[jordanbeiber]

I said tenants, not users. Tiny little detail that you overlooked there. =) Last company I worked for had a €150.000.000 tech budget and about ~90k employees.

Again, if you read what I said you'll notice that I pointed out that you actually can build decent architectures using enterprisey stuff, it will however never scale horizontally in a resonable way. What happens when you have filled all your shelves in the array box? Ah, you'll need a new $250K box...

Mentioning vmotion and all... yeah so... VSAN et al... brrr... I'll put my trust in the open source world rather than shoddy software from 3rd party vendors trying to appease to the latest fad. Hyperconverge my *ss! =)

KISS is what rules but vendors are busy feeding channels and partners with impossible to penetrate acronyms leaving you in a mess sooner or later.

Focus from these vendors is to keep integration at a minimum, which means API's are usually crappy and achieving a reasonable level of automation is often a chore.

Now there is probably a little percentage of "enterprises" that uses tech in a sane way, but my bet is that the CIO you mention is a blockchain expert, as well as putting AI at the top of strategic actions to "implement" this year.

He probably have commissioned a pre-study from Accenture that outlines these strategic imperatives.

This is of course a little rant, but also true for the 90% of the 90% mentioned.

Don't be defensive and close minded. That's what's leaving most enterprises in the dust. There's just a lot of inertia inherent within certain businesses that will let them continue to burn through cash on pointless tech for yet a while.

[a11595]

again, cute. $250K. very cute. Try $5mil for a box, at least, after a 50% vendor discount. VSAN has nothing to do with SAN, and no one on a SAN uses VSAN. You are again showing your lack of enterprise experience, yet you are strongly trashing what you don't understand. A server sees many arrays, over a SAN. That is called horizontal scaling. You can't do that with internal disk.

[jordanbeiber]

Oh, 250 was for the box, no disks. 75% discount. :)

Keep it old-school!

Vsan btw is vmwares attempt to actually achieve _horizontal_ scalability.

I just don’t trust vmware with anything except for that bytecode vm. It used to rock, but time went ahead, and even as they IPO’d I thought they would end up dead in the water eventually. I had just been introduced to the wonderful zones in Solaris and it just made hypervisor vm’s seem silly.

And here we are with cgroups and friends...

Have a look at ceph if you’re interested: http://docs.ceph.com/docs/master/architecture/

Anyway, I’m out.

If your horizon extends to what vendors are prepared to sell you, take that 50 discount and run with it!

One final thought: is that disk not ”internal” to the array? This is what makes blockstorage notoriously difficult to scale horizontally. You’ll need very clever software!

GL&HF

[a11595]

yeah, I know what VSAN is. It's you who does not if you think you run VSAN on top of a SAN-connected cluster. Yes, the disk is internal to the array. A server can see a hundred arrays on the same HBAs. It doesn't care what array the storage comes from. I am positive at this point you know nothing about what a SAN is.

What "box" - the 42U Rack? I don't think so. The rack is always free. You then have DAs connected to the disk, and FAs connected to the SAN, which are on a pair of directors. You literally cannot get those w/o disk.

You don't know what a SAN is, you've never seen an itemized quote for an array. Thanks for your link. It's like sending a hooked on phonics link to an English professor. Cute. Keep it cute! People like you are the reason people like me get paid a lot.

[jordanbeiber]

For free! Good one. Cause’ that’s whats really happening... right? With a straight face?

I was certain I had nothing more for you, but this is too much fun!

You clearly don’t grasp the difference between vertical and horizontal scalability which means you have never been subjected to a bunch of scenarios requiring the latter.

Dinosaurs taking the p*ss are the reason many enterprises opt to off-shore and out-source.

[a11595]

yes idiot. I have worked for several vendors and sold this stuff. I have also been on the customer side buying this stuff. You're paying 250k for an empty 42U that you call "box" - you literally are lying.

there are, literally, zero enterprises off-shoring their hard IO hitting datacenters. In fact, having been in 80 different countries for these enterprises, they usually have many datacenters all over the world.

VSAN is for hyperconverged systems only. racks with a thousand 1u nodes that all have disk, connected to a fat ethernet backplane. Things on a SAN are not hyperconverged - they are on a SAN. VSAN is for tier 2 stuff that goes on hyperconverged - like web servers and DMZ things. The fastest processing is done on solid databases like Oracle or UDB on clusters of large servers, connected to a SAN. VSAN is even positioned by sales for tier 2 from all major vendors.

You literally picked up some technical words you heard around the office, googled a few things, and now consider yourself and expert so you give authoritative opinion on here about things you have never worked with. I bet you are deskside support or a code monkey, and have never architected a solution. When someone gives you a budget of 20mil and says you can average 1min of application unavailability per year or it impacts billions in company's bottom line and your whole team gets fired, do let me know. I'm sure your suggestion would be to cluster together a bunch of old dell laptops over wifi.

[jordanbeiber]

Hey sunshine!

So, you’re saying vsan for horizontal scalability and you regular san for single point of vertical scalability.

Yup, sounds about right!

I’ve only consumed vsan as a dev, and that turned out... not so good. Scaling performant storage horizontally is a science and no fun to troubleshoot.

Implying you get stuff for free from EMC is just a bad joke, or you have no clue how high the markups are. It does not matter what the invoice tells you, bottom line counts. Last time I was involved, admittedly many years ago, the enclosure actually came with a price tag.

I was there when the company I used to work for was first through the gates in emea to san boot their physical x86 boxes. What a ride and very little gain. Costed a fortune tho!

I’ve worked at a hardware/software vendor (499 of the 500) as an architect within professional services which means I have way to much exposure to the madness going on at the 500s.

I’ve built all flash boxes running zfs as well as xfs for specific scalability needs for customers, usually on-prem clouds but other use cases as well. Commodity hardware. Blazing performance.

If I need proper storage experts I turn to the zfs dev mailing list f ex.

If you could lower your guard for a sec you’ll see that I have no less than two times pointed out that you can build decent infrastructure with precious enterprise gear. You’ll pay through your nose tho, and personally I’d rather hire 5-10 super generalist FTEs rather than a vendor labeled expert and a bunch of hardware.

I’ll leave you with this oldie but goldie: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-...

I know: “that’s not SAN”, but the point I’m making is the mark-up. If you are working at a place that allows you to play the lone ranger and blow everyone away with three letter vendor acronyms, good for ya’!

Lone rangers are the biggest blocker for most enterprises from a technical perspective, second only to politics.