Enterprise Grade Storage Recommendations

[Child of Wonder]

Child of Wonder, that line by line ripping apart of a Pure customer's feedback and experience is just mind boggling when honestly it seems that you are a Pure employee or partner. Pure has a good product with good pricing but the numbers game makes me second guess buying them or Nimble until the product is bought out by a larger company to keep things afloat. Don't do the company a disservice with venting online when you can just let the product speak for itself. I have a lot of buddies/old colleagues that work at Pure, there are definitely shady as hell sales guys there. ALL vendors have shady as hell sales guys.
In regards to the feature sets on the box, it is a great product for its price point. With how far the XIO line has come since the 2.0 to 3.0 laughingstock of an upgrade, I'd still give them a look although not want to pay the EMC tax if I don't have to. That ripping apart though really is stopping me in my tracks on the Pure point. We have a Pure array and we love it in our DC, my wifes hospital chain she does telecom for just bought quite a few Pure boxes for raw power. No need to rip people apart for their opinion and experience.

Not trying to rip apart a customer's feedback and I apologize if it comes across that way. A lot of what was stated didn't seem accurate so I wanted to offer some counter points. If kdh's experience with Pure has been that negative, to the point that he no longer trusts his sales team or doesn't see the value in Pure, then I'd like to do whatever I can to help fix that since, yes, I do work for Pure, and I always strive to give my customers the most unbiased and objective information I can. I guess my reflexes to jump in got the better of me.

 

[NIZMOZ]

Glad this has changed. Are professional services still required for hardware upgrades? Going from a single node to a cluster or expanding a cluster?

Yes, they also now require two technicians when working on an XIO onsite. Due to a customer loosing their data because of a technician mistake.

 

[kdh]

Damn, that's a lot of FUD in one post.

Zero Fud. That was 100% my experience with them.

A sales team certainly could miss when it comes to estimating data reduction. But any prospective customer can get a Right Size Guarantee from Pure before buying that will guarantee the array will hold X TB based on the data the customer plans to put on it. Tell the sales team, for example, you have 10TB of SQL, 10TB of VDI, 10TB of Exchange, and 20TB of general virtual server data and they'll create a guarantee that estimates the data reduction you'll get which will turn into an effective capacity the array will provide. If the array fails to hit that, the customer gets a capacity expansion for free.

I hear what you are saying, but the above didn't work out like that for me.

The post compression process is simply this: we run in-line compression on the data as it comes in, then use spare CPU cycles to run a deeper level of compression on the data later on. Deduplication behaves similarly. Data reduction is never "turned off."

In the 3 meetings I sat in, sales, and TCs all said that when the array gets over loaded, dedupe, and compression is sidelined until the array load lightens up. There is a 2nd process that runs for further dedupe and compression. 3 separate technical folks from Pure told me this, to my face.

How is migrating from EMC Powerpath on Linux to Pure Storage, which doesn't need Powerpath, a Pure Storage issue? If you need to reload your iPhone every time you pair it with a different car, is that a car manufacturer problem or an Apple problem?

You can't run DMP and Powerpath at the same time on the same host in the linux world. Pure's own international documents say the same, so does EMC, and Oracle. With that said, if you have a host that is on EMC and running powerpath, the only way to migrate it is 1. Disable powerpath and run down a single link or, 2 Reload the OS and enable DMP at install. Installing DMP on Linux after powerpath was install is a bad idea. I have first hand experience with this, and stability issues that go with it.

Yep, only one local user account. Sync up the array with Active Directory or LDAP, set up RBAC, and then change that one local account's password to something obscure, save it somewhere, and use your own account. How would managing several local user accounts make your life any easier?

Not everyone wants their stuff or even has the ability for their gear for what ever reason to be tied into a global directory server.

Old hardware was OEM'd but the //m series released in summer 2015 is our own custom hardware. How was that any different than several other vendors in their first few years of existence? Our arrays do not run CentOS.

They do run Centos.. I watched the machines boot myself. It maybe modified, but at the end of the day.. the banner said centos 6.5.

Ask for the Right Size Guarantee and if the sales team undersizes you get a free upgrade. Simple. If you don't want the array within the first 30 days of owning it, send it back for any reason for a full refund. Simple.

This I can't disagree or argue with.

Swapping engines IS easy and IS seamless. Yes, you will be running on only one controller for a combined ~20 minutes during a controller upgrade but performance remains at 100% during and exceeds 100% after. Is this better or worse than the overwhelming majority of storage vendors? Customers also get these controller upgrades as part of their maintenance renewal every 3 years (maintenance that will only ever increase in price from the initial purchase if the customer buys more capacity).

Pure is only ever 2 engines. Upgrading means you are in a degraded state. XtremIO, you add space, you add compute power with no degraded engine state. Vmax is the same, unless you are adding cache to your directors. Pure in terms of tech stack is a lot like a VNX. Scale up instead of Scale out.

I am not aware of any customers in my three state region that have purchased Pure and gone back to EMC. Can you share any with me?

Not with out violating NDAs and personal relationships I have with folks.

Are you asserting that other vendors will maintain aggressive initial purchase discount pricing for as long as a customer owns an array? Pure may have to get aggressive, like anyone else, to win an initial sale but when the customer gets free controller upgrades as part of their 3 year maintenance cycle which eliminates forklift upgrades every 3-5 years, can evacuate existing shelves of SSD so they can trade them in for denser shelves (you don't rebuy TB you already own), has Pure support proactively monitoring the array and performing software upgrades for them, and can seamlessly migrate from one architecture to the next (moving to NVMe SSDs and shelves someday, for example) without downtime or data migration, customers overwhelmingly see the savings in CAPEX and OPEX going Pure.

It would be dumb for other vendors to not get aggressive. But when it came time to add a SINGLE tray of disks to my pure array, the cost of a SINGLE tray of disks was almost exactly the same cost as buying the array itself brand new. How can a single tray of consumer level drives cost 250K? If pure is saving me money on using consumer level drives, Im just not seeing it. And the free controller thing? Pures maintenance was much higher then EMC. So are you really getting the controllers for free? No.

We have compared Pure to XtremIO many times (don't really run into it much lately):

- Technology and hardware? Why would a customer want expensive and low density eMLC drives vs today's cheaper and more dense 3D TLC when a storage array can get the same performance and longevity, including warrantying the 3D TLC drives for as long as you own the array without increasing maintenance costs?

- Layout and design? Have you seen the back of an 4+ cluster XtremIO implementation vs Pure? Talk about a complex, 23RU+ cable nightmare.

- Support and management? Everyone who loves EMC support raise their hand. Everyone who loves Java based management that requires its own separate server raise their hand.

- Upgradeability? Why would I want to buy a 10, 20, or 40TB node only to lock myself in at that node size, only able to expand my array at that increment in pairs of two until I hit 8 nodes? Why wouldn't I want to be able to grow my array in different increments or even non-disruptively trade in low density shelves I already own for bigger ones? Why would I want to migrate all my data off an array for a major software upgrade? Why would I want to pay for professional services for an upgrade? How does any of that benefit me and my business?

Introducing the Newly Expanded Evergreen Storage – Guaranteed Capacity That Stays Modern and Dense

- TCO? Buy technology that requires more rack space, more power, more cooling, more cables, more complexity that I'll have to forklift upgrade every 3-5 years or if I want to move to higher densities VS buying technology that has maintenance costs that don't go up unless I buy more capacity and include controller upgrades every 3 years and the ability to move to denser shelves or newer flash technology non-disruptively, and protecting my initial investment by getting trade-in if I have to move up to a faster controller or add denser shelves.

- Not going to argue on eMLC drives vs the 3D TLC drives. You are correct, but the drives if they are considered consumer driver are definitely not priced as consumer drives. My argument on this point is invalid, because no vendor charges best buy prices for their drives.

- Yes, I have. The complex argument is silly and a nonstarter for me.

- While I agree with you to some point, I CLI my way to victory for the most part so for the most part, Java isn't an issue.

- You got me on this one. However, I've seen the road maps and I know whats coming down the pipeline. Intermixing 10, 20 and 40 bricks is coming, and so is the ability to rebalance and migrate to a new cluster with no downtime.

Pure isn't profitable today. We just released our Flashblade product, an all flash, total ground up software and hardware build, for file and object storage, which has been in development for years. As a publicly traded company anyone can look at our financials and see where the money is going. Up to others to decide if we're spending money appropriately as an all-flash company as the entire world begins to move away from spinning disk and towards flash media.

As for the rumor mill, I won't comment one way or the other but I can say is it's pretty ironic when companies that they themselves are being bought make negative claims and predictions about a competitor being bought out. Glass houses and all. As a Pure employee I'm bullish on what the company has done and will be doing. Rumor mills are just noise and distraction.

FlashBlade is actually a really cool idea. Seen some demos on it. Pure maybe onto something with it. Pure is making waves, and shaking up the 100 pound gorilla that is EMC. But with my personal experience with it, and I have 9 months of it in a production environment running UEK, Vmware, and Windows, I wouldn't recommended it. You are right about the rumor mill, sorry to bring it up. Wasn't cool.

 

[kdh]

We currently have a VNX5200 and it's closing in on both capacity and throughout. We're thinking about going Pure. What product of theirs are you using exactly? Flashblade looks very impressive to me, compared to the VNX5600 we could get at near the same price.

I'm somewhat new to managing enterprise storage, but an AFA is very appealing.

This would be part of a large data-center upgrade including moving from 7 VMware hosts with dual hex-cores and 192GB of RAM to a fully populated Cisco UCS with 512GB of RAM per blade and the 22 core Xeon V4's.

I was using the m20s. I know I'm crapping on pure in some of my posts, but its actually a pretty decent product. It just doesn't stand up to EMC. The m20 install I had, and I had 2 of them barely took up much space physical space. The GUI is a little.. weird. But is pretty straight forward. The remote management, and issue tracking is something they crush most other vendors on.

Really do your homework on AFA arrays. There is a lot of stuff out of them out there.. Close to 44 last I checked. Gartner was saying in 3 to 4 years after they will all swallow each other up and it'll get down to 5 different offerings. If you stick with EMC, Pure, Hitachi or even Netapp you'll do fine.

 

[kdh]

EMC here. We have the VNX5300, 5400 and Xtremio in our environment and they are great. The only downers is EMC support is really terrible. Takes forever to get a part. LOL!

I would also recommend looking into TINTRI as they are new on the block but have some nice looking options.

Must depend on your location. In mine, unless I loose an SP or something tragic, I can get a drive shipped to me in under 3 hours.

 

[kdh]

In the end its all about service and SLA.

If you set a price, select Dell/ HP or the preferred SuperMicro Storage Hardware, Intel SSDs or HGST Ultrastar disks with LSI HBAs and a ZFS SAN OS like Oracle Solaris where ZFS comes from or an OpenSource Solaris fork like OmniOS , you will never be able to beat this regarding performance and hardly regarding features.

If you have your own IT department, you can buy enough spare, failover and backup systems to be safe with OpenSource Software and hardware support. Beside that OS support from Oracle for Solaris is affordable (about 1k $ per year) and OmniTi offer support as well for OmniOS.

ZFS is a non starter in a real storage environment. Sure its great for small to mid size business. Yes it can handle Ps worth of storage, but you stand just about any ZFS solution to say.. a Vmax? And I guarantee you that ZFS solution will be laughed out the building.

 

[kdh]

Not trying to rip apart a customer's feedback and I apologize if it comes across that way. A lot of what was stated didn't seem accurate so I wanted to offer some counter points. If kdh's experience with Pure has been that negative, to the point that he no longer trusts his sales team or doesn't see the value in Pure, then I'd like to do whatever I can to help fix that since, yes, I do work for Pure, and I always strive to give my customers the most unbiased and objective information I can. I guess my reflexes to jump in got the better of me.

FYI, I actually didn't take it that way. No apology needed. If anything, mine was a little douchey.

 

[NIZMOZ]

Must depend on your location. In mine, unless I loose an SP or something tragic, I can get a drive shipped to me in under 3 hours.

Definitely not dependent on the location. Read online. It's a known fact EMC has support issues. Open a ticket up, and it could take days till they actually look at it. We have had to call them multiple times to get the tickets assigned even for a major failure. But just getting a drive replaced usually takes a week.

 

[bigdogchris]

+1 for 3PAR. Fantastic product. The Thin provisioning and auto tiering work well. Management is really easy. Flash read caching if you need it.

 

[Jagged]

EMC here. We have the VNX5300, 5400 and Xtremio in our environment and they are great. The only downers is EMC support is really terrible. Takes forever to get a part. LOL!

I would also recommend looking into TINTRI as they are new on the block but have some nice looking options.

Another vote for Tintri. We're running multiple Tintri appliances of various generations (T540's, T650's, T880's, and a couple of T5080 AFA's). Super easy to setup and administer, excellent support. Great integration w/ VMware. The thing to keep in mind is that these are meant for virtualized environments (VMware/Hyper-V/etc). We also have Pure (FA450's) and older NetApp storage (V6240). Tintri just seems like a no-brainer when looking at virtualized environments.

 

[NobleX13]

TINTRI looks interesting... I will have to reach out to our VAR and see what they say about them.

Thanks for all the feedback/opinions guys.

 

[kdh]

Definitely not dependent on the location. Read online. It's a known fact EMC has support issues. Open a ticket up, and it could take days till they actually look at it. We have had to call them multiple times to get the tickets assigned even for a major failure. But just getting a drive replaced usually takes a week.

Meltdown on your sales and CE folks. Thats beyond unacceptable. Which product line did you have issues with?

 

[NIZMOZ]

Meltdown on your sales and CE folks. Thats beyond unacceptable. Which product line did you have issues with?

Till recently, it was the VNX5300. We have actually been dealing with our Sales folks and they have done all they can do. We have direct contacts with the manager that is in charge of our region now if we have any issues we contact him. But we have the following equipment with EMC.

Our Prod site:

VNX5300
Xtremio 800GB model

Production VDI VBLOCK:

Xtremio 400GB model
Vnxe

DR site:

VNX5400
Xtremio 800GB

DR VDI:

Xtremio 400GB
VNXe

 

[kdh]

VNX/Clarriion support has definitely had issues about 5 or 6 years ago but it has been cleaned up for sure today. Usually your parts depo will carry drives, LLCs, and a few other odds and ends. SPs can take up to 24 hours because they usually have to be flown in from a hub. XtremIO has had some... pains.. If you are on the 4.X code base a good chunk of your issues should go away. EMC knows xtremio has been difficult. It was a rushed product to market in the first few releases. I don't have much experience with the VNXes. But I can tell you this, if you are on a call and you are not getting what you want, escalate the call. Don't feel bad, say, "Look, this isnt going any place, I need to escalate." If that doesnt work, say you want to speak to the MOD (manager on duty). Another trick I will use is, I will tell them I am not getting off the phone, I'm not going on hold, and I'm not going to wait for a call back. Keep them on the line a long as possible and you will be routed to someone with a higher skillset who can resolve your issues. Yes its a bunch of weird awkward silence, and typing but you'll get routed to a support guy who can help. Also, really become friends with your local CEs. They are usually really great guys and can make magic happen when you really need it. They sometimes have the connections to resolve your issues as well.

 

[dilidolo]

TINTRI looks interesting... I will have to reach out to our VAR and see what they say about them.

Thanks for all the feedback/opinions guys.

We looked at Tintri as well, very good product but in the end, I settled with Coho Data All Flash, much better architecture and a lot cheaper. Waiting for the gears to be deployed next month.

I have 2 EMC VMAX3, 3PAR and NetApp. I'm also evaluating All Flash NetApp to replace both VMAX and 3PAR for production workloads and use Coho for VDI.

 

[NIZMOZ]

VNX/Clarriion support has definitely had issues about 5 or 6 years ago but it has been cleaned up for sure today. Usually your parts depo will carry drives, LLCs, and a few other odds and ends. SPs can take up to 24 hours because they usually have to be flown in from a hub. XtremIO has had some... pains.. If you are on the 4.X code base a good chunk of your issues should go away. EMC knows xtremio has been difficult. It was a rushed product to market in the first few releases. I don't have much experience with the VNXes. But I can tell you this, if you are on a call and you are not getting what you want, escalate the call. Don't feel bad, say, "Look, this isnt going any place, I need to escalate." If that doesnt work, say you want to speak to the MOD (manager on duty). Another trick I will use is, I will tell them I am not getting off the phone, I'm not going on hold, and I'm not going to wait for a call back. Keep them on the line a long as possible and you will be routed to someone with a higher skillset who can resolve your issues. Yes its a bunch of weird awkward silence, and typing but you'll get routed to a support guy who can help. Also, really become friends with your local CEs. They are usually really great guys and can make magic happen when you really need it. They sometimes have the connections to resolve your issues as well.

Sorry, but this is current as of today. They are restructuring it now that Dell is taking over so we are hoping they fix the issues. Trust me, I escalate them all the time.

 

[Shockey]

Till recently, it was the VNX5300. We have actually been dealing with our Sales folks and they have done all they can do. We have direct contacts with the manager that is in charge of our region now if we have any issues we contact him. But we have the following equipment with EMC.

Our Prod site:

VNX5300
Xtremio 800GB model

Production VDI VBLOCK:

Xtremio 400GB model
Vnxe

DR site:

VNX5400
Xtremio 800GB

DR VDI:

Xtremio 400GB
VNXe

Your call home working correctly for every device? Drive replacements for VNX typically are auto routed and pushed to field for replacement immediately.

XtremIO they give a bit more TLC too when drives fail.

Usually your parts depo will carry drives, LLCs, and a few other odds and ends. SPs can take up to 24 hours because they usually have to be flown in from a hub. I don't have much experience with the VNXes. But I can tell you this, if you are on a call and you are not getting what you want, escalate the call. Don't feel bad, say, "Look, this isnt going any place, I need to escalate." If that doesnt work, say you want to speak to the MOD (manager on duty). Another trick I will use is, I will tell them I am not getting off the phone, I'm not going on hold, and I'm not going to wait for a call back. Keep them on the line a long as possible and you will be routed to someone with a higher skillset who can resolve your issues. Yes its a bunch of weird awkward silence, and typing but you'll get routed to a support guy who can help. Also, really become friends with your local CEs. They are usually really great guys and can make magic happen when you really need it. They sometimes have the connections to resolve your issues as well.

1. His tricks do work, I've done it when at customer sites installing or servicing gear.
2. Being friends with CEs does help. I can guarantee you they know their way around the quirks in the EMC systems. They run into and deal with all of it on daily basis also.

 

[NIZMOZ]

Your call home working correctly for every device? Drive replacements for VNX typically are auto routed and pushed to field for replacement immediately.

XtremIO they give a bit more TLC too when drives fail.



1. His tricks do work, I've done it when at customer sites installing or servicing gear.
2. Being friends with CEs does help. I can guarantee you they know their way around the quirks in the EMC systems. They run into and deal with all of it on daily basis also.

Yes, that is the issue. It opens the ticket, and it just sits in their queue never assigned to anyone till we call. :/

 

[Shockey]

Yes, that is the issue. It opens the ticket, and it just sits in their queue never assigned to anyone till we call. :/

What state you located in? PM me the last SR this happened on. I'm curious..

 

[NIZMOZ]

Texas. I'll have to go look again through our EMC queue once I can remember when I am at work.

 

[Shockey]

Texas. I'll have to go look again through our EMC queue once I can remember when I am at work.

Okay, i think you are down by KDH. Think he located somewhere in Texas.

 

[NIZMOZ]

It seems those have already fallen off the list of requests. We have had a bunch recently due to our Datacenter move so they pushed all those off. :/

 

[kdh]

I am in Texas, central in a major city. Its very possible my experience is better then yours because I am in a more populated area in regards to the parts depo. Dont hold your breath that dell is going to fix anything. Depending on the work, its actually not EMC doing the work but a Unisys contractor. But like the local CEs the Unisys contractors are actually great guys to be friends with.

NIZMOZ, yea, your experience is crap and it shouldn't be like that. Your sales guy should get you covered and get you where you need to be. if not, switch sales guys. How is sales helping with support? Trust me, you swap your sales guy for another one, and you'll get support cause your sales guy doesnt want to loose out on his bonus.

 

[NIZMOZ]

I am in Texas, central in a major city. Its very possible my experience is better then yours because I am in a more populated area in regards to the parts depo. Dont hold your breath that dell is going to fix anything. Depending on the work, its actually not EMC doing the work but a Unisys contractor. But like the local CEs the Unisys contractors are actually great guys to be friends with.

NIZMOZ, yea, your experience is crap and it shouldn't be like that. Your sales guy should get you covered and get you where you need to be. if not, switch sales guys. How is sales helping with support? Trust me, you swap your sales guy for another one, and you'll get support cause your sales guy doesnt want to loose out on his bonus.

Yeah, Unisys is crap. They cause us more grief than EMC does, but there are times the tickets sit and never get assigned to even them. I will say we talked to EMC support today, and were impressed. Things are already changing. Their emails are now @dell.com. Haha. I am actually friends with one of the EMC CE's that knows us well in our area. He is a good guy.

 

[t_ski]

Be careful with depending on dedupe in calculations in SANs. It's typically not inline and can kill performance when the Dedupe jobs fire. And for those that do inline Dedupe (with a few notable exceptions), the performance suffers tremendously. Also, watch out for Tiering timeframes on EMC gear as well. As I understand it, most of the VMX gear has a an hourly auto-tiering schedule to flash.

VNX have the option to do automatic tiering schedules or manual. You can set the schedule window to off-hours if you are worried about performance hits.

EMC here. We have the VNX5300, 5400 and Xtremio in our environment and they are great. The only downers is EMC support is really terrible. Takes forever to get a part. LOL!

I get all my VNX parts next day, unless I state I have a major issue and then I can get them same day (multiple drive failure with no remaining spares happened once and I got all three replacement drives driven to me in 3-4 hors).

VNX/Clarriion support has definitely had issues about 5 or 6 years ago but it has been cleaned up for sure today. Usually your parts depo will carry drives, LLCs, and a few other odds and ends. SPs can take up to 24 hours because they usually have to be flown in from a hub. XtremIO has had some... pains.. If you are on the 4.X code base a good chunk of your issues should go away. EMC knows xtremio has been difficult. It was a rushed product to market in the first few releases. I don't have much experience with the VNXes. But I can tell you this, if you are on a call and you are not getting what you want, escalate the call. Don't feel bad, say, "Look, this isnt going any place, I need to escalate." If that doesnt work, say you want to speak to the MOD (manager on duty). Another trick I will use is, I will tell them I am not getting off the phone, I'm not going on hold, and I'm not going to wait for a call back. Keep them on the line a long as possible and you will be routed to someone with a higher skillset who can resolve your issues. Yes its a bunch of weird awkward silence, and typing but you'll get routed to a support guy who can help. Also, really become friends with your local CEs. They are usually really great guys and can make magic happen when you really need it. They sometimes have the connections to resolve your issues as well.

^^^This

Your call home working correctly for every device? Drive replacements for VNX typically are auto routed and pushed to field for replacement immediately.

^^^And this

Yeah, Unisys is crap. They cause us more grief than EMC does, but there are times the tickets sit and never get assigned to even them. I will say we talked to EMC support today, and were impressed. Things are already changing. Their emails are now @dell.com. Haha. I am actually friends with one of the EMC CE's that knows us well in our area. He is a good guy.

Depends on your tech. We have Unisys in our area and the main guy I work with is great, and he's even taught me a thing or two.

We have three VNX5300, one VNX5500, one VNX5400 and one VNX5200, plus Data Domain 2500 and Networker. Basic support has been fine and level three support has been better. Currrently looking at a Unity 300F, which was quoted to us around $200K for 38TB, 16GB FC, 4-year support, and some other bells and whistles. The ability to dump to a Data Domain is a nice bonus for us. Still trying to figure out if we should go with the Unity or one of the IBM options quoted to us (5030 or 900).

 

[NIZMOZ]

VNX have the option to do automatic tiering schedules or manual. You can set the schedule window to off-hours if you are worried about performance hits.



I get all my VNX parts next day, unless I state I have a major issue and then I can get them same day (multiple drive failure with no remaining spares happened once and I got all three replacement drives driven to me in 3-4 hors).



^^^This



^^^And this



Depends on your tech. We have Unisys in our area and the main guy I work with is great, and he's even taught me a thing or two.

We have three VNX5300, one VNX5500, one VNX5400 and one VNX5200, plus Data Domain 2500 and Networker. Basic support has been fine and level three support has been better. Currrently looking at a Unity 300F, which was quoted to us around $200K for 38TB, 16GB FC, 4-year support, and some other bells and whistles. The ability to dump to a Data Domain is a nice bonus for us. Still trying to figure out if we should go with the Unity or one of the IBM options quoted to us (5030 or 900).

I am hoping it gets better. I should have clarified what we had.

2 VNX 5300s, 1 VNX 5400 (possible two soon), 2 XtremIO 800GBs, and 2 XtremIO 400gbs, 2 VNXes, 4 RPAs (two at each site). We are actually looking at Nimble storage now instead of the second 5400. We looked at Data Domain, but for what 4-5 products in Data Domain can do, you can get one with CommVault. So we utilize CommVault for everything and way more pleased with it after our testing of EMCs Backup solution.

 

[NobleX13]

My boss brought in SolidFire yesterday and I pretty much picked their product apart. $50K for 4.6TB usable before dedup/compression, and they would not tell me who makes their drives or what the write endurance was. They were using cheaper TLC flash and commodity Dell PowerEdge 1U servers as nodes in the cluster. They also lose 50% of their raw capacity due to their clustering system.

Who do these bastards think they are with pricing like this? I expect the SSDs themselves to be at least 60% of the total product cost and this is clearly not the case here.... What gives? I feel like every enterprise storage product is a ripoff, especially when I see SAS SSDs like these on eBay. NEW 1.6TB SSD SAS Enterprise Drive - HGST - HUSMM1616ASS201 - 60 Day Warranty

The offering from Solidfire consisted of 4 1U servers with 10 240GB drives each... what a joke.

 

[Child of Wonder]

My boss brought in SolidFire yesterday and I pretty much picked their product apart. $50K for 4.6TB usable before dedup/compression, and they would not tell me who makes their drives or what the write endurance was. They were using cheaper TLC flash and commodity Dell PowerEdge 1U servers as nodes in the cluster. They also lose 50% of their raw capacity due to their clustering system.

Who do these bastards think they are with pricing like this? I expect the SSDs themselves to be at least 60% of the total product cost and this is clearly not the case here.... What gives? I feel like every enterprise storage product is a ripoff, especially when I see SAS SSDs like these on eBay. NEW 1.6TB SSD SAS Enterprise Drive - HGST - HUSMM1616ASS201 - 60 Day Warranty

The offering from Solidfire consisted of 4 1U servers with 10 240GB drives each... what a joke.

A huge part of what you're buying is software and support. Hardware is cheap, especially when it's commodity gear, but a lot of man hours went into designing, writing, and testing the code that goes into Solidfire.

That being said, the numbers are even worse than you'd expect. Some vendors use Base10 Terabytes to tell you how much space you're buying when your OS uses Base2 to tell you how much space you're using. So in reality the usable space would be 4.36TiB (Base2, like what Windows and Linux report) after the mirroring overhead.

To make things worse, you have to ensure that the vendor is NOT including Thin Provisioning in their effective or usable capacity after Data Reduction numbers. I've seen people get burned by that where their All Flash arrays arrive and they're only getting half the capacity that was promised because the vendor assumed 2x savings from Thin Provisioning.

 

[CombatChrisNC]

Well, we had the talk with the Pure guys and are likely going that route because of their Greenleaf program. Buy 3 years of support now, and 3 years later buy it again - any time after that and before the total 6 years are out, get free upgrade of the controllers. Also, the 'make it right' promise where if they under-deliver on space after having a quick look at our storage needs, they'll add however much disk is needed to bring it down where it is supposed to be at no cost to us.

 

[NobleX13]

Well, we had the talk with the Pure guys and are likely going that route because of their Greenleaf program. Buy 3 years of support now, and 3 years later buy it again - any time after that and before the total 6 years are out, get free upgrade of the controllers. Also, the 'make it right' promise where if they under-deliver on space after having a quick look at our storage needs, they'll add however much disk is needed to bring it down where it is supposed to be at no cost to us.

That is the same song and dance that they pitched here. The controller upgrade is nice, I will say that.

 

[Child of Wonder]

Well, we had the talk with the Pure guys and are likely going that route because of their Greenleaf program. Buy 3 years of support now, and 3 years later buy it again - any time after that and before the total 6 years are out, get free upgrade of the controllers. Also, the 'make it right' promise where if they under-deliver on space after having a quick look at our storage needs, they'll add however much disk is needed to bring it down where it is supposed to be at no cost to us.

That is the same song and dance that they pitched here. The controller upgrade is nice, I will say that.

The controller upgrades that come with maintenance aren't just at years 3 and 6, they're as long as you own the product. And maintenance costs don't go up unless you add more capacity, so whatever maintenance costs on day 0 you pay that same amount to renew maintenance for years 4-6, 7-9, 10-12, etc. each time getting upgraded to the latest and greatest controllers.

On top of that, it includes shifts to new media, like NVMe. One of those controller upgrades will give you gear that supports NVMe flash media. No need to buy another array when you're ready to go that route. And you can trade in your existing capacity for a discount on new, more dense gear. Trade in a 6TB shelf for a 24TB shelf, but only pay for 18TB.

Everything done non-disruptively. You never move your data. It's really worth taking a look at a long term TCO to see how Pure stacks up with other products.

 

[JulieONeilEMC]

Budget? I'm pretty much an EMC Fan boy..

You can easily get to 500Ts on a VNX 7600 with Flash Cache, and storage tiring using SSD, SAS 10k drives and 4TB sata drives. But that's a rough stab at it. What kinda data is running in the VMs? VDI, any kind of high io, db type stuff? You can go with xtremio, you'll most likely get 2:1 dedupe and compression so you could go with 6 node brick. Both of those do FC.. if FC is not going to work, Isilon with a few accelerator nodes using NFS over 10gig.

Always nice to have a fan! Have you seen the Dell EMC Store? If not, google search Dell EMC Store. It's a great place to search and compare products within the family.

 

[kdh]

Always nice to have a fan! Have you seen the Dell EMC Store? If not, google search Dell EMC Store. It's a great place to search and compare products within the family.

it always look way tacky when marketing/sales folks pop into public forums such as this to try and sell gear. Especially so when its your first post in the forum.

 

[Langly]

Yeah, we have a few reps from other vendors in the forums too.

Probably not the best thread to go fishing mid discussion without anything of substance to contribute.

On a more related note, what's with some of the recent nimble rebadging/model name/number changes? I've seen a few people asking elsewhere but never heard a solid response. Anyone got any light to shed on that?

 

[kdh]

I actually think its good when vendors try to participate. However when its your first post? I always think of Bill Paxton.. And not Game over man Bill Paxton from Aliens.. But slimy sales guys from True Lies Bill Paxton.

 

[CombatChrisNC]

Well, we just finalized a deal with our VAR on Friday. In our primary co-located DC we're getting: (with 10Gbs FCoE)
Compute- 9 Cisco UCS Blades with the 18 core e5 V4's and 512GB RAM
Storage- Pure M20, 20TB raw, 11TB formatted, ~35TB usable projection based on compression estimates (16Gbs uplinkS to the UCS)
Backup- R344 from Rubrik, 48TB RAW

Our co-located DR is getting the same thing (minus the UCS) and it's compute is going to be bolstered by as many hosts that we can pull from primary and stuff in a single rack. It will be getting the old 8Gbs FC infrastructure to replace the existing 1Gbs iSCSI.

This is replacing in production: (with 1GBs network infrastructure and 8Gbs FC)
Compute - 6x Proliants with 6-core E5's and 192GB RAM - - 2x Dell's with 14 core and 384 GB RAM -- and 2x HP's with 14 core and 384 GB RAM - all split over 3 VMware clusters
Storage - VNX 5200 which had near reached it's limit on disk count, capacity, and throughput. Maxxed on flash-cache
Backup - Drobo 27TB RAW - which only had a 1Gbs interface

And we got it at a very very good price. Everyone's happy and we're getting our metrics of where things are now for comparison's sake - like how our AR person spends 2 whole days running monthly reports on the SQL servers.

 

[t_ski]

Just got an EMC Unity 300F all-flash array delivered yesterday. Was extremely easy to set up. I almost had the whole thing done before the vendor sent me the email asking for config info so he could help me do it

This is for VDI BTW, and possibly some Exchange & SQL. Our VNX-5300 are getting long in the tooth, especially for VDI, and now I have this:

38.4TB usable in 2U, which is more than we had in the 5300 rack.

 

[NIZMOZ]

Drool.........

 

[t_ski]

I know, right? Oh, and there are only 17 drives in this so far, and it can take 24 in the DAE. I want about four more DAE's worth

 

[Langly]

I know, right? Oh, and there are only 17 drives in this so far, and it can take 24 in the DAE. I want about four more DAE's worth

Those Unity's are super easy to install. You can get 8tb drives for the flash... With 16tb coming down the pipe. Only major complaint was some migration features aren't there and ESRS is super broken to setup in secure data centers. My sales/partner guys say inline compression is coming with an update soon with some other undisclosed features/tweaks. Good changes on the Gui compared to the VNX.

So many good options out there in the market. Makes me happy when helping customers price out different configs. I've had great experiences with Nimble, Pure and EMC in the past few months