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The data storage business is amazing.
It sort of reminds me of Churchill’s quote… how did that go… “never was so much owed by so many to so few”. We keep giving our blood sweat and tears to a handful of enterprise storage vendors. We are served the same old commodity hardware and complicated software. Let’s face it. Almost everyone is selling the same disks on the same chassis and touting the same features.
The storage sales guys by-and-large are marketing droids that don’t understand a damn thing about what I need and probably wouldn’t care if they did. Oh, I’m not saying they are bad people. They have to earn a living like everyone else. My beef is that they always have an agenda that includes finding my wallet and removing my money. When they tell me that they want to meet to better understand my infrastructure it feels like they are just snooping around for more business. If I have a real storage project believe me — I’ll find you.
My company primarily buys netapp storage. Most of the netapp sales guys are okay — certainly a little better than some vendors I’ve dealt with. The gear works. That’s certainly a positive. On the other hand it is really expensive. It is a limiting factor for growth in our business. It harms our competitiveness. Netapp wants to license every cock-a-mamy protocol and service separately. Need iscsi? cha-ching. Dedup? cha-ching. Oh, now you need replication? cha-ching cha-ching. You won’t know the true cost of your netapp infrastructure until a year down the road when you need to start adding expensive features. And here’s the real rub. You end up paying about 20% annually for service and maintenance on the hardware. So basically over five years you have just paid 2X for your storage. It’s such a great scam I’m kicking myself for not inventing a storage company.
I want google storage. No, not some kind of remote data storage service like Amazon S3. I need more performance than those storage services can offer. I want storage that scales like building blocks. I want to be able to plug in storage blocks and gain more space and more performance. I want the storage scaling to be automatic and dummy-proof. I don’t want a solution that simply mirrors raid10 disk on vaultA to raid10 disk on vaultB. That’s trivial and a waste of resources. I want true distributed storage with outstanding performance. I want redundancy if building block nodes fail. I want to replicate data to multiple datacenters. I don’t want to license separate features. Give me the whole enchilada. Netapp, if someone else steps up to the plate and is able to provide me with this type of storage solution, it’s… buh-bye.
