I often see the line from one vendor or another 'customers aren't stupid!' and this is mostly true but I'm going to add another one 'customers are pragmatic!' or at least they should be.
So when EMC finally got their RAID-5 implementation to work on Sym and finally decided to admit that mirroring was not the only game in town; customers got some amusement out of the fact and ragged their EMC account managers a bit but carried on buying from them. It wasn't suddenly a case of EMC were wrong, lets go and buy someone else's stuff. It was more a case, we can get more out of our EMC arrays.
And so it continues, this next bit is purely speculation and I have had no briefings on this but lets imagine for a moment that something like the following happens.
EMC decide to announce a Unified Storage Platform, this uses some of the best features from DART (Celerra) and some of the best features from FLARE (Clariion) and they decide to use a 'file-system' in a similar way to NetApp do with WAFL to provision everything from LUNs to Networked file-systems.
Would it matter to me as a customer? Quite frankly, no! I'd have some fun at the expense of the EMC account manager, I'd have a chuckle with my NetApp account manager and then I'd continue to compare the products on their merits.
You see, I don't care who was right, I just care who is right for me at this moment.
Yeah, but what also matters is when a vendor takes a one eyed, kill-the-enemy, i’m-always-right, i-know-whats-best-for-you approach to sales then they have to accept that their poop is the same as everyone else. This makes them look stupid.
And that’s EMC. That’s the way they do business. It’s immature and counter productive. Hard to like that sort of company.
“Would it matter to me as a customer? Quite frankly, no! I’d have some fun at the expense of the EMC account manager, I’d have a chuckle with my NetApp account manager and then I’d continue to compare the products on their merits. ”
Actually, if they did it right, the joke would be on netapp. Sun arguably got it right with ZFS and you see some uptick in ZFS storage solutions. Frankly, EMC might be better off if they licensed or bought ZFS. But maybe they have their own skunkworks solution going and want to own the IP, etc.
First thing EMC should do to show they did it right is run demos that shows how well such a product works and *performs* as used space approaches 80%+. That would tell me they got it right.
“First thing EMC should do to show they did it right is run demos that shows how well such a product works and *performs* as used space approaches 80%+. ”
Didn’t they just do a CIFS benchmark showing it takes them 50 disk ops on the back end for 1 CIFs op out, while the Apple Xserve showed 1 disk op on the backend for 2 CIFS ops out? They’ve got a long way to go at this rate.
John
John, you just can’t resist can you…It just gets so tired!