Posts by RollTide14

Re: 20% of the cost of the Primera?

so 60% gross margins arent a lot?? I mean, its not like pure SW margins but I think lots of industries would love 60% gross margins.

Thank you! There is nothing “innovative” about going from 7 racks of 300gb SAS drives to a quarter rack of NVME. You can do this with any major storage vendor.

AWS, Azure, GCP none of those guys have "99.9999999999999999%" availability.

In fact, they have three 9's which is equal to 44 minutes a month or almost NINE hours a year. The twelve or fifteen 9's of availability is durability for their storage. You wont LOSE data but you might not be able to access it!

Re: Customers

No, Wall Street really loves consumption models. If all customers loved consumption models then something like Reserved Instances wouldn’t exist

Pretty sure that $65M deal got axed as well. So that went from $950M to a big fat ZERO

https://about.bgov.com/blog/rean-cloud-pentagon/

Re: Ummm why?

Yes, C480 thats what I meant! Not S-Series, I was blanking on that for like half an hour.

Interesting, the way that I was told is UCS DGX you are talking about is just the NVIDIA DGX but on Cisco's GPL. Same way you can buy Commvault, Veeam, VMware or about a million other technologies. I don't believe there is any difference so I highly doubt you're going to be running AMD or TPU on an NVIDIA box :)

You seem to have a great handle on this. How can I pick your brain more on this stuff outside of this venue?

Re: Except...

Yep, definitely not an EMC homer here....jesus lay off the Kool-Aid. I'd like to refute like 80% of your comments above but I don't have enough time.

- Former EMC'er

Re: Innovation

Hey Chris,

I actually disagree with you on #3. I think EMC (Not Dell/EMC) reps are some of the best around. They also have an absolute beast of a marketing machine.

Their issue is the majority of their products are absolute crap. Isilon WAS great for very specific workloads and has recently gone down hill dramatically. ScaleIO doesnt have a single enterprise feature. VMAX is great for very specific workloads and has had a tough time moving to all flash.....dont even get me started on the Xtremio debacle. Remember how hard they were pushing that piece of garbage? They pushed it so hard for a year and then its almost like it completely vanished from the portfolio after they had so many issues with it.

would love to know what your definition of "few" is

I feel like people have been saying that for the past 4-5 years yet here they are.

Re: Cloud costs

Ahhhh my favorite.

"Backup / Disaster recovery costs"

Do you think that since it's in the cloud that it's automatically backed up?

Out of all the points you mentioned above....2..maybe 3 are valid (Colo costs for sure, ongoing maintenance and maybe....maybe depreciation)

You have to pay to architect backup/DR properly, you have to pay to secure properly. Nobody has staff completely dedicated to just HW, you have to train your team for cloud now.

Re: Just curious...

Let me start this post with the always applicable "THERE WILL ALWAYS BE TRADEOFFS" line. By having these components provisioned separately it allows for certain efficiencies that current HCI players aren't able offer.

My customers who have gone down the HCI route have done so for 1 reason and 1 reason only. Simplicity. You can try and tell me otherwise, but it always boils down to that single reason. Should a customer really care how its packaged if provides the same levels of simplicity (i'm making an assumption that it does ie. single pane of glass, 1 click upgrades...)????

Sure, NetApp. I'll take my steak medium rare

For their cloud....no none of them use enterprise arrays but if you think that google/Microsoft/amazon don't have millions upon millions of dollars of EMC/NetApp/HDS in some of their environments then I've got a bridge to sell you

Re: block sizes matter

For Pure to get blown away by a UNITY box is not a great look......yikes

Its going to be very interesting on a couple different fronts. Can they manufacture their own drives at a price point where they can be cost competitive in the market? Does development now slow down with proprietary HW (ala 3PAR ASIC)? Finally, the DSSD, Violin's of the world that used proprietary HW did NOT offer any data services (Dedupe, Compression) because that inherently slows the array down. Did they fail because of the HW or because of the lack of services?

Re: Nothing at all like NetApp does - and that's good

So its not NetApp Private Storage as a Service??? Cause it sounds a lot like NPSaaS...

Re: Blagh

SAP reps are have way better comp on cloud offerings than on prem as well. Makes no sense for anyone to try and resell this stuff, they are going to have to win that battle all on their own.

Re: doing some math

Sarcasm doesnt always translate over text....

Re: Do I....

Your org doing a bunch of deleting of files???

I agree on a bunch of the comments, but I'm not seeing anyone with SHRINKING storage requirements

Re: Neither Solid Nor on Fire

Can you elaborate here? I'm assuming by "wasteful" you mean the usable capacity ratios right? Completely agree with you there, but I think they've done a great job with their licensing model to combat that.

The customers that I have running it absolutely love it.

Re: Can someone from NetApp defend

I'm a former NetApp employee....go read the comments in this article

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/08/solidfires_flash_density_looks_meagre/

There are comprises you have to make in order to get certain features/functionality. In order to get all the bells and whistles that SolidFire brings to the table means its very memory intensive. Has nothing to do with inefficiency, has to do with a completely different set of features.

Re: Discounts for market share

Valid point....but tell me which AFA company is NOT doing that right now???

Re: PureStorage Software Included

Thats why they are called "examples".

I can do the same thing...10:1 with Pure??? Wishful Thinking!!

Re: An inherently inefficient architecture

Thank you D for a non biased, honest response. I'm still shocked that some people (Chris Mellor) can't recognize that there are ALWAYS trade offs. I can have scale out with inline global data efficiencies but I wont get density. I can have density but I wont get things like true QoS policies.

There is no storage platform that is perfect....otherwise they'd own the market

As D said, Any true scale out platform with data services (like inline GLOBAL dedupe) is going to run into issues with large SSD size. If you want to accommodate those SSD sizes then you need crazy amounts of memory and that will price themselves out.

SolidFire Memory - 384GB

Xtremio Memory (40TB brick) - 512GB

Re: Re:

All very fair and valid points, especially the 20TB-40TB hybrid storage for the SMB mid market space and the all flash or go home comments. This just reminds me of the FAS2XXX/VNXe releases of "configs starting as low as $8,000!!! You got a single controller, 1TB of disk, no SW, and a year of basic support" Any real world config ended up being 3X+ that amount.

Now I predominantly sell NetApp (which I know you aren't a huge fan of so I'll try and tone down being a fanboy and look at this objectively) but if I showed a $5-$10GB price tag I would get laughed out of the room. I've sold 5 AFF arrays in the past 6 months and all of them are under half of your $5GB price tag and thats with only a 2:1 (useable to effective) ratio.

Just curious, why do you think Unity has a lower floor cost than its competition?