Last week on twitter there was a discussion about hyper-converged solutions and how these were not what someone who works in an enterprise environment would buy for their tier 1 workloads. I asked the question: well what about buying Pure Storage, Tintri, Nimble or Solid Fire systems? All non-hyper converged solutions, but relatively new. Answer was straight forward: not buying those either, big risk. Then the classic comment came:
No one ever got fired for buying IBM (Dell, HP, NetApp, EMC… pick one)
Brilliant marketing slogan by the way (IBM) which has stuck around since the 70s and is now being used by many others. I wondered though… Did anyone ever get fired for buying Pure Storage? Or for buying Tintri? What about Nutanix? Or VMware Virtual SAN? Hold on, maybe someone got fired for buying Nimble, yeah probably Nimble then. No of course not, even after a dozen google searches nothing shows up. Why you may ask yourself, well because typically people don’t get fired for buying a certain solution. People get fired for being incompetent / lazy / stupid. In the case of infrastructure and workloads that translates in to managing and placing workloads incorrectly or misconfiguring infrastructure. Fatal mistakes which result in dataloss or long periods of downtime, that is what gets you fired.
Sure, buying from a startup may impose some risks. But I would hope that everyone reading this weighs those risks against the benefits, that is what you do as an architect in my opinion. You assess risks and you determine how to mitigate those within your budget. (Yes of course taking requirements and constraints in to account as well.)
Now when it comes to these newer storage solutions, and “new” is relative in this case as some have been around for over 5 years, I would argue that the risk is in most cases negligible. Will those newer storage systems be free of bugs? No, but neither will your legacy storage system be. Some of those systems have been around for over a decade and are now used in scenarios they were never designed for, which means that new problems may be exposed. I am not saying that legacy storage systems will break under your workload, but are you taking that risk in to account? Probably not, why not? Because hardly anyone talks about that risk.
If you (still) don’t feel comfortable with that “new” storage system (yet) but they do appear to give you that edge or bigger bang for the buck simply ask the sales rep a couple of questions which will help building trust:
- How many systems are sold world wide similar to what you are looking to buy and for similar platforms
- If they sold thousands, but none of them is using vSphere for instance then what are the chances of you hitting that driver problem firsts? If they sold thousand it will be useful to know…
- How many customers for that particular model
- Wouldn’t be the first time a vendors sells thousands of boxes to a single customer for a very specific use case and it works great for them, just not in your particular use case.
- But if they have many customers, maybe ask…
- If you can talk to a couple of customers
- Best thing you can ask for in my opinion, reference call or visit. This is when you find out if what is promised actually is reality.
I do believe that the majority of infrastructure related startups are great companies with great technology. Personally I see a bigger threat in terms of sustainability, rather than technology. Not every startup is going to be around 10 years from now. But if you look at all the different storage (or infra) startups which are out there today, and then look at how they are doing in the market it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out who is in it for the long run. Whether you buy from a well-established vendor or from a relatively new storage company, it is all about your workload. What are the requirements and how can those requirements be satisfied by that platform. Assess the risks and weigh them against the benefit and make a decision based on that. Don’t make decisions based on a marketing slogan that has been around since the 70s. The world looks different now, technology is moving faster than ever before, being stuck in the 70s is not going to help you or your company compete in this day and age.