Child of Wonder
2[H]4U
- Joined
- May 22, 2006
- Messages
- 3,270
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Bye Bye VNX, finally...
We have 4 VNX's that are up for replacement next year. This should be interesting.
There is some crazy innovation going on with the up and coming storage vendors. Take advantage of the opportunity to shop around and learn more about what else is out there.
Bye Bye VNX, finally...
VNX is a great product. VNXe? Meh.. I actually see Dell droping EqualLogic and Compellent in favor of VNX. If I wanted to really see crazy.. Drop VNX for XtremIO now that the 1.6+ TB enterprise drives are out with 2+ TB drives on the horrizon but keep pricing at the same level as VNX.
My biggest concern is Vmax road map. Vmax3 droppped less then a year ago, that platform will be around for atleast another 3 years, with 4+ years of extended support.
Some significant work has been done to characterize the impact of placing XtremIO behind a FAST.X configured VMAX3. This slide shows some detailed performance numbers when XtremIO is used in a FAST.X configuration behind a VMAX3. Read hit workloads tend to deliver improved response times due to the performance we experience with VMAX3 cache hits. Read misses incur the performance hit of the hop to the XtremIO back end although the impact is minimal and we will continue to optimize and improvethese performance numbers. Large block performance is generally improved over native XtremIO performance.
I see the 2 products being merged. In fact, Xtremio is now part of FAST-X.
Some marketing fluff..
I think the'll be merged because people want the performance of XtremIO, but they want the stability of Vmax. I was on a conf call with EMC that specifically said Vmax was build around spinning disks. Even if you fill a Vmax with nothing but SSDs, you'll still hover around an average of 1 - 3ms of response time. XtremIO being built around SSDs will hover at .5 - 1ms of response time. You could shrug at that kind of a difference, but in my environment (financial), its very important. But XtremIO does not have the same level of redundancy(today) as a V-Max.
I very recently finished doing a Vmax3 vs XtremIO vs Pure demo bake off. While XtremIO and Pure were neck and neck in performance, ease of use, setup, and administration, I settled on a Vmax3 due to internal redundancies, and maturity of the platform. Having the ability to virtulize a XtremIO array behind it in the future make it also very attractive.
Once EMC takes the best out of XtremIO and merges that special sauce into Vmax4, then we'll see a massive game changing shift in enterprise storage... Unless Dell ruins it.
Then what is the EMC all flash product going to be then? That the big drawl right now is all flash arrays. If EMC doesn't get a flash array into the account, some other company certainly will try. Big drawl to XtremIO is the performance and the reduplication rate.
They may offer solution you described as a spin off but to completely axe off XtremIO would be a mistake.
I think the biggest shake up will be to the higher end VNX model to make room for XtremIO and differentiate between mid market and enterprise product lines. Right now customer are comparing the two and making decision based on cost. Guess which one wins when cost is a factor?
There are close to 35 different all flash array vendors right now. 30 of them most likely will be bought out by all the major players. EMC already has XtremIO. Youre right, there is a big drawl towards XtremIO because of performance and deduplication rates. But XtremIO doesn't have the reliability of a VMax.
However, if the Pure Array gets over saturated, it stops deduping until the load lightens and then it goes back and dedupes the data and any new data coming.
Good information. Either you work for Pure or you've done your research.
In my POC with pure and both XtremIO, I gotten virtually no compression and dedupe. This was with Oracle, but our data is very unique.
In regards to high bandwidth, large write IO? Most flash arrays in this department are about the same. AFAs really shine with small IO blocks, but very random IO and lots of it. I think as these products mature, large write IO will not be much of a problem. This goes back to my original thought.. there are 35 different AFA vendors out there.. They will gobble each other up, and then the main players(EMC, Netapp, and Hitachi) will buy what is left.
I was excited to see Pure go public last week. But they have a serious burn rate with their funds and haven't been a profitable company. I like the idea of yanking out the engines and replacing them with new ones after 3 years for free based on maintenance but that just cant be sustainable. The engines are cheap.. They are rebranded Dell boxes. But most orgs will balk at a ridiculous maintenance bill. Most companies are trying bring down opex, not increase it. Sure Pure has a little special something something in the works and will no longer use Dell boxes, but that is a ways out. The fact that pure hasnt been profitable, is a fairly new company with a new(non dell) tech stack and just went public? Ill wait for everyone else to public beta that gear before I have another look at it. Honestly? I felt the same way about XtremIO.
Dear Valued Customer,
As you may know, Dell Inc. and EMC Corporation, VMware’s majority shareholder, have signed a definitive agreement under which Dell, together with its owners, Michael S. Dell, MSD Partners, and Silver Lake, will acquire EMC Corporation, while maintaining VMware as a publicly traded company.
VMware’s mission and strategy remain unchanged: to provide you, our customers, significant value through software-defined computing, networking and storage solutions, and our cloud, mobile, and desktop offerings. Our leadership team will remain in place and we are as committed as ever to helping you address your most pressing business and IT challenges.
We look forward to developing even more valuable solutions for our customers and we will continue to invest in the strong partner ecosystem that has been such a core part of our success. You should feel confident that this agreement was made with customers in mind, and that the world-class service and support VMware has always provided you will continue.
As always, we will focus on bringing disruptive innovation to market to help customers like you succeed.
Pat Gelsinger
Chief Executive Officer
Let's be honest. Any of the true AFAs out there exceed probably 90% of customer workload I/O requirements. I try really hard to stay out of the "we flip bits this way, they flip bits that way" discussions. It's a waste of time these days. Go with the company, portfolio, and partner you trust the most. The rest is competitive BS.
kdh said:Im really interested in seeing how Dell handles the VCE relationship between Cisco UCS and EMC V-Block