A case of overkill - and how tiering avoids it

A couple posts ago, discussing Netapp CEO, Tom Georgens' now famous quote on tiering, I wrote:

To be fair, Georgens DID get support from the contrarian Drunken Data. 

This was the only reference to Jon Toigo and his blog. Apparently this thoughtless insult set Jon off because a week later he wrote a whole lot of overkill  in response.  Considering the effort he made, it doesn't seem fair to just ignore it all.   

1.  I listen to customers, so do Chuck Hollis, Barry Burke, Mark Twomey, Val Bercovici, Alex McDonald, and most of the vendor bloggers. We might take away different things, but I'd bet there is a fair amount of overlap in those discussions.

2. Tiering is all about reducing cost.  It's not going to reduce costs for every customer, but customers needing performance acceleration for certain apps at various times can save a lot of money with tiering. There is no need to configure a system for overkill, when a smaller number of high-performance devices and tiering can do the job.

3. Bruce Kornfeld at Compellent is a blogging wannabe. He can change that if he wants to by engaging the rest of the storage blogosphere.

Speaking of overkill, there are a lot of installed arrays that are great examples of capacity overkill. It's often discussed as poor utilization, but that is just another way of saying customers purchased far more capacity than they needed. In other words, they bought an overkill solution.

3PAR's thin technologies are all about avoiding capacity overkill. If you think you might want to get away from overkill storage implementations, it's a good time to do it with 3PAR, while we have our 50% capacity guarantee program running.

Comments

[Mike Richardson]

How did you get a pic of the FAST v2 prototype? Are you in the beta? :D

Storage Efficiency doesn't end just at reducing white space and redundant data waste. For NetApp it also means getting the most performance out of your storage as well. In my mind, EMC tiering just spreads out the inefficient use of hardware across more hardware.

I recently blogged my thoughts on this. You are welcome to take a look.

http://blogs.netapp.com/dropzone/2010/02/dont-cry-for-me-why-netapp-is-not-dependent-on-tiers.html

[marc farley]

No, 3PAR is not in EMC's beta, LOL! We'll have to wait and see how EMC's tiering works when it is finally delivered. You might be right and it's possible that they will have something that works well.

Mike, not that I haven't done it myself on occasion, but linking back to your own post to draw attention to it is not going to fly here. I'll let it pass this time. You might say - "yeah, but you let Alex (or others) do it" and I'd say, yes and Alex's post are usually very well written and very funny. The same criteria applies to everybody - if it makes me laugh or if I think it is interesting dialogue I'll consider keeping the link in. Nobody wants to read a regurgitated data sheet though, which is what your post reminds me of. Try to bring more to the table.

Keep writing and keep editing, it's the only way to improve this important skill.

[Mike Richardson]

Marc,

Truth can't always come in the form of a steering wheel cam...or can it?

Never-the-less, point well taken. I suppose I can work on my delivery. Thanks for the criticism.

-Mike

[marc farley]

The subjective truth of the blogosphere always comes with a layer of varnish - from customers and vendors alike, although vendors tend to put on a thicker coat of the stuff. And yes, the windscreen of steering wheel cam vids is admittedly opaque.