StorageRap

EMC skating in the rear with IBM, HP (and Oracle/Sun) at the back of the capacity garantee derby

As Mike Riley points out on his Netapptips blog today, I was not exactly a fan of Netapp's guarantee program when it first came out, but now I am an unabashed supporter.  Sometimes other vendors come up with excellent ideas. 

Yesterday HDS announced their capacity guarantee program and although it depends heavily on the capacity differences between RAID 1 and RAID 5 (which is a little cheesy), they offer a contract and appear to be ready to put back the program with more than a hand wave. That leaves HP, IBM and EMC (oh wait - and Oracle Sun) as the major storage players who aren't offering a capacity guarantee for customers making a technology refresh on storage.

 The question is - are these programs just marketing ploys?    Sure they are, just as any customer satisfaction guarantee for any product is a marketing ploy designed to hook customers - whether it's soap, kitchen knives, bass lures, vacuum cleaners, etc, but these ploys and the products behind them are targeted directly at data center operators that are tired of over-spending on storage. All are serious products from some of the biggest names in the storage industry and proven technology leaders.  3PAR's thin technologies (provisioning, conversion, persistence, reclamation and zero-detection) continue to lead our industry.

Depending on the applications and requirements of your data center some of these products and programs will be a better fit than others.  All of them should save you money on capacity purchases, but there are other things to consider, such as required software and services.  The details of each vendors' programs are different. That said, if you are offered a contract to reduce your storage capacity costs, that's pretty strong negotiating leverage with any other vendor - whether or not they offer a guarantee.  And even if you are not ready to make a purchase now, you might want to know how these programs work so you can be better prepared when the time comes.

To find out more about 3PAR's capacity program, click the image below. 

A conversation with Nick de Beer of SYSDBA

SYSDBA is our excellent 3PAR business partner in South Africa,  Some of their team came to 3PAR  headquarters recently and I had the chance to record this interview with Nick de Beer, a technology expert with a wide range of experiences including Oracle, storage and virtualization.  In this interview, Nick talks briefly about 3PAR's Recovery Manager software, which allows customers to recover data from many point in time snapshots.

EMC takes dumbass award with denial of reality strategem: Secure Multi-Tenancy and Virtual Domains

EMC can't help themselves.  Given what appears to be a new corporate mandate to deny competitive threats in their massive propaganda machine, they look pretty stupid when one of those threats involves their new BFF Cisco and their trophy-acquisition raison d'etre,VMware.   

Yesterday, Netapp, Cisco and VMware made a planned, well-orchestrated announcement of their secure, multi-tenancy architecture.  Trust me - everyone in the industry knew it was coming and it was the main reason we chose to time our vSPhere and vCenter Server announcement for Monday this week. Chuck Hollis, EMC's StorageMonkeys poll winner, responded with an incredibly ignorant post that does not even mention the companies involved, nor does it link to any of the numerous online postings discussing it. For as many words as La Bombast put into this blog entry, you would think he would have at least mentioned Cisco in his discussion on network security. Granted, this announcement puts EMC in a compromised position, seeing as how their most strategic partners have chosen to develop an advancement in data center technology with one of their most dangerous competitors, Netapp.  Nonetheless, EMC's inability to deal with the reality of it underscores the difficulties they have holding an objective, honest and open public discussion.

I like what Netapp, VMware and Cisco have done with their Secure Multi-Tenancy architecture. The ability to segregate and align applications, data and IT resources for management purposes is a very big deal. It is also one of the key concepts in virtualization technology.  Sharing resources among multiple applications and users provides powerful economic leverage (doh!) and aligning security and access controls on virtual boundaries is not only desirable - it is essential.  Role-based administration is certainly nothing new, and bringing that into the virtual data center is a necessary evolution in the technology's development.

So what about 3PAR?  Been there, done that and continue to lead in utility storage infrastructure technologies. 3PAR developed our Virtual Domain technology more than two years ago that brought  role-based administration and firewalls to utility storage. It's also why we developed our Cloud-Agile program for utility computing service providers and designed ourCloud-Agile SECURED solution into it.  We have done many things over the years that have been ahead of their time and Virtual Domains was one of them. We're happy to see Netapp, Cisco and VMware shine a light on this important technology area.  Too bad for EMC that they missed on this one. Guess they have some 'splainin and fudding to do!

Check out our capacity guarantee -
the program EMC doesn't want you to know about.

3PAR Countdown: New Plug-Ins for vSphere and vCenter Server

The news is here:

The difference between a rant and thought diarrheaship.

Its been pretty quiet in the storage blogosphere so far in 2010.  Innocuous stuff.  No smack ups.  We all got the message late last year that readers were fed up with vendor bashing.  Well, the truce apparently can't last forever - or can it?

One of the most followed storage bloggers who works for a very large storage company wrote a post today that he characterized as a rant.  It wasn't much of a rant, but there were certainly aspects of it that fit this part of the Merriam-Webster definition:

    to utter in a bombastic declamatory fashion.

I think of rants as having elements of dark humor and scathing, pointed accusations.  This bombast had neither, but it did have pieces of whine mixed in.  Whining about how a competitor of theirs, 3PAR had come out with a program that they don't have an answer to.  Whine-bast that their strengths should be considered as the only ones that matter.  A general whine-bast that they should be the only ones allowed to make the rules.  A load of baloney, but not anything truly disgusting.

    Sort of a thought diarrheaship piece.

Does anybody actually get anything out of reading such tripe?

3PAR Countdown: 3PAR's Thin Guarantee Program

The news is here.



Very easy & straightforward.  Start fat and move to thin, efficient storage on a 3PAR F or T Class system.

For more information on 3PAR's Thin Guarantee Program, check out the page on 3PAR's web site here.

 

3vaPAR Episode #1: The invasion of the legacy storage warriors

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Here is the first episode of our new video show for 2010: 3vaPAR.  3vaPAR is a world inhabited by storage people who are very skilled and work diligently to help others be successful with their storage lives.

In this video, the people of 3vaPAR offer a capacity guarantee to legacy storage people.  Hmmm, just like 3PAR announcing their capacity guarantee program today?

3PAR Countdown: 3PAR Expands Cloud Agile

Here is the news:

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A complete list of our Cloud Agile Partners is here.

A StorageRap Sneak Preview

New for 2010:  3PAR'VTAR.   This dude is definitely in tune with his chunklets!