Posts by JRW

Lazy Sexist Generalisation

I did more than a quarter century as a sales engineer. Not all account managers are women and what mikus opines is just lazy sexist nonsense that insults the mostly talented and hardworking female account managers I know. Most of the account managers I worked with were men and in general the women had to be twice as good as the male candidates to get an account manager position.

Wow, just wow!

Someone still complaining about seat belts. Wow. Just wow!

Re: The Pencil needs charging?

And the Russian answer to the NASA space pen - a pencil. Some people do overcomplicate things ...

Re: Bad info on 8 Node

John from Nutanix here

@Dwarf

There is a difference between how Nutanix protects metadata and the actual blocks written. We don't RF5 data. Not trying to duck anything but it is covered much better than I have space for at nutanixbible.com. I'm not going to point to a third party's completely wrong account of how RF2 and RF3 work (the bad maths), not bs, me not spreading bs.

1 node cluster mirror data and meta data locally, 2 node clusters mirror between nodes. you don't get non-disruptive upgrades on a 1 node cluster. It's a reason they aren't by some definitions a true cluster. Nutanix is completely open about this - no smoke and mirrors here.

I got the impression with your 'first hand experience' you had been involved in the install. My suggestion still stands, whoever was doing the install should contact their local Nutanix Channel SE. We train our partners, free of charge, how to do this things correctly. Occasionally someone (not blaming any specific person, certainly not the customer) drops the ball. When this happens we try and make sure it is not repeated. Please do pass on the suggestion, Nutanix will act on the request.

I think the big storage node thing is a bit of a straw man. It doesn't make sense to add a single massive storage node to a cluster made of up of small general purpose nodes. Equally 3 nodes of 80TB is probably a sub-optimal design, five nodes of 40TB would do a better job (and provide more useable capacity because of the smaller n+1). File storage is the most common place big nodes make sense and to get a better price point for unstructured data we now have an unstructured only license (Files now, Object (Buckets) very soon), which makes unstructured only clusters much more cost effective. I accept we are not always the lowest price option and for file workloads we've tried to address this. It is a new thing so we are adjusting aspects as we go in response to customer feedback.

I do not believe I have stated anything is incorrect without providing evidence/an explanation. You say sales are down - that is absolutely and publicly demonstrably not true. Software and support revenue was up 42% compared to the same quarter last year and 47% (to $1.1bn) for a rolling 12 months.

I think the Khaptain speaks a lot of sense. I know a little bit about French wine and less about all the rest. My solution is to get help.

There are non-national operators like Cambridge Wine Merchants, I use Naked Wine and the folk at Majestic have made me some good recommendations when I've popped in there. Other outlets are available.

Don't forget Aldi and Lidl. If you know what you like they have some fantastic deals, but they won't help you find your new favourite wine variety like a good specialist.

With the right advice you can get a great bottle of wine for around £10. A poor choice at any price will disappoint.

Re: If Only....

Some people look at HA as being protecting against single points of failure and stop there. You don't hear about all the times 1 thing happened and some point later normal protected running was re-established. You have to plan for more than 1 event. 3 tips to start with.

1- Don't turn check sums off. If a supplier suggests you turn check sums off on a production system work out how quickly you can stop using that supplier. Check if any benchmarks or certifications cited involved turning checksums off - and if they did demand the ones with checksums enabled.

2 - A snapshot is not a backup.

3 - A replicated snapshot is not a backup.

Re: overbuilt much?

As others have mentioned if you are going to run services such as compression and deduplication then these will consume both RAM and CPU cycles (nothing is free).

As well as the volume of data (TB) mentioned the number of files/objects also matters as this generates additional metadata (nothing is free).

The other factor not mentioned is the number of concurrent users. 8GB of RAM may be fine for a home NAS serving music to Sonos etc. for a few users, 5-10 active connections tops? Plenty of small businesses might not stress 8GB, and things like OneDrive may make more sense than a Cloud gateway for these users anyway. When the number of connections may run into 1,000s then more resource is needed (nothing is free).

Obviously some things are free, like open source software, which often turns out to be free like a puppy. (Even free stuff isn't free.)

Re: NVMe vs. Hyperconverged

JohnW from Nutanix here. We introduced support for RDMA in AOS 5.5, which was GA December 2017. Most people won’t need it for some time to come, but for those who do it is available now. It’s not really NVMe vs. Hyperconerged as we’re ready for tomorrow today.

Re: Too true

I’m also ex-Nimble and without being behind AC I’d like to say how I disagree with the two former workmates on this thread.

To the person still in HPE - I left in January taking a significant pay cut. I am lucky my kids are grownup and this means I am much freer to make choices than most, but job changes are not always about money.

To the ex-HPE person I would suggest listening to Meatloaf’s ‘Objects in the rear view mirror.’. I am not disputing your description but look forward not backward. Enjoy the choices you have made, hopefully for some positive reasons and focus what you are now doing, let HPE worry about themselves.

To all the ex-Nimble people, still in HPE and the many now in other places, I hope life is treating you well.

Re: @Yet Another Anonymous coward

Not sure the pedestrian always has the right of way or there would be no word jaywalking in American.

Re: I asked why did I need a recovery on a new laptop.

The reason you might want to create the recovery thumb drive is if it is the only computer you will have access to. Computer down ... internet down ... creek without a paddle.

I did it for the laptop we bought my Dad. Fingers crossed I don’t have to ever talk him through using it.

Architect is a verb

Before declaring architect is not a verb perhaps Mr Dogdo should have looked in a dictionary. Turns out it is a verb... Fail, should have engaged brain before posting.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/Architect

@Charles 9 30,000 deaths pa does not all come from the person who is determined to kill people (they will be hard to stop if determined). A chunk are people with mental health problems killing themselves. First check everywhere (including private sales) should be does the buyer have a clean mental health (and criminal) record. Another chunk are escalation killings, where it has 'kicked off' and because those involved have free access to firearms the triggers are pulled before the brains are engaged. Right to carry is very dangerous. The saddest ones are the children who shoot themselves or their siblings/friends by accident. Unusually for a Brit I do believe in the right to bear arms, but IMO the system as it is in the US is badly broken. If you want to understand how broken look up what happened to Charles Vacca (clue, 9 year old with a machine gun).

Re: mafia

I think the online stuff the OS are doing, and the £20 a year print your own service, is great. I have no idea what abuse of monopoly Aitor1 thinks is going on - looks like great public service to me.

Re: Mass market?

The Focus is almost half the price of the Model 3. Both are mass market, but not in the same price band. For Model 3 entry money you can get a 5lt V8 Mustang. Since I don't live in the US or have $35K to spend on a car it's not a choice I have to over think.

Re: Slow Like a Sports Car

John from Nimble back

I used 4K numbers because it is the one the storage industry tends to publish. One of the many brilliant things InfoSight does for Nimble customers is let them understand (if they are interested) exactly what every application and volume is doing in terms of IOPS. I do see a lot of small IOPS out in the field (8K and below). InfoSight lets the whole customer base benefit from the hundreds of billions of data points it ingests everyday.

Dr Adamson's blog here gives an idea of the type of data science Nimble does about IO sizes. He definitely understands it better than I do.

https://www.nimblestorage.com/blog/busting-the-myth-of-storage-block-size/

I would say if a 'higher end' array is handling IOPS less well than a 'lower end' array then there is something wrong with the 'high end' array. I've worked with XP and 8 node 3PARs and particularly in all flash configuration they can support numbers of IOPS well above the million+ IOPS of a Nimble cluster. That said, most storage users don't need >1m IOPS.

Re: Nimble's Enterprise team (couple of guys) have been struggling on all accounts

JohnW from Nimble here

Not K34, it was J49 (I think) on 3PAR and J37 and J47 for the XPs. J49 suffered a little from everyone still trying to get their heads around 3PAR. Not a bad exam as such but probably too much simple/dull material in the syllabus, so lacked focus. J37 & J47 were tough for different reasons. They were aimed at admins, service staff and pre-sales, making them tough for any of the target groups. J37 was better then the exam that went before and J47 improved again, but still unfriendly exams.

JohnW form Nimble here

We do use SuperMicro, nice kit, good hardware does matter. We don't use an Infiniband interconnect but rather the Intel NTB, which is a PCIe direct connection between the controllers and built into the Intel server chipsets we use. We're not alone on this as it works well. The clever stuff is in the software.

Re: Well it sounds quite clever and quite fast and quite reliable

JohnW from Nimble here.

John Smith 19, you can check out pricing here. From 10 cents per GB per month. Not for me to say if that is expensive, all I can say is it is Enterprise grade flash block storage as a service for multi-cloud with the best analytics in the market.

https://www.nimblestorage.com/technology-products/nimble-cloud-volumes/

Re: Soo let me get this right

JohnW from Nimble here.

AC throws out 11 questions. (Slight whiff of cowardly FUD.) Too many for me to try and answer here. For brevity I'll have a stab at the first one and a half. Yes, NCV are encrypted with AES-256 encryption and each volume has it's own key. Unlike when encryption comes from self-encrypting drives this allows for keys to be disposed of on a per volume/application basis.

I suggest people check out Nick T's blog here for what this game changing innovation is really all about. http://spr.ly/60048ncCw Got to rush, busy times at Nimble :-)

Re: the problem that nimble has

Disclosure: Nimble Employee, my own views

I like this idea that Nimble OS is somehow trying to retro fit flash at a late stage. ROTFL The first product Nimble designed was an all flash appliance. The first product sold was a flash optimised hybrid one because that was the larger addressable market. In the hybrid disk/flash combination flash provides the read acceleration, writes are pretty good on Nimble whatever media. Having an all flash flavour was always anticipated. Nimble OS is designed to be media agnostic. The old and 'new' all flash architectures remain tied to the back end media for performance. Nimble takes a different approach that offers more to customers today and is highly adaptable. In the last 3 months Nimble added another 580 net new customers taking the total to 8,160. We may not yet be the size of NetApp let alone EMC but we continue to grow while they shrink and our Net Prompter Score (NPS) is 85. Since EMC won't publish their NPS the only conclusion I draw is the big dog has something to hide. It is selling to Dell so it can be more private.

AC - Very happy to offer an All Flash Nimble for testing. Those that have tried it find it a generation ahead of the competition. It's advantages are too numerous to list here. Once you've tried it I am sure your perspective will change.

As a final point a side by side review of InfoSight shows it to be years ahead of anyone else and it continues to evolve. Nimble's advantage in that area is not going away anytime soon.

Cheers,

JohnW

Re: What about post-RAID?

Disclosure - Nimble Employee

Nimble offers triple parity plus data protection without traditional RAID to manage. The Nimble OS manages protection/capacity automatically and does not require configuring the 'back end' either at initial setup or adding capacity. We lack the concept of RAID groups, aggregates etc. that traditional architectures are built on, making storage management application centric rather than about setting up the 'back end'.

Re: I'm puzzled

It's generally understood dedupe can be very useful in VDI, which is not really a static environment. On the other hand video archive is as static as it comes but only benefits from dedupe if completely unmanaged. As the folk at DD and elsewhere have shown dedupe is a very useful technology for backup. Compression tends to be much more effective than dedupe in the database world. Ultimately it's the nature of the data set that determines if dedupe may be useful and while plenty have over sold it that doesn't mean it, and its often forgotten twin compression, are not useful across a wide range of workflows.

Re: Question

They would be expensive as low volume and the rebuild times would be unbelievable high. Basically no one woudl buy them. Let's say these devices can sustain writing at 150MB/s. It would take 11+ hours to fill up a replacement 6TB drive if it were full (assuming no other bottlenecks). On some older designed storage platform a rebuild of a multi-TB drive can be weeks. Dual parity is looking inadequate to protect data on current large drives, even on well designed platform. Your 5 inch drives would be an order of magnitude worse. With large drives (and flash devices) the need is not to step up to physically larger devices but for better protection systems than dual parity. The challenges for storage are not how to get the most data on one device but how to (a) protect the data and (b) get the performance required at a price people can pay. If the data requires so little performance/access it would work in a 200TB drive then a tape will be cheaper.

Re: Analytics

Nimble Employee Back Again

Anyone interested in how Nimble's InfoSight analytics helps RCA please take up the offer of a demo and/or we can arrange a call with current customer.