Comments on: Enterprise Computing: Is EMC Storage Configuration Advisor A SANScreen Killer?

By: Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:57:12 +0000

Alex

Far from it. However it’s horses for courses. Enterprise arrays offer a higher degree of resiliency and availability. Typically FC LUNs have been used on enterprise, unsurprisingly because they’re connected to the most expensive interconnect – fibre channel. Why use anything else if you just bought the Rolls Royce of storage hardware? iSCSI is a kludged protocol that Cisco/IBM developed to be “anything other than FC”. It never made the big time and will now die a death as FCoE overtakes it. And NAS, well that’s just for files.

By: Alex McDonald

Alex McDonald — Fri, 15 May 2009 08:51:43 +0000

Is it your assumption that FC LUNs are enterprise, and that iSCSI and NAS aren’t? That’s very narrow. Start with defining mid-range requirements, and I think you’d be surprised how quickly you run out of differentiators for enterprise. Perhaps monolithic and price might be the only qualifiers?

By: Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:58:58 +0000

Alex, I did say “enterprise”. I’d not class Celerra/Clariion etc as enterprise quality, so I’d be prepared to concede that filers could compete in this “midrange” market. Perhaps a good definition of enterprise and midrange is required.

Chris

By: Alex McDonald

Alex McDonald — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:54:19 +0000

And that differs from Celerra, CLARiiON, Centera, Atmos, even the V-Max? Are you suggesting that none of them is any different from my laptop because their just x86 PCs running Unix/Windows/some old crufty OS from Data General?

You’ll be singing the praises of BlueArc next, given that it’s based on magical FPGAs!

By: Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:20:52 +0000

Kostadis, I assume you mean that Netapp isn’t in the enterprise storage array market.

OK, I’ll concede that Netapp filers support FC LUNs, however as they’re effectively PCs running Unix, then they’re more the modular than enterprise market. It’s a bit like using a DMX-4 for iSCSI – you could, but you just wouldn’t…

By: kostadis roussos

kostadis roussos — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:37:28 +0000

> SANScreen plays in the market that Netapp isn’t – enterprise storage arrays.

This is the second factual error.

By: Chris Evans

Chris Evans — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:17:12 +0000

Kostadis

Actually, I’ve been poring over the SANScreen manuals in recent weeks for an unrelated reason, so I have an excellent view of what the product purports to offer. Unfortunately you missed the point of my post. SANScreen plays in the market that Netapp isn’t – enterprise storage arrays. EMC can offer the Storage Configuration Adviser as part of a bundled purchase and displace expensive SANScreen deployments. Even if SANScreen is currently superior, customers can opt save costs and go with the bundle option. Unfortunately Netapp can’t do that; the offer of free or cheap SANSCreen isn’t going to tempt enterprise storage array customers to move to using Netapp filers for their block-based fibre channel storage. So, to recoup the $120m purchase price, that’s a mere 2.4 million storage ports at $50 a piece that will need monitoring. I don’t see SANScreen being given away any time soon.

Anyway, for fun, I’ve added a poll to the blog…

By: kostadis roussos

kostadis roussos — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:54:31 +0000

No new value since the acquisition for SANscreen?

I beg to differ.

We’ve added iSCSI, VMware, Capacity planning, data warehousing and a proven track record for simplicity.

SCA is, at best, comparable to an old version of SANscreen.

Time for you to get a refresher…

http://blogs.netapp.com/extensible_netapp/2009/05/sanscreen-lives.html