There have been a couple of articles recently on the HDS blogs about HDP; Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning is HDS' thin provisioning offering and like all of the thin-provisioning, it also offers wide-striping. I am not going to get into whether HDS' offering is chubby, skinny or just slightly overweight but what I am going to ask is…
if wide-striping is so foundational and so important to the storage industry and especially to improving my TCO as a end–user, why do I have to pay extra for it?
HDS and EMC are both extremely guilty in this regard, both Virtual Provisioning and Dynamic Provisioning cost me extra as an end-user to license. But this is the technology upon which all future block-based storage arrays will be built. If you guys want to improve the TCO and show that you are serious about reducing the complexity to manage your arrays, you will license for free. You will encourage the end-user to break free from the shackles of complexity and you will improve the image of Tier-1 storage in the enterprise.
I understand that you feel that you have to maintain the legacy architectures and designs that you have inflicted upon us in the past but it is time that you stopped enabling our mashochistic tendencies and it is time that you encouraged us to move away from the pain of the past. You can do this by removing the licensing costs for wide-striping; keeping the cost for thin-provisioning is just about acceptable but charging for this key simplifying technology is not!
And if one of you does it first; it's okay to copy! Really it is!! I can feel that we're going to be friends.
Hi, Storagebod, thanks for shining the light on wide striping again. Every vendor (including 3PAR) has to figure out their business model and decide what functional elements will be licensed separately. To some degree, the licensing costs reflect the development costs to add functionality to a product’s core architecture. By contrast, all 3PAR arrays ever made wide stripe data across all drives by default as part of the core architecture. Implementation differences can matter a great deal for performance, scalability, manageability and cost.
3PAR is happy to have competitors like HDS and EMC copy our features in their products and we are happy when customers make comparisons. Of course, 3PAR will following them sometimes too, as we will with flash SSDs. In the long run, it doesn’t matter who is first with a feature, but who implements it best with the best economic advantage for customers.
2.015: challenge accepted free vp
No, Joe Biden isn’t being set free – he’s not even in jail as far as I know. Nor is this about VP wanna-bee Sarah Palin, who indeed will be free from her gubernatorial responsibilities at the end of July. No, this post is about a different kind of VP a…