Kudos buddy! Looking forward to Chad 2.0.

http://virtualgeek.io

Chuck, I agree we view the world with different lens... which is a good thing. Diverse perspectives are required to address diverse needs. Thanks for posting my comments and sharing your perspective. -- cheers, v

== Disclaimer: Pure Storage Employee == Chuck, Hyper-converged infrastructures like VSAN (and the prepackaged version EVO:RAIL) seem ideal in addressing market needs where even the smallest storage array is a finanical burden - ala branch offices, retail locations, militarized vehicles, etc. As hyper-converged systems are comprised of a shared-nothing storage architecture they inherently laden by low storage utilization. How can you position VSAN or EVO:RAIL for enterprise-scale deployments? Doesn't their ~20% storage utilization disqualify them from AFAs that deliver greater than 300% storage utilization? I graphed out the utilization of the EMC VSPEX BLUE solution here: http://virtualstorageguy.com/2015/03/12/hyper-converged-infrastructures-are-not-storage-arrays/ To reiterate, I think HCI addresses significant market needs - I just disagree with the notion that HCI can address enterprise storage needs. Customers wrestle with data center resource scarcity as much as they do with storage challenges. I look forward to your reply. -- cheer, v

While I have no insight in to the situation that led to this post, I do believe competition can bring out the worst in some individuals. You wrote, "distrust anyone who starts talking negative about the other guy" yet I just finished reading the EMC produced document titled, "Pure's Top Ten Lies: 10 things Pure will tell you that are not true" See the irony? You are calling out the behavior of an individual who is following in the footsteps of the EMC corporate culture. Is it only OK if EMC slings the FUD? How about publicly challenging the EMC marketing and competitive teams to act like an industry leader. Ask them to fulfill your vision and lead by example. - cheers, v

Simply a fantastic post - well said Chuck -v

Well said Chuck. Innovation and Disruption being developed and released at an unprecedented pace. You have to love what's occurring in the industry.

Great write up and supporting documents. A few points of note. If you are a NFS customer, remember your medium is Ethernet and as such you can easily add iSCSI or FCoE RDMs to enable this solution. Customers interested in deploying Exchange Server on datastores connected via NFS should contact their Microsoft account team and request support. Like all vendors, Microsoft ants to take care of their customers. Lastly, with Microsoft announcing support for SMB2.2 with the forth-coming release of Hyper-V 3.0 I think it's fair to speculate that NAS is becoming more prominent and hopefully support statements will be revised sooner rather than later. http://virtualstorageguy.com/2011/09/20/microsoft-announces-smb-2-2-and-nas-support-for-hyper-v-3-0-in-windows-8/

@Forbsy - I think it's fair to say that you are asking for some clarity from NetApp around our Backup & Restore strategy. Let me know if I have misunderstood your point. SnapProtect (CommVault OEM) allows NetApp to offer an enterprise B&R solution which includes integration into our native data protection technologies like Snapshots, SnapMirror, & SnapVault for storage, application, virtual infrastructure, backup, and compliance administrators. Our existing set of B&R applications tend to only address the needs of each the administrative groups. SnapProtect allows our customers to deliver the capacity, bandwidth, and time savings of our IDP technologies in a manner that is coordinated across multiple management domains and can be extended with our partners DR automation tools. I want to apologize here, as I meant to address these discussion in a blog post or two in June and unfortunately got pulled away. I'll get back on this shortly. Thanks for sharing your feedback. Vaughn

@Pedro - We are woking on an official release targeted for the fall. Those pesky NDAs prevent me from sharing the details here. If you need to address a misaligned ESXI environment today you should first upgrade to data Ontap 8.0.1. This release includes logic to better better handle the impact of misaligned workloads. After the upgrade you could consider a number of steps to actually align the VMDKs... Wait for the MBRAlign releasee that supports ESXi Running MBRAlign from an ESX host Using a 3rd party alignment tool Install MBRAlign in a Linux VM (btw - this model screams - its fast)

@Fletcher - I don't have intimate knowledge around the data you are seeing with nfsstat, but I'd suggest you have an application in your VM that is creating a number of writes that are less than 4KB in size. If what I suggest is accurate there's no need to be concerned, as it is normal behavior for the application. I know you're well aware of misalignment, but please allow me to restate for those who may not be... What we want to avoid is having misaligned I/O for hundreds or thousands of VMs on an array. The inefficiency in I/O transfers due to a large mass of misaligned VMs will stress the array and lead to the eventual need to upgrade hardware. Let me know if the small writes is or is not the case. I'd be happy to engage others to continue the conversation if needed. Vaughn

@Fletcher - I don't have intimate knowledge around the data you are seeing with nfsstat, but I'd suggest you have an application in your VM that is creating a number of writes that are less than 4KB in size. If what I suggest is accurate there's no need to be concerned, as it is normal behavior for the application. I know you're well aware of misalignment, but please allow me to restate for those who may not be... What we want to avoid is having misaligned I/O for hundreds or thousands of VMs on an array. The inefficiency in I/O transfers due to a large mass of misaligned VMs will stress the array and lead to the eventual need to upgrade hardware. Let me know if the small writes is or is not the case. I'd be happy to engage others to continue the conversation if needed. Vaughn