Disqus - Latest Comments for skenniston

Re: Dedupe Rates Matter…Just Not as Much as You Think

skenniston — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:27:47 -0000

Just one point of clarification - and I did speak w/ Curtis about this. Storwize would never sit in front of a Data Domain solution. The context is, and why I feel Storwize has a great deal of 'value' is because when you compression your primary storage (with Storwize in front of primary storage) then when you do perform your backups, you see the benefits in your deduplicated backups - and it is 100% transparent.

Re: Dedupe Rates Matter…Just Not as Much as You Think

skenniston — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:16:02 -0000

Curtis,

As I read it, I didn't come to the conclusion that Storwize was 720 times more effective than NetApp, rather it was, on a large scale, incrementally better. The values, at least when I evaluated CORE on the Wikibon site, lead me to believe this was more logarithmic.

I am wondering if you were going to comment on my comments below. I am simply asking, if 'effectiveness' is a good measure of what customers would want to know about, and the functions that - real-time, that compresses before it hits the disk, and not require them to purchase the disk capacity for decompressed disk before you can compress the data - which is more effective? By how much?

Again, and I agree with you, I applaud Dave for putting numbers to this versus Gartner that purposely avoids 'numbers' in their 'Magic Quadrant' so they can be surreptitious with vendors. When a vendor complains to their placement on the MQ, Gartner can say the placement is relative, I know, I was a vendor once that spoke to them. Assigning numbers is more a more concrete way, which provide real metrics on how they were achieved.

I say to Dave, get this in the Wiki, lets debate what the real numbers for CORE should be both from a formula perspective and from a product perspective and revise. That is the great thing about the Wiki. I am not sure why this didn't happen with the content on CORE that is already there but it now looks like there are people who will add some more foundation to CORE - it can only make it better.

Re: Dedupe Rates Matter…Just Not as Much as You Think

skenniston — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:16:20 -0000

Curtis – really? Your comments go from thought leadership to slamming…

First I will say I am a Storwize employee.

Dave ran his calculations by us, just like he did with the Ocarina guys, also CORE has been up on Wikibon for a month.

Let me ask, and PLEASE, put yourself in the customers shoes NOT the shoes of an analyst or thought leader for a moment.

Company A comes in and says “I will sell you a solution that provides 50% to 90% data reduction (depending upon your data type) on your primary storage, that sits in front of your NAS appliance and has no impact on performance (reads or writes), and in some cases improves performance, will not require you to change ANYTHING on your application side, and 100% integrates with the Data Domain / Avamar solution you bought last year, and in fact make your dedupe faster.”

Company B comes in and says, “I will seel you a solution that provides you 45% to 85% compression on your primary storage, and it too will not impact your operational performance as I will do the reduction once the data lives on the array, at night when your users have gone home and your backup jobs are done. Now this means that I will only be able to reduce a little bit at a time, but over time it will all get compressed. Now, in order to read the reduced data, it will need to be re-hydrated before the application can read it, but once re-hydrated the application can access it. Oh, and by the way, when it comes time to use the Data Domain / Avamar solution, you will need to re-rehydrate the data in order for Data Domain / Avamar to have its affect.”

Now I know the story told w/ Company B is a little over the top, but I am trying to disseminate enough to prove a point. Which technology is more 'EFFECTIVE'? Which would you choose to POC first for your data center? The answer is – IT DEPENDS. What is the cost, what is the environment, what is the use case?

I too could argue that decompress is just as important. But if you assume that optimize / unoptimize are the same then you could assume similar numbers. Now, if they are dramatically different, then the vendor should be honest with their customers and tell them there is a difference. I can tell you, from a Strowize perspective, compress and decompress are the same. I don't know about the others and I’ll let Dave do what he feels is best there. Curtis you say NTAP has 'minimal' performance impact. Again, put yourself in the customers shoes, what do you want, minimal impact or no impact?

As far as cost of the technology – I think what Dave did was fair. From what I understand in reading the blog, he took 100% of the cost of each capacity optimization technology and excluded the storage costs, meaning the capacity costs were the same for everyone. This normalizes the cost of the capacity on both the cost and the benefit side– seems very fair to me. I don’t get the slam there.

The point from my perspective is not whether the spread from 1800 vs 250 is 100% accurate…it is really this– if Storwize was in a Gartner magic quadrant as the highest, up and to the right bullet, would we be having the same conversation? No one ever seems to question the relative competitive advantage in magic quadrants and we all know there is little or no math behind the relative positioning of the bullets. Here there is a methodology to actually try and measure effectiveness and good for Dave for putting it out there. I’m all for fine-tuning the calculations – it’s all open and anyone can run the numbers or come up with their own calculations if they think they can be improved– I say go for it.

Curtis, I know we owe you a briefing so I will get that set up. The goal is not sway you but to make sure you understand that technically that what Storwize does is what is advertised.

I would be happy to hear some comments on what you all believe the customer wants…

Re: Opportunity Knocks for EMC: Will Slootman Answer?

skenniston — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:16:12 -0000

Dave,
Interesting post, however, you heard my presentation at EMC World that discussed Data Deduplication 2.0 - Comprehensive Capacity Optimization - where I discussed EMC's data reduction vision across it's portfolio. The Data Domain acquisition give EMC more assets to leverage in continuing to build that vision. I would stay tuned...

Re: The Weather is Like Life – It’s What You Make It!

skenniston — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:37:46 -0000

KevinB,
Just saw the comment and sorry for the delay, I am normally way better at the response, I was on vacation.

You can anchor at Peddock and my wife and I often blow up the tube and tie it off to the boat and float for hours. There is a beach near by and you could swim up to it and play.

Funny thing is, @ Peddock this weekend they had an Aquapaloza - probably 200 boats all rafted up and they had a large party boat with a band playing great music all day.

Thanks for reading the blog and there will be more posts this week.

Re: What’s all the Commotion?

skenniston — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:29:53 -0000

Yeah, can you believe it? But, that is what you get. The boat was only a 2 year old 31' center console Fountain. I'd guess ~$200K. The engines shot, the electrical shot and the electronics shot. Probably over $100K to replace. I am sure he had insurance but my question is what recourse does the insurance company have. I mean, the mistake was on the captain not anyone / thing else. But I guess it's like a car accident...

Also, 5' swells back to back can swamp a boat. The boat had a full live well, everyone was at the back of the boat it just stated sinking... bizzare.