@ianhf wondered "Why buy a clariion when baby vmax at same price? (ignoring vmax hype'd 'not ready yet' features)"; various people @davegraham, @storagezilla, @smith_Cameron, @basraayman and myself chipped in.
Ian poses a good question and one which gets asked alot but there's actually a fairly simple answer; the Clariion is a better array for most people! No, architecturally it's not as good; certainly not as reliable and it's replication capabilities are not as good but if I was going to parachute a new EMC array into a non-EMC customer and tell them to get on and manage it; I reckon that most IT shops would have a good chance of getting a Clariion up and working without going through a big training exercise and it'd still be okay in six months. Depending on what software options etc, I reckon there's a good chance that the V-MAX would be a huge mess and unmanageable within six months.
So until EMC can make a V-MAX as simple as a CX to manage; CX has a place but once that happens, then I think Ian has an interesting question. But I would ask the question, if FLARE had replication as good as Enginuity; why would I want a V-MAX? And as they both run on x86 now; why not run FLARE on top of the V-MAX hardware?
Actually, I think the V-Max hardware isn't that interesting. I think the more interesting question is what they will do with Flare. I think they might try to copy the more "user friendly" features like manageability from Flare to the new array -as they have already partly done with the new V-Max- and perhaps broaden the FAST concept to include the entry and mid rage arrays.
That IMO would be tiering at it's best. Your virtual matrix would have a scope that includes not just your VX, but also all your other (EMC end perhaps even Non-EMC) arrays and use tiering to store and move your data based on the requirements.
I'm actually guessing that this is a direction that EMC is already working on. It would make for one hell of a sales pitch. :)
Posted by: Bas Raayman | June 22, 2009 at 10:34 AM