NetApp's withdrawal of their heterogeneous replication product last week and their reasons for doing so is a bit of a disappointment and I hope really doesn't reflect their views. They claim that people are only interested in homogeneous replication and not an any-to-any replication product; well, in my opinion, they are wrong!
I am certainly interested in a scalable, robust, heterogeneous replication product; one which scales and is easy to deploy. One which does not mean installing agents on all my hosts and taking a CPU hit on them, one which sits in the SAN and quietly without fuss replicates to another array of any other type.
Unfortunately, NetApp didn't have such a product which is why I think they have failed to be honest. People don't want to be installing agents everywhere, can you imagine how an agent based replication would work in a virtualised environment? It would be painful trying to deploy the agent on hundreds of VMs.
And yes I know that some of the storage virtualisation products allow heterogeneous replication; I think that there is a market for those people who don't want to fully virtualise their environment. A half-way house which enables data-mobility without completely changing the environment?
Oh well, when VMware completely dominates the data-center environment perhaps we'll have that as it will be built into the VMWare level. Just deploy software appliances with JEOS ontop of VMware and let VMware do all the heavy lifting but even VMware will still have a hit of some sort on the server infrastructure.
SMOS can work with a CISCO MDS switch and can replicate at the SAN level without the need to install agents in hosts.
You could do due diligence before doing a whole blog on this.
Okay, that didn’t help people with a Brocade environment.
It also doesn’t help that NetApp made it incredibly hard to buy the SanTap module. We actually have SMOS and we asked about the SanTap module, we got blank looks. I suspect at the point we were asking, the writing was on the wall for SMOS or RepX. NetApp certainly didn’t want to sell it to us
So to all intents and purpose, SMOS was an agent-based product for a lot of customers.
And I challenge you to find the Santap module on the NetApp website because I might be being stupid but I can’t find it!
BTW Sajeev, it would be nice to put your NetApp email address when commenting?
Hi Martin
From the vendor side, there are parts of your views that I agree with, and others where a different perspective might be helpful.
The problem with “heterogeneous feature X” is that it’s really a feature, and not a market per se.
Most people would appreciate a multi-vendor capability for replication, storage management, NAS head support, etc.
However, most people then turn around and deploy said capability in a largely homogeneous environment.
I think the other challenge for NetApp and Topio is that the product did have its challenges.
EMC snapped up Kashya ahead of NetApp — it’s not good having to settle for the #2 in a space.
As a result, RecoverPoint (also heterogeneous) is doing pretty well. A decent number of customers are using it with mixed EMC storage, and some are using it with non-EMC storage, but the strong majority are deploying in a homogeneous fashion.
One wonders what this means for Onaro.
— Chuck
Okay, I want homogeneous replication…I’m feeling selfish! I don’t care what the market wants, I want it and need it. Data mobility between vendors is a pain; I’d rather not VVR multi-terabytes of data, it’s slow and painful.
I suspect we’ll be having another look at RecoverPoint.
At the moment, I only hear contented murmurings from Onaro customers; something that many other SRM vendors can only dream of!
I was so disappointed when EMC purchased kashya then even more disappointed when netapp couldn’t be left out and snatched up topio.
I tried to buy both products a few years ago with no-one wanting to sell it and it only seems that now EMC are starting to push recover point (it does look really good btw).
Martin, I’ll keep that in mind going forward. I normally don’t use the official id just to avoid spam.