‘Zilla is so right with this post; it makes me laugh, it’s exactly how we think. And I think EMC miss a big trick at their customer council events, they should ship a couple of TC/SEs to them; tell them to sit in a corner and just listen to the conversations which happen after about midnight and we think there are no EMCers around. It’s funny, there is always EMCs official theme and then there is always an underlying customer theme and probably not always something EMC would approve of.
Last year for instance, there was a lot of discussion about putting NetApp heads in front of EMC disk. Not supported by EMC for sure but there’s enough people out there who have tried it with success, that it doesn’t scare us. Us end-users do all kind of things which aren’t supported; we do try and avoid being first but there’s always someone who is rash enough to try it.
p.s it’s not just EMC customer events, I’ve sat on the IBM customer council and exactly same thing happened.
Even funnier is a NetApp head deduping EMC arrays behind it…. i just think that’s hilarious!
Another post to write; why NetApps apparently insane decision to implement LUNs in the way they did allows them to some hard things really easily.
Still think it gives them some other problems and there are always trade-offs in any design decision. But after sitting around scratching my head and asking ‘WTF, why do it like that’; I’ve come to the conclusion, that although it feels wrong, in many cases and especially in the market-sector currently occupied by NetApp; it isn’t a bad idea.
The conversations that happen after midnite? Aren’t those filthy?
I’m not sure which Customer Councils you’ve attended but the ones I have been to are the picture of decorum!! And I’ve always made the early morning sessions!
The conversations we have are are even better, how can we get away from this lock in EMC have got us into… and thats why so many (including the largest EMC install in Europe) are using SVC…
I like SVC (or certainly the idea of SVC) but I do see this it gets me away from lock-in as a bit of a false sell; it puts me into another lock-in, this time with IBM. Now, I know IBM have done a lot work making it easier to get in and out again. But I still wouldn’t want to have to get multiple petabytes in and out.
So instead of selling it on getting out of lock-in, sell it on the features which it gives me. Lets be honest, it’s about taking market share from a competitor!
OK, so I see your point, but when we talk about lock-in we mean, each time you go and tender for your next batch of storage, you don’t need to worry about multi-pathing, will it co-exist with your current set of controllers… etc… It makes the decision much more open, and because of that you tend to get better quotes, as the vendors know you have a choice…
But, again, the feature set is up with any Enterprise monolith, and of course the online migration makes many a storage admin happy.
I’m beginning to hope that vendors realise that we have a choice anyway. I think that they are, we have much more mature conversations now and it is happening less and less that a vendor will suggest that if we move to another product our world will end.
Obviously we still get hyperbole in public but in private at least for instance, people admit that certainly in the Tier-1 space that there’s not a lot in it. Put it like this I wouldn’t have any particular worries running DS, DMX or USP as a Tier-1 platform; I know they’d all work and I know that they all have their own foibles.