The point of maximum effectiveness of a TP system is immediately after migration/creation. After that unless the app/filesystem is well behaved the ratio of actual data to provisioned storage will inevitably get worse as fragmentation and other filesystem artefacts clag up the TP system.

Chris

But there is much greater risk for us if we sell something that doesn’t work out for the customer. Every vendor has had issues with that sort of thing at one time or another and I think I speak for all of us that we want to avoid those sorts of problems. So what will we do if a customer wants to buy a configuration that is inadequate for their needs? I’m fairly certain our systems assurance process will spit it out and reject it – and we won’t sell it.

That raises the question: Is your capacity guarantee just a gimmick to attract attention without any intention of making good on it? Of course we want to attract attention, but we can offer this program because we know from installing many products with many customers over the years that the risk for us isn’t very big. But because of the complexity of storage installations, the terms of each guarantee are expected to differ.

I want to be clear about a detail of 3PAR’s program that differs from HDS’: we cover RAID 5 to RAID 5 conversions, but we do not cover customers wanting to step down to a smaller parity set size (n+1). For instance if a customer is running (7+1) on their current storage system, our capacity guarantee does not cover a change to a smaller parity set size, for example (3+1).

I don’t find that these things are pitches to the guys trying to manage the storage resources as well as they can, but to some executive tier extremely far removed. You then have to talk the executive back down from the from the stars they have in their eyes, as you are already using something other than raid-1; or you are using thin-provisioning; or you are using snapshots rather than full clones.

Additionally while if you haven’t moved to some newer systems, every single vendor can pretty much supply all the feature they are using for their “guarantees” (with the exception of dedupe of primary storage i.e. NetApp which I have a number of); so there is nothing really unique about these pitches either from vendor to vendor if you are buying a new array (who doesn’t do raid5, who doesn’t do thin). In the end all it does is try to “shock and awe” some executive who doesn’t realize that they aren’t really getting you to buy anything unique, all the other vendors would give you the same level of savings because of the features (who much those features cost is something else)

I’m just tired of all the BS coming in from the vendors that I have to waste massive amounts of my time with because somebody who doesn’t know anything about real differences read some crap on the internet (don’t even get me started on the whole did you see the Backblaze article that was forwarded to me ad nauseam: why can’t our Oracle OLTP database storage be $118.00 for a terabyte? questions that flooded me for weeks)

Chris