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.
Don’t forget to take the support into account. Every system has bug’s. Either in the system or you it’s miss configured. In either case you have to fall back on the support of your vendor.
Completely agree. Customer support and the level at which a vendor is rated based on customer support can make or break a decision.
In Italy, you cannot be fired for a mistake 🙂
You are not forced to buy a Pure Storage/Tintri/Nutanix/… and put on it your whole production environment, if you are unsure you can always start with a pilot project.
I’ve always thought this was an interesting discussion because everyone has their on ideas.
Even if a startup goes under, their product doesn’t immediately stop functioning when the company folds. Odds are very good that it will keep on running — albeit without supporting the latest and greatest features, integrations, etc. If you are the kind of organization that adopts new technology at that rate (i.e. requiring the latest and greatest as soon as it is released), though, you are probably going to replace your infrastructure more rapidly than most. AND, you’re probably a good candidate for staying away from the bigger companies who tend to release a little more slowly.
Furthermore, having a startup disappear out from under their product is often just slightly different from a “big 5” company killing off a product line. Usually, the “support” you get there is the bare minimum, no matter what they tell you. I have heard stories of big companies leaving only ONE engineer to support a certain discontinued product line. That guy wasn’t developing anything new, and was really just there to triage requests before saying “no.”
How about people who decided to buy a Pillar Axiom array…. which was then swallowed up by Oracle….. =P
or like us, leave EMC to buy Isilon, only to be acquired later by EMC. same happened to us with Compellent and Dell. bottom line is all these startups want to be acquired and are never in it for the long haul, so expect to be acquired and to press #9 for “other” when it comes to support…
“Not every startup is going to be around 10 years” –
I can’t imagine keeping infrastructure around that long these days. We used to do that, but we don’t any more. 3-5 years is the new lifecycle.
For most indeed… but for storage not always. Some investments go 5-7 years. But even if your lifecycle is 3 years you could find yourself in the situation after 2 years that a company disappears of the map. But at least then you only have 1 year to bridge. Great thing about short lifecycle is also the lowered risk when it comes to sustainability.
Disclaimer – Pure Employee
What if the investment can last 7+ years and you get the benefits of the new technology? 🙂 I would say that’s a win win … 🙂
Happy CHAPPY 🙂
Disclaimer – I work for Pure Storage.
A couple of things to comment on.
The first is that all startups want to be acquired. Pure is actively putting policy in place not to be acquired, which is great because like the other comment above about the guy that had the EMC/Isilon challenge and Dell/Compellent challenge – I want to work for a vendor I chose.
Secondly, have a look at the Pure Forever Flash model, this is a company that is again actively working towards changing the industry and is a major reason I moved to Pure. Giving free controllers every 3 years and guaranteeing flat or better maintenance is gold and helps increase the longevity of the customers investment.
Its a new world out there for some.
Oh – and the Nimble comment cracked me up…….. very good.
Nobody ever got fired for smart concepts.
The reason why small startups come up with new and clever ideas are often the shortcomings of classic products by big players.
People get fired for letting technology dictate requirements, and buying emotionally.
To me, it’s a matter of due diligence! Regardless of the storage array or any product for that matter requires some good research and thorough testing before replacing any legacy array in production.
With that in mind, I don’t see how someone could get fired for purchasing an array that does the job. Of course there could be implementation mistakes, but regardless, if the job is done right, everything should work as expected or better.
Serial ATA over Ethernet Coraid storage, if you bought them you should be fired. They are dead as a company. This is why you don’t buy startups.
You know….. my experience with hardware support from one of the major vendors on that list has been really lackluster lately, because their response after a call-in to hardware support after seriously impactful crashes on large ESXi hosts. HA is great, but it’s still an issue if HA has to reboot 50 critical VMs.
I get a hardware error message such as: ESXi Pink screen: “LINT1 motherboard interrupt. This is a hardware problem: please contact your hardware vendor.”” / “Bus fatal error detected on a component at slot 5” “Bus fatal error detected on a component at bus 0 device 9 function 0.”
Support rep said it is probably a bug in ESXi, and please “make sure your ESXi version matches your firmware version”. (ESXi was installed using Vendor’s customized vSphere 5.5 ISO)
Update your firmware…. Of course, there is (IN)conveniently new firmware available every month or so, regardless of who your server vendor is, and the hardware exceptions occur about ounce every 20 days to couple months, but are still unacceptable.
Always get a dumb response such as “Please re-seat the PCI cards, Memory, and CPU”. When
I just want the issue to go away permanently, and in 20 days, 45 to 90 days the issue will repeat,
once the vendor closes the ticket, guaranteed, But not very soon, even under heavy load, AND
the answer from support will still be the same one “Please re-seat the PCI cards, Memory, and CPU.”
Does absolutely nothing, But even if our company buys the Gold/Super-Platinum Premium OnSite 24×7 4-hour response…… it’s as if we in IT have to “prove” that “basic steps” do absolutely nothing, instead of the hardware vendor having to prove the issue is fixed and guarantee us that our equipment is healthy, which seems wrongsided.
In some cases, I start to not see any advantage over the SuperMicro specials….
So bottom line is, as a architect for what workload ? Whats the best fit solution ? What support do i get ? Does this new solution has any testimony ? where does my workload stand after 5/10 years ?
I agree not every startup going to be there for next 10 years. Might be out of context. how can we guage who is going to be there or who is not ?
Yes that is very difficult Vijay to get a good enough understanding to be able to assess if a startup will be around 5-10 years from now. Even when you are plugged in to the startup market and track “hype / reality” it is difficult to figure that out.
Well, one way to get a better idea if a startup will last 5 or 10 years is to wait 1 or 2 years, and see what happens. E.g. Instead of trying to chase the latest startup; chase the startup who has had a product on the market for 2 to 3 years. If they’re still around, and there is a large amount of industry adoption from early adopters, then it’s a good sign.
Don’t forget political issues on why people buy what they do.
What about Tegile? You guys looking at these solutions?
Well written sir…. Nice post.
Don’t forget, “it’s the devil we know.”
This of course has bitten us lately. We are mainly HP on the compute side and we stayed with them for the support more than anything else. The management software of the physical infrastructure is getting extremely bloated and picked apart requiring you to be in multiple consoles to do what you want and then of course requiring more software licensing.
Every major EMC, Dell, Oracle etc… Is on the software license train to making their customers get cheaper hardware but pay out the rump for software to turn things on. I feel this change will make people switch to the independents quicker than reputation alone.
My $.02
People often buy new from the Big Providers – it’s just that they don’t realise it. Yes, it may be an established vendor/product, but what if it’s a new controller engine and new firmware? Odds are that the engineering quality is high but the statistical probability of a fault may be the same. Yes, the test harness for a new system may be very comprehensive in a 10-year-old product line, but mistakes still get made. And people leave as well – it may be a completely new team of engineers on this next version of the product.
So IT professionals need to earn their keep: anyone can buy by analysing vendor market share. And it’s not a bad approach, as long as you only get paid the salary of a buying admin clerk, not an IT guru. But if you’re accepting the salary of an IT professional then you’re being paid for judgement, experience and technical expertise – and you should be able to handle at least a degree of innovation.