Posts by Homer Simpson 1

SolidFire's Time has passed

The SolidFire architecture, although brilliantly conceived and marketed by Wright et al, never quite lived up to expectations and competitive pressure.

Although it is, obviously, an all-flash array, there is a little too much to do for the Element software to distribute and collected copies of the data on multiple nodes over a 10Gb network to provide the kind of performance that Pure and others can deliver on all-flash appliances. As a person on the front lines for SolidFire, one of the most successful people ever selling this product, we found very little technical attraction other than the use of a REST api and the ability to deploy/undeploy and redeploy nodes in a service provider environment. In performance bake-offs, we routinely LOST business to Pure and XTremeIO. At the time I left SolidFire, a single LUN was limited to 20,000, 4k IOPs before the "QOS" features were defeated and the highly touted deterministic IO delivery model was defeated.

But Dave Wright is a good guy and team builder. His wealth and success reflects that. But, with the ability of the latest storage technologies to far outstrip disk interface limitations, the "all flash SAN" is becoming another temporal milestone in the history of performance computing and is rapidly being replaced by hyperconverged infrastructure where the storage access path is evolving to look more like memory IO and less like external device IO. Witness the success of Nutanix and the recent products announcements from Pure where there IS NO SAN!

Totally disagree with comments about Warmenhoven

I've been in multiple business situations with Dan, personally, during the time of cloud in its infancy. He's actually one of the brightest people on the planet, generally listens more than he speaks and has incredible situational awaremess and dynamic marketplace understanding. If a company has sold $50M into the storage market, they're on Dan's radar.

This choice gives me more confidence in Cohesity than before - he will be a voice on the board with the experience of taking a company from under $100M to several billion. That's a rare talent.

Good fortune for Cohesity. Unfair comments.

Years of momentum left in EMC... spinning those drives...

I visit IT shops at the rate of two or three a week. "We're an EMC shop" is frequently heard. Do they piss people off? Yes. Are their arrays perfect? No. Are they the largest storage company on the planet? Absolutely. But for how long?

History will show that the biggest mistake that EMC and NetApp made was not embracing solid state storage soon enough. Some of the upstart flash vendors, particularly SolidFire, have better technology already and are nimble enough to continue to adopt to the next generation of flash and then capacitor based RAM disk. Flash is approaching the price point of spinning rust media now, and prices will get lower. Resistance is futile.Your spinning rust drives WILL BE assimilated.

NetApp seems hopelessly lost with FlashRay, which appears to be a year late and XtremeIO obviously has a ways to go to be enterprise ready - their latest upgrade requires a wipe and restore to install!

Are these two vendors avoiding all flash arrays to protect their legacy spinning disk products? I believe that's a clear YES - and people are still buying, because they don't know any better.

I'm waiting until I go into a business and hear, "We're a SolidFire shop." They're out there, and THAT's the company where I'll invest my hard earned dollars!

Cisco has completed the Trinity of Enterprise+ IT

Network, compute, storage. The Trinity of IT Infrastructure. Cisco has put a complete data center product together that can exist, standalone, to service a high performance data center and provide a monolithic vendor data center solution.

Solid State Disks are getting bigger and cheaper faster than EMC (or NetApp) seemed to anticipate. Several startups (including Whiptail) have developed product that aggregates SSD to directly compete with the traditional vendors. The traditional spinning disk vendors are losing business in cases where IO rates are critical - and, if you're spending a million quid on storage, IO rates ARE important. Massive stacks of spinning disks are being replaced with someone's managed stacks of solid state storage.

Most spinning disks will spin into oblivion as SSD's get larger, less expensive and more robust. Cisco is perfectly positioned to ignore the current technology in enterprise disk arrays and be a leader in the Enterprise Plus data center. Yep, sell your EMC stock until they integrate XtremIO technology into a large scale product.

Now, what;'s going happen to the Cisco content of NetApp's FlexPod?

From my persective as a 6 year NetApp employee, NetApp has changed from a "great place to work" to be about the same as EMC. Data ONTAP will go down in history as a combination of the best methods of managing spinning disks ever... but there's a major technology shift happening - spinning disks are being replaced with solid state devices. The technology needed for this new storage is quite different than today's Data ONTAP.

Instead of embracing solid state disks, NetApp has mainstreamed Clustered Data ONTAP. The problem is that it didn't pull all the features of legacy Data ONTAP and it added complexity of configuration and management that can only be called weird. So NetApp has mainstreamed a product that is useful to maybe 10% of their customers.

The best people want to represent the best products and the best corporate culture. So they're leaving.

In NetApp's sales organization, there has been a systematic elimination of all the "nice" managers in order to hire hard nosed sales managers. This is reflective of senior sales management, almost all of whom came to NetApp from EMC. It's not surprising that the culture is shifting. The "great place to work" philosophy has been replaced with Theory A management and layoffs of everyone whomever complained about their managers - almost everyone over 50 years old is gone..

My opinion is that NetApp is in troulble. They haven't tractked the market to keep the best product for existing technology and the best people are leaving.

NetApp has so much cash and momentum (like IBM and EMC) in the market place that it is difficult to see how they would fail. But the demise of a great corporate culture and the failure to track solid state disks is going to cause them even more grief. Watch for more bumps in the road ahead for NetApp!