Well I suppose it is finally out, or at least in a “limited” way. NetApp apparently is releasing their ground-up rewrite all Flash product Flash Ray, based on a new “MARS” operating system (not related to Ontap).
When I first heard about MARS I heard some promising things, I suppose all of those things were just part of the vision, obviously not where the product is today on launch day. NetApp has been carefully walking back expectations all year. Which turned out to be a smart move, but it seems they didn’t go far enough.
To me it is obvious that they felt severe market pressures and could no longer risk not going to market without their next gen platform available. It’s also obvious that Ontap doesn’t cut it for flash or they wouldn’t of built Flash Ray to begin with.
But shipping a system that only supports a single controller I don’t care if it’s a controlled release or not – giving any customer such a system under any circumstance other than alpha-quality testing just seems absurd.
The “vision” they have is still a good one, on paper anyway — I’m really curious how long it takes them to execute on that vision — given the time it took to integrate the Spinmaker stuff into Ontap. Will it take several years?
In the meantime while your waiting for this vision to come out I wonder what NetApp will offer to get people to want to use this product vs any one of the competing solutions out there. Perhaps by the time this vision is complete this first or second generation of systems will be obsolete anyway.
Current FlashRay system seems to ship with less than 10TB of usable flash (in one system).
On a side note there was some chatter recently about a upcoming EMC XtremIO software update that apparently requires total data loss (or backup & restore) to perform. I suppose that is a sign that the platform is 1) not mature and 2) not designed right(not fully virtualized).
I told 3PAR management back at HP Discover – three years ago they could of counted me as among the people who did not believe 3PAR architecture would be able to adapt to this new era of all flash. I really didn’t have confidence at that time. What they’ve managed to accomplish over the past two years though has just blown me away, and gives me confidence their architecture has many years of life left to it. The main bit missing still is compression – though that is coming.
My new all flash array is of course a 7450 – to start with 4 controllers and ~27TB raw flash (16×1.92TB SSDs), a pair of disk shelves so I can go to as much as ~180TB raw flash (in 8U) without adding any shelves (before compression/dedupe of course). Cost per GB is obviously low(relative to their competition), performance is high(~105k IOPS @ 90% write in RAID 10 @ sub 1ms latency – roughly 20 fold faster than our existing 3PAR F200 with 80x15k RPM in RAID 5 — yes my workloads are over 90% write from a storage perspective), and they have the mature, battle hardened 3PAR OS (used to be named InformOS) running on it.
[…] The storage wars of the mid/late 2000’s were fairly legendary, at least that was my take on it from an outsiders viewpoint. There was a period from around 2008-2011 where it went pretty hot and heavy,  with the various corporate bloggers/evangelists of the various factions EMC, Netapp, HP, HDS, IBM, and even “independent” bloggers throwing their lot in with trying to muddy the waters.  What made it entertaining from an outsiders view was the concentrated effort to FUD up a bloggers comments section with “anonymous” posts. The various warriors would inject themselves into various discussions and then flame wars, trolling, and FUD would be the order of battle. Then oddly there came a period of quiet between the major players. I’m not saying it went away completely, you tend to see it from the old guard whose business is being eaten away by the new upstarts, and also as a means of generating buzz for the upstarts products at the expense of the legacy vendors pitfalls or mis-steps. […]
Pingback by SNLDD Episode #9: Can’t We All Just Get Along? | This is Hyper-Awesome — September 25, 2014 @ 1:38 pm
Any comments on the HP split? My guess is that it’s probably a positive for the Enterprise side, but supposedly HP-Enterprise is interested in EMC….
Comment by TonyT — October 8, 2014 @ 10:53 am