What other excuse is there for the NetApp 50% Virtualization Guarantee coming after the show?
Oh there was a lot of smack talk on the run up to the show but no pay off. NetApp, back from the show and finally understanding that they trail the field in the VMware space, appear to have replaced innovation with a shell game.
Focusing on what we've heard today, this is easy to get so long as you don't dig beyond the first sentence.
NetApp are the kings at eliminating the messy complexities of reality in their messaging.
One has to ask is it really putting your money where your mouth is if you've been sure to rig the game so you can't lose? 50% reduction with de-dup for low change rate heavily redundant data? Hell, you're not even supposed to pick up the phone unless you're running over 80% capacity and if you hit that number with one of the specifically defined data sets they support it means you probably don't have de-dup switched on or have a pile of pre de-duplication snapshots stinking the place up somewhere.
And how much time is required for NetApp to come out and assess if your setup is a candidate for their guarantee?
Since you're not the audience to be distracted by shiny objects lets look at this.
The 50% reduction uses a RAID 10 baseline, talk of RAID 5 and RAID 6 waved away as they obliterate the NetApp narrative. Forget about pro-active hot sparing or dual parity RAID schemes and all that availability malarkey, RAID 10 is the only thing that'll make them look good in comparison.
I don't even have to explain why now do I?
Everyone knows why.
So many people know why that Tom Georgens used his Premiere Sponsor Keynote at Oracle OpenWorld to whine about how unfair everyone was being to NetApp about it. The attendees all of whom have their own ideas of storage management, most of which begin and end with ASM, couldn't care less about what someone who wasn't from Oracle had to say and wanted him to get off the stage so they could see Gold Medal winner Michael Phelps who was due to take the stage after him.
An aside, it must have been a bitter pill to swallow after paying that sponsorship fee to then have Larry Ellison punk him with Oracles own storage announcement made in conjunction with HP.
To rub salt into that wound since Oracle isn't considered a low change rate low performance workload, which when you take out everything they say isn't covered by the Guarantee happens to be the only thing which is covered by the Guarantee, Oracle Advanced Compression can do for Oracle customers what De-Duplication for NetApp cannot do today and probably won't do tomorrow.
And with that you're managing information you're not managing blocks, which is something I'm all for.
Getting back to the topic at hand I might have found the RAID 10 thing a bit bizarre but I realised a while back that's how NetApp prefer to compete against Clariion.
A mirrored config with the write cache on the LUNs disabled.
Funny how the real world isn't like that...
