Hi Chad, You need to be careful about putting words in other peoples mouths. I was there, so I'm can say that the assertion that Vendor B said that "Auto-tiering was rubbish" is incorrect. I also looked at @jpwarren's twitter feed and I didn't see him make that assertion there either. I did have a slide that was deliberately contentious and designed to stimulate some debate. It was entitetled "What's not so hot" which included the following bullet points. Old school bulk copy backups Stub based archiving Physical Tiering Closed “stacks” Scale-out for performance Compression/Variable block for primary Databases as blob stores Badly designed ethernet storage networks 8GB+ Fibre channel That's not saying they're rubbish, but that compared to other approaches like say megacaching or converged networking and other really high value technologies they're "not so hot". For more information on what was said, I'd recommend looking at the subsequent blog posts and the subsequent follow-up posts. http://nsrd.info/blog/2010/11/10/a-tale-of-4-vendors/ http://www.eigenmagic.com/snia-blogfest-2010/ http://rodos.haywood.org/2010/11/snia-blogfest-interview-with-netapp.html

(NetApp Employee) If that's your honest opinion of what IBM is planning in the mid - high end space, then your competitive research team either isn't doing their job, or you're not listening to them. I bet the IBM guys are all biting their tongues .. HARD. You're also falling into the "point one finger, find three more pointing back" trap. Why be worried whether the array you purchase gets updated or replaced with a new model soon ? If it meets the projected performance and functionality requirements at the right price, then buy it and be happy. Even if IBM was to EOA the entire DS range tomorrow, I would expect IBM to give every customer excellent support for the lifetime of that equipment. To sugggest otherwise makes me wonder about EMC customers experiences with its refresh program. Did everyone who purchased a DMX4 in early 2009 make a bad decision ?

Good luck Marc, looks like some fun times ahead. It seems like Dell is moving into the storage industry by following EMC's footsteps, though reconciling the disparate technologies will be an interesting exercise, I dont think EMC's quite worked out how to do that properly yet ... Of course if Dell was going to emulate EMC, they'd have to bundle the EQL and 3PAR kit into different classes of DellVirtualBlockMatrix (DVBM ?), but they'd have to buy a NAS vendor too ... hmm ... ever thought about working for BluArc ?

Interesting post, overall I'd agree with your categorisation of Mid-Range vs Enterprise, though in the past I'd always thought that DMX was better suited to sequential workloads and single threaded large I/Os due to its mainframe heritage with the associated tendency to do batch processing, and that mid-range boxes typically had the advantage when it came to cache-hostile random I/O. I based that assumption on a casual conversation almost a decade ago, where someone said that Exchange 2000 workloads were fairly toxic to early DMX implementations. I brought up that conversation with an EMC engineer who said that a revision of Enginuity addressed this. Even though this was based mostly on hearsay, it appears maybe this cloning situation is another example of a mismatch between the design center for the array and the particular workload. I wonder if this had test had been done on an old-school hand tuned DMX whether the result would have been the same as I suspect that the design center for the Vmax workload is more highly optimised for small block random I/O than the previous Sym. For single threaded workloads little law determines overall throughput, and the additional overheads associated with a scale-out architecture (even when measured in microseconds) can really drop sequential throughput, but I'm surprised that the impact is as large as it was. As a matter of interest, did the customer try using PowerPath ? Your mention that using round robin would have improved things dramatically inferrs that they didnt, but if they'd gone to the expense of installing a V-Max why not complete the picture ?