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About a week ago I tweeted that I had been invited to a storage vendor’s event, was invited as a potential customer by two different parties.  Funny thing about email lists, people get invited that you wouldn’t expect to attend.  I took off my storage hat, put on my analyst hat and promised a few old friends that I would behave.  I’ve competed against Compellent in the past (sometimes very aggressively!).  I’ve also said some nice things about the technology as well.

Compellent

Strong storage player, public company surviving in a harsh IT economy, and locally here in Colorado working with some great internal talent and one of my favorite partners.  Basic premise of the storage technology is controller based disk array (controllers are commodity based architecture which I’ve mentioned before) with a plethora of storage software services.  The special part that they bring to the table is at the storage service level, Data Progression™, Fast Track, replication, etc.  They have a very compelling story, proven scalability and a growing revenue and customer base.  The recent introduction of SSD support brings what most like to consider as a Tier0 storage layer, and although they have SATA, I would really like to see a strong archival tier in the near future.

Lewan and Associates

Lewan, is one of my favorite local integrators.  They did a very nice presentation about how they have several lines of business, specifically broken into two main lines of business, the traditional printer/copier side, and the IT Solutions side.  Lewan was relatively recently acquired by Xerox, but remains a very independent subsidiary.  What I liked the most about Lewan’s presentation was that they get the whole IT picture, and to date have had some of the key technology partners to create best-of-breed solutions for customers in the Rocky Mountain region.  The quick elevator pitch from Lewan?  D.N.A. – Data Center, Network, and Application Delivery.  They cover it all, and do it not only from a pure product basis, but from a consultative model that keeps the customers coming back!

Latisys

Latisys was another sponsor of this event, and they have some great solutions to the remote data center/hosting/co-location problem.  The purpose of the presentation on this day was to talk about Compellent’s place within Latisys, specifically to offer a target for secure remote replication.  This is something that any customer should look at that is currently running a Compellent SAN, because it reduces the complexity and I would assume costs associated in owning your own remote installation of Compellent gear, while giving you a place to recover too.  The better play they are offering however, is the ability to bring up your VMware based environment in a disaster, which is something that is very powerful for business continuance.

The SAN Technologist

I felt like a spy, I got funny looks, got directly asked if I had any questions, but I behaved and while I made no promises, I learned, I liked the things I saw, and I could without loosing sleep write something that is meaningful about these companies.  It isn’t everyday that you get a chance to see old friends, not try to destroy them, and leave with friendship renewed.  Quick shout out to my lovely mother who will greatly enjoy the Wizard of Oz reference, although not Judy’s greatest role, it is a good one. 

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I while ago I poked fun at the NetApp 50% Guarantee.  The idea that most of the savings come from taking a RAID10 environment and switching it to NetApp’s RAID-DP (btw, they only guarantee 35% if you are using your own storage behind a v-filer platform), is something I’ve touched upon in the past.  Now they have released a $1M’s worth of, at list, hardware if they can prove the reduction vs. a non-NetApp customer’s current environment.  What you win:

4. Prize

a) The prize ("Prize") to be awarded is comprised of the following NetApp products, and will be based on NetApp’s published US price List: storage hardware valued at $850,000, Professional Services Deployment, valued at $100K, and Software, valued at $50K.

b) The Prize will be subject to the Winner’s agreement to be bound by NetApp’s standard commercial terms. No purchase will be necessary to utilize the Prize; provided, however, after the applicable warranty period has elapsed for the hardware, software and service elements of the Prize, additional charges may apply to any requests for repair and maintenance.

c) To become the winner, the selected corporation must agree, if needed, to allow its representatives to be filmed by a NetApp representative and the winner’s representatives must execute a release and consent form that authorizes NetApp to use the video in NetApp Marketing material and activities. The winner must also agree to have a third party, nominated by NetApp, to evaluate the winner’s virtualization environment, both prior and after the commencement of NetApp’s implementation services to confirm the agreed upon virtualization metrics. Winner shall also agree to adhere to NetApp’s recommended best practices and requirements, including having NetApp’s professional services personnel on site to conduct a virtualization requirements analysis.

d) The Prize is not transferable. No Prize substitution is allowed except at the discretion of NetApp Inc. If the Prize cannot be awarded due to circumstances beyond NetApp Inc.’s control, a substitute prize of equal or greater retail value will be awarded.

So you get all this good stuff!  This is really a great marketing idea.  Get a bunch of non-customers to tell you exactly what they are running (lead generation), pick a customer and make a case study of it (great P.R.), and finally, still get them, after all is said an done, to pick up support costs after warranties are expired and upgrades for other features they will want to use.  This is a win-win though, take a company that has legacy hardware that was looking to refresh, quick easy way to get into a NetApp solution.

Image via Wikipedia

     Couldn’t make it to VMWorld this year for various reasons, but I have been eagerly listening in to all the chatter, social networking, and general fun being spewed across the internet.  There have been funny cartoons, funny videos, blogs, tweets, Facebook updates, etc.  The updates and news coverage is pretty great, but there has been one vendor’s daily updates that of course are self serving, which they should be, but are a brag about something 100% in their control.

     Not trying to launch a war here, but twitter man @HPStorageGuy, (who you should follow because he has some good thoughts when not bragging about LeftHand’s VSA)  Calvin Zito has been busy tweeting these past few days.  Typically he talks up the LeftHand Networks, now owned by HP, iSCSI storage solutions and other HP storage products.  Recently, Calvin has been bragging about how HP has the most VMWare HCL certified storage systems, server systems, and the ONLY virtual storage appliance that is certified.  Not sure everyone knows, but getting on VMWare’s HCL is an easy, but expensive task.  So, considering that all it takes is money and a little time, why brag about something like this? Regardless, Congratulations!!!  Also, Congratulations to RedHat for having the most certified OSs!!!

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     What happens when your storage system is a “klunk”?   In the start-up/up-start space there are still numerous storage vendors, two recently have moved from that I would consider up-start to Corporations due to acquisitions.  These two companies are what I would NOT consider “klunks” in the Treasure Hunt vernacular.  These two companies were the $25k prize check for Dell and HP, who going against some odds took the risk to spend large sums of money for non-traditional storage companies.

     Now that I’m in a different storage game I can take a serious look at two competing technologies in the iSCSI space.  As my audience knows I did work for Equallogic, Inc.  What they may not know is that I spent a good amount of time interviewing and looking at LeftHand Networks prior to looking at Equallogic.  Now to be fair, it wasn’t Equallogic that kept me from going to work for LeftHand, and it wasn’t anything I found out about LH that made me go over to Equallogic.

     iSCSI, while that used to be a “name we shall not speak” it has become a household storage protocol in the past few years.  I can remember when Windows software initiators would literally bring a server to its knees when running any type of IO.  So, LH spent some serious time about a decade ago working on a proprietary network storage protocol, but quickly switched over to iSCSI as it was standardized.  Equallogic started down the route as a potential NAS device, but also moved quickly to the iSCSI block level standard.

     I discussed before the merits of hardware vs. server as a storage platform, and both of these entries to market have very valid attributes.  So I’m going to leave this alone.

     The PS4000 vs. the P4x00, I mean really?   Just as HP releases a formal product naming conventions (thank G-d they minimized the “starter-SAN” nomenclature), Dell releases an “entry” level Equallogic product called the PS4000.  I can’t wait to see online pricing for this product line, it looks like it will fit nicely in the “S” of the SMB space as well as the remote office/branch market.

     The future of these products will be very interesting considering the relatively small revenue % they drive for HP and Dell, but I really do hope the best for both products, and it is like two rival players each getting drafted to rival NFL teams.

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While tweeting today, David Graham (http://www.flickerdown.com/) gave me a great idea for a new game.  Use your GPS and the location data from your cloud storage and see how many chunks you can find around the state, country, world!  Anyone who can recreate a single file manually gets a trinket!