a fake passport are in order.

Re: I don't geddit.

@ratfox - or have an open system of relays which do not depend on any single person/corporation to hold the data or make the rules. We used to have this in NNTP and usenet but eventually bots, spammers and dumbasses made it too hard to find anything useful and ISPs no longer offered it is a service so you had to find a public source.

Re: out of interest...

NetApp has virtual editions of both their FAS line (7mode and clustered) and the Eseries. They are downloadable from the support site. Hitachi had a virtual VSP program that I had a copy of but I haven't looked recently. Other people pointed out the EMC emulators.

All of them are great ways to try out the interfaces for different vendors. It's also a great way to test out scripts or orchestration flows without borking your real SAN.

Do you think those CPUs in storage arrays are there just to help keep the HBAs cozy and warm? It takes compute power to run a real array and host IO directed at it and probably more so for a virtual array. There's no free lunch! You'll have to take your existing compute needs and then add the storage load onto that. You aren't going to be able to squeeze VSAN into an already fully loaded compute farm. You can try, but you'd better have your resume freshened up first or a forgiving manager with the Dell rep's number on speed dial.

Re: Dynamic provisioning

The majority of companies have similar daily/weekly io usage patterns. The cloud providers have to build based on peak usage. A bit like highways. Not everyone works 8-5 but enough do that the highways are built to accommodate that. You'll be paying for cloud providers to overbuild as well. Just like the rest of the IT world does. No free lunches.

Re: what, more hardware on a monolithic processing scheme?

You are apparently misinformed. NetApp has been breaking out processes from Kahuna for years to get better use of cores. In my experience, almost every 8.x release has been a bit better in utilizing cores. Perhaps you're thinking of VNX2 which finally uses those multicore procs unlike the VNX they sold people as recently as August.

NetApp has had synchronous replication for years in 7-mode.