In the last couple of weeks something stood out to me when it comes to the world of storage and virtualisation and that is animosity. What struck me personally is how aggressive some storage vendors have responded to Virtual SAN, and Server Side Storage in general. I can understand it in a way as Virtual SAN plays in the same field and they probably feel threatened and it makes them anxious. In some cases I even see vendors responding to VSAN who do not even play in the same space, I guess they are in need of attention. Not sure this is the way to go about to be honest, if I were considering a hyper(visor)-converged solution I wouldn’t like being called lazy because of it. Then again, I was always taught that lazy administrators are the best administrators in the world as they plan accordingly and pro-actively take action. This allows them to lean back while everyone else is running around chasing problems, so maybe it was a compliment.
Personally I am perfectly fine with competition, and I don’t mind being challenged. Whether that includes FUD or just cold hard facts is even besides the point, although I prefer to play it fair. It is a free world, and if you feel you need to say something about someone else product you are free to do so. However you may want to think about the impression you leave behind. In a way it is insulting to our customers. With our customers including your customers.
For the majority of my professional career I have been a customer, and personally I can’t think of anything more insulting than a vendor spoon feeding why their competitor is not what you are looking for. It is insulting as it insinuates that you are not smart enough to do your own research and tear it down as you desire, not smart enough to know what you really need, not smart enough to make the decision by yourself.
Personally when this happened in the past, I would simply ask them to skip the mud slinging and go to the part where they explain their value add. And in many cases, I would end up just ignoring the whole pitch… cause if you feel it is more important to “educate” me on what someone else does over what you do… then they probably do something very well and I should be looking at them instead.
So lets respect our customers… let them be the lazy admin when they want, let them decide what is best for them… and not what is best for you.
PS: I love the products that our competitors are working on, and I have a lot of respect how they paved the way of the future.
Dave Owen (@vmackem) says
I do love it when you do these kind of posts. 🙂
Totally agree with you though, I personally love cool technology and innovation no matter if it comes from the company i work for or not. Im happy to discuss the differences in capability and features with what im proposing to a customer and what they maybe looking at from someone else, but i always try and avoid actively “dissing” another product. If a competitors technology meets the customer requirements better, you should be professional enough to acknowledge that fact imo.
“not smart enough” may be a little strong (but true sometimes), I think it shows desperation as they dont believe their technology is actually strong enough and its a last resort tactic.
Mike Sheehy says
Let’s be completely up front here. VSAN is a direct challenge in many use cases to the defacto standard in storage today. Sometimes I think that how else should I think they respond? There is no doubt that when we start seeing storage deals lost by VSAN it’s going to get worse. This is just preemptive FUD to change customers mindsets on what is best for them, unfortunately, without representing all the facts.
Michael Stenson says
Welcome to the world of Storage! You will see more and more as VSAN matures. In fact, the server folks are the most quiet ones as they believe they can tag along and sell some servers in a segment with declining sales. At this point they don’t feel VSAN is a threat to their storage business but eventually this may change.
That said, i’ve heard over the last 8-9 mos the greatness of vsan, but i’d like to know what are its limitations? What do I lose? What are the tradeoffs I have to make because like with everything else there are tradeoffs. While I believe some competitive material posted is far fetched, some if it maybe actually valid. However i’d like to see you tell me what’s valid and what’s BS.
That said, I don’t think by just saying “FUD” you address your competitor’s claims. If you want to show it’s FUD you need to pick it apart, and expose it. Then and only then it will be FUD.
Thanks
Ian Forbes says
While I understand your frustration I kind of have to laugh (a little). You’re new to the world of storage so I can understand where you’re coming from. I work for a systems integrator, so the world of FUD in storage is absolutely nothing new. Unfortunately, if VMware wants to play in this new forum, be prepared to see it and hear it. It’s been that way far before VMware entered into the fray. Vendors are fighting for their market share lives and will do whatever it takes.
VMware has held a position of dominance in virtualization for a long time now. You’re challenging into a new vertical, one that’s incredibly crowded – so that’s just the way it goes.
As long as VMware supplies partners and customers with solid data to combat the FUD, intelligent people will make informed decisions. I just don’t see the use in getting upset about it. Welcome to storage.
Duncan Epping says
I am not talking on behalf of VMware here, and I am certainly not new to the world of storage… Just needed to get this of my chest 🙂
Jason says
There are still fundamental questions about VSAN unanswered: https://communities.vmware.com/message/2367871
Duncan Epping says
Euhm yes?
Tom Queen says
I’ve regularly used the example of a salesperson who tried to ‘sell’ me their product by only spending time telling me why I should not buy their competitor’s offering. After letting him talk, I said, “Let’s say I agree with your points (I didn’t). You’ve now convinced me to not buy something. You’ve yet to spend any time telling me what I should buy, including whatever it is you’re pitching.” Negative selling is not selling and does a disservice to the customer.
Michael Stenson says
I generally agree with you said Tom however, i think we need to start paying equal attention to both. The “negative” seller and the “happy go lucky” (aka positive) seller. In fact, i’d argue paying attention to the second type maybe more beneficial because at least with the first type you know their objective. With the second type you maybe dealing with a wolf in sheep’s clothing and that’s much harder to detect. It will always be upon the buyer to be educated and ask the right questions.
Eric Wright (@DIscoPosse) says
Well said Duncan! I am a big proponent for maintaining an independent view, and as bloggers we all should hold that close to our heart as we quite often have multiple vendors who sponsor and support us all, and they offer competing products.
It is fine to recognize one’s own product strength, and I appreciate that you and many more also recognize the strength in competing vendor’s offerings.
I make a point of understanding how all competing products work, and their individual challenges and strengths. Everyone needs to look at how many of the senior technologists and technical marketers have changed companies at some point.
Trashing the competition in a gut reaction to a current situation may happen but the time may come that the very technologist who blasted their competitor will some day need to be employed by that, or another vendor. It’s a small world in technology. Let’s all play nice 🙂
Doug Baer says
Duncan,
I think you make a great point here: you have been the customer. I have also spent a large portion of my career on that side of the equation. Unless you have purchased gear, put it into production, and had to live with that decision, you really do not understand WHY you are doing anything. That fact is lost by many consultants, SE’s, and sales people in the industry who tend to focus on pushing gear.
The goal of any customer is (and if it is not, it should be) to solve a business challenge or address a business need, not to spend money or get shiny new gear into their environment.
As a customer, I would much rather hear about the good things in your product than what you perceive as the bad things in a competitor’s product. If I ask you to compare a specific aspect of your product to another, I would appreciate an answer, but I’d typically ask who you viewed as your competition so I can set the context appropriately for our discussion and do my own research later.
It is, ultimately, the customer’s responsibility to select the solution that best fits the business need — sure, pricing and other aspects come into play as well — but there is no reason for vendors to poison the well. Remember that all that time spent trashing your competition only serves to erode your credibility with a potential customer. From the sales side, you typically have limited time to convince the customer to look more closely at your solution. Why waste that valuable time talking about the other guys?
Totie Bash says
“It is insulting as it insinuates that you are not smart enough to do your own research and tear it down as you desire, not smart enough to know what you really need, not smart enough to make the decision by yourself” — Amen to that brother…
The entry of a well thought out VSAN to the storage industry introduces competition. Whenever there is competition, the client or the buyer always win. VSAN can compete and it threatens good old/new storage companies. You wouldn’t be hearing from other companies if VSAN is not a threat to them.
On the same token, VMware’s entry to App Remoting with Horizon View 6 introduces competition with Xenapp. Again, this introduces competition and each company needs to be at the top of their game to deliver a solid product with the reasonable pricing.
Ian Forbes says
It would be fantastic if vendors and consultants/SE’s all played nice and didn’t stretch the truth about what they are trying to sell. There are many honest vendors out there that have solid products and messaging. There will also always be those that feel the only way to win is to make the other guy’s product/service look bad. Hopefully this isn’t news to anyone.
I have the luxury of working for a company whereby we have many solution partners. When solving a customers requirements we don’t have to push a solution. We’re able to look at a wide variety of solutions and choose the ones that align with our customers requirements. Many times that means displacing an incumbent – and that generally pisses them off. That leads to FUD. It’s my job (and the job of the vendors whose solutions we’ve picked) to combat that FUD.
Every vendor plays the FUD game in some way (IMO). I was recently suggesting desktop layering solutions and had to explain to my customer how Mirage isn’t really a layering technology -although all their literature claims they are. It doesn’t mean Mirage is a bad product, but the market around desktop layering means that VMware markets their solution to combat other layering products.
http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/ronoglesby/archive/2013/09/12/why-vmware-mirage-is-not-the-same-as-virtual-desktop-layering.aspx
In the end, it’s really the customer’s responsibility to ensure they are getting the correct information. Unfortunately, there will always be FUD.
Garret Black says
I totally agree but I’ve unfortunately grown to accept this. There is no perfect product in the storage industry for every use case. It’s pretty easy to find a limitation pretty quick. You really have to lay out ALL of your requirements and know them going into these kinds of meetings. From there you can ask each storage vendor the same question. This is where a good VAR can truly actually add value (instead of just reselling).
Andrew Warfield says
Hi Duncan,
I was surprised at your post — it’s the first time anyone has ever called something that I’ve written FUD, and it certainly isn’t how I’d intended my article to be received. Anyhow, I’ve just updated my blog post with a bit of clarifying text at the top. Hopefully it helps.
http://www.cohodata.com/blog/2014/04/08/hyperconvergence-is-a-lazy-ideal/
All the best,
andy.
Duncan Epping says
I wouldn’t even say your article was FUD, but I don’t see the point in to calling it lazy. As with ANY solution VSAN (or other types of storage / compute) you will need to do the math. Same applies to COHO, without going through the requirements / constraints / risks it is a battle lost. VSAN is not a magic solution, and neither are any of the other solutions out there.
Calling it lazy and the presumptions is what made me link to your article as well. It is not up to the vendor to tell customers what works for them or what they need. Just look at the quote below, that is what I was referring to. Customers know very well in many cases what problem they have, and are looking for you to explain how you can solve it and not for you to explain how someone else does not solve it.
“Rather than jumping on this fantasy aesthetic of a one-size-fits-all converged appliance, let’s spend some time thinking about whether it’s solving the right problem. At Coho, we believe that enterprise storage has a lot to learn from the way that enterprise computing has evolved. Making storage efficient doesn’t mean that is has to be embedded within your VM infrastructure, and there are a lot of great reasons to keep it independent.”
Paul Meehan (@PaulPMeehan) says
Hi Duncan,
I think Andy’s article makes a lot of sense. Maybe the use of the word “lazy” was a bit OTT. I do think though that hyper-convergence can make more sense than convergence, which can be riddled with complexity.
However I don’t believe the article contains FUD. For me, it’s an intelligent piece of analysis based on the real world. It is obviously intended to provide Andy’s and the COHOdata side of the argument and make people consider the COHOdata technical strategy. That’s fair enough, let’s face it, their strategy is completely different to VSAN and all others which is what makes it interesting. You do the same for VSAN every day as do many of your colleagues and sometimes many of us community members. I think both VSAN and COHOdata are awesome solutions which will suit different use cases.
I believe there is a LOT of hype by some, that hyper-converged is a one-size-fits-all solution that is suitable for every use case. In that way I suppose I agree with Andy and maybe yourself too ?. Is that ever the case with any solution ?. Yet this is one of the value propositions of scale-out systems like these i.e. to make customers lives simpler/better/cheaper/faster. I totally agree with Andy about the far-fetched notion of “web-scale”, this years laughable concept that all enterprises are supposed to fit into. Any customers with common sense I have spoken to here do not buy into this notion. That’s for 3-5% of enterprises IMHO.
In terms of Andy’s final point about solving the existing problem, I somewhat agree with that. We should use technology to move forward, but I would suggest many issues with storage today are due to sloppy design and lack of correct workload analysis and placement. I think we can safely use the work “Lazy” in this regard in relation to many software and hardware vendors.
A classic case in point is VDI being “bolted onto” existing storage – that happens all-day, every-day. So we have these scenarios where bad outcomes are guaranteed to occur, on architectures not optimised to deal with them,that are badly designed; A Perfect Storm. I also believe that up to v5, vSphere introduced simplicity yet also significant (backend) management complexity into many environments without the correct tools to manage growth and clear down existing storage platforms.
All the best,
Paul
Duncan Epping says
I don’t think I am saying that VSAN is the be all – end all solution… I am not trying to defend VSAN or hyper-converged solutions either. What just stood out to me is that people have all sorts of arguments why VSAN doesn’t solve a problem, but based on what? I can write a book on why product X sucks at Y, but is that relevant when you don’t know the problem someone is aiming to solve?
Been a customer and a consultant for a long time, and personally I care about solving problems. I don’t care much for randomly putting in technology just for the sake of it.
Paul Meehan (@PaulPMeehan) says
I totally agree. Technology for the sake of it is a waste of all our time. It’s the most frustrating thing about trying to do our job (design) properly when customer buys product with no requirements. That happens me every day and is so frustrating. Maybe it’s time for a “VSAN Common Misconceptions” post to clear these matters up ?
Chris says
No offense but you kind of sound like your saying “don’t hurt me, I just work here.” and proceed to try to take the moral high ground.
Flat out, you have to be biased in all of this. You work for VMware, write books supporting their products, and have more than a few blog posts on VSAN. You have skin in the game and in that, there is no moral high ground. Maybe if you were an unbiased employee in a different industry then the high ground would be yours, but that isn’t the case.
VMware put on a full court press with their employees and blogs and the push of VSAN was very obvious. Why would the competition or even unbiased observers not call this out and share their thoughts? Seems like a reasonable response. Not all of it was bad.
Most of the posts elsewhere seem pretty reasonable of their assessment of VSAN, what it can and can’t do as a v1.0 product. I mostly see no harm in it if people call it what it is and that is the general case. With tech companies pushing marketing into social media and blogs, it is going to get a least a little dirty. You have to expect that when people are fighting for mind share and big dollars.
Still love your blog though. 🙂
Duncan Epping says
I wasn’t saying that I am not biased. Sure I work for VMware, and I am not pretending to be independent either… But you also do not see me trying to downplay other vendors here either. It wouldn’t be too difficult to do that, but I expect our customers to make up their own mind based on the info about various products out there. That is what this post is about.
PS: VMware did not instruct me, or any of the other bloggers out there, to blog about VSAN… I just happen to like new products and have a natural curiosity that pushes me to test these / play with it and share it with the world.
Don DeHamer says
Enjoyed reading about your Vietnam trip and the orphans – we need more of these events in our lives.
Jason Boche (@jasonboche) says
Sounds like the FUD hit the fan while I was traveling. I’ll try to catch up with all the links.
I agree with most of the response here, including the ones about getting used to it and not losing any sleep over it. Don’t hate the players, hate the game. VMware opted into the storage realm and the competition is quite a challenge, nothing like VMware is used to even if you consider the aggressive tactics of Microsoft virtualization in the past – those were child’s play compared to the storage landscape (yes, even the poker chips). I also agree some storage vendors, won’t mention names, have been aggressive in their product positioning. Expect any and all responses above and below the belt. What I’ve seen is: the nosier marketing gets, the bigger a target they become. To stay positive is to stay classy.
Take care,
Jas