A friendly NetApp bod sent me the link initially but I see that our friends at The Register have already picked this up, NetApp’s 50 per cent guarantee. I think I’ll enjoy the fireworks!! I can see a number of points of contention
- Comparing against RAID-10; this is going to cause some pretty explosions
- Only 10% of the data can be things which can be hard to dedupe; perhaps the odd rocket here and there
- Its for VMware environments only (article misses this I think); a nice jumping jack
- Utilisation of Snapshots; twinkly catherine wheel
- No high performance workloads which require lots of spindles; whoosh, look at the Roman Candle
- Must use NetApp PS engagement; oh blimey, is that the burning effigy of a NetApp spokesman or just some Guy? (For my non UK readers, we traditionally burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes on a bonfire night)
Now, I’m not making any judgements but flipping heck….this is going to be colourful!
V-Series?
No soup for you. check out the FAQ.
yeah – should be fun watching it all unfold 😉
I’ve checked the FAQ and as I posted on Chuck’s Blog; NetApp have well bounded this and actually they’ve not set themselves a stretch target.
Is it a marketing gimmick? No more than a lot of things and will it save some customers money? Yes I think it will, it will make some of them think about what data they’ve got where (and that’s not a bad thing). Will NetApp end up giving any disk away? I very much doubt it’ll be very much if any.
NetApp can do dedupe on the primary storage; I’m not sure any of their competitors can (please shout if you have an announced product and you can); I think that this campaign is probably mostly about this.
Are NetApp a bit sensitive over utilisation figures; yes, I think they are. I’ve seen them get defensive quickly in the past but hey which storage manufacturers don’t have some skeletons? RAID-S anyone? You’d have thought that EMC didn’t have any other RAID level apart from RAID 1 for years. And that isn’t an especially space efficient use of disk. And you couldn’t snap it, even if you wanted to.
Lots of bones in that closet over there I think! Marketing gimmick? Yes! Chuck-chain yanking? I’m sure there’s a bit of it! Worst idea in the world ever? Not even close!
Thought I answered this, might not have made it through the crummy 3G during the train journey.
It’s not the technology it’s the stunt marketing. As I said in my blog post with the data set they’ll stand behind you should see more than 50% savings easily. For other data sets that just won’t be the case but of course they’re careful to exclude all of those.
If they give away any disk it’ll be because someone found a bug in the product. I’m not convinced it’s about de-duping other peoples storage either or they’d have included V-Series
As for RAID-S, well that’s all Moshe and now that you have his blog URL feel free to ask him about it. Though I have emails from him and whoever is writing that blog has an entirely different style of communication.
When do people thinking up marketing promotions do anything but try make sure that they are not going to loose anything? I’ve been around long enough to be incredibly cynical about anything which comes out of a marketing campaign.
How can you tell that a sales-man is lying? Their mouth is moving.
How can you tell that a marketeer is lying? Their eyes are open (if they are asleep, they’re simply dreaming of the lies that they’re going to tell).
How can you tell that a politician is lying? You can’t, that’s why they’re politicians (but best to assume that they are anyway)
Cynical? Maybe but always read the small print!
Sometimes I wonder if EMC had any other engineers working for them when Moshe was there!
In that case it wasn’t the amount of engineers it was the amount of people who were allowed to make a decision.
Back then there was only one decision maker and if you didn’t like it you could sod off elsewhere.
Fun post! Colorful.
I particularly love EMC people’s rebuttals. Let me reword the wordy so it is quite clear to everyone what their real problem with what NetApp is doing.
Ahem.
“We (EMC) cannot do what NetApp can do, therefore this is a stunt.”
BTW Martin – the last comment you made was great. I plan on using the jokes liberally when ever I can.
Let me add one to the arsenal –
Q: What is the difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman?
A: The car salesman *knows* when he is lying….
disclaimer – I am a happy NetApp employee!
I think the kicker in this whole announcement, is that all of the advanced NetApp features/licenses/etc. required will still only save you 7% on-top of the capacity savings difference between RAID10 and RAID-DP.
When I was running a Professional Services group finding 7% additional capacity really wasn’t that amazing.
The best part, they won’t even give you your money back, or migrate you back to your RAID10 configuration, they will only give you the additional capacity if the PS group can’t find some more capacity for you.
Oh, and there is NO performance guarantee either, so if it is slow as a turtle, sucks to be you!
Steven –
Our SE and PS forces are honest, ethical and hard working. They refuse to lose credibility in front of their customers and would not position an inadequate solution.
So – now that you are smarter than the rest of the world – what do YOU guarantee?
You see Mike, the problem with guarantees is that often after reading the small print; they aren’t especially useful.
But I think NetApp are doing the storage community a favour by further raising this issue.
I think it is a good discussion to have; some of my end-users are slowly beginning to realise that there is a difference between RAW and useable disk. I’ve been telling them for ages but it sometimes needs vendors throwing rocks at each other to make them sit up and take notice.
Could I find another 7% capacity in my estate? Fairly easily, I suspect; could I get it back? Not without with some disruption. If I was doing migrations, right-sizing etc onto new arrays, no problem. I allocated more disk than I bought last year as part of a consolidation/migration program which allowed me to do things let recut arrays into RAID-5 etc.