I work for a company that is a Dell Shop, Dell Servers, Dell EMC Storage running a Windows Hyper-V environment. Lately, we have been experiencing performance issues related to our storage (we think). We are currently in the process of working with Dell to hopefully solve these issues.
With that said, I’d like to see what you all recommend for a replacement storage solution. I know Tom is a big fan of TrueNAS (iXsystems, 45Drives, or custom build) and Synology but want to see if there is anything else others recommend.
As mentioned, we are a Windows shop running about 50 VMs across 4 hypervisors on a 10 Gb network. Looking for a storage solution that is either all-flash or hybrid with 100TB of space.
I would look at Nimble for budget performance or Pure Storage for extreme performance since you are only looking at 100TB. Both have really good support too.
I have not run into any running Nimble, but we have replaced a few Pure Storage systems with IX Systems / TrueNAS for performance environments. There are a lot of enterprise companies (including ones on the Fortune 500 list) using TrueNAS.
Not to Hijack but my “daily job” Tom just picked up Pure Storage because they are Gartner to the T. Did they do it for cost or performance, in an vsphere environment the Pure Plugin is nice.
I don’t put too much faith in Gartner reviews.
“Gartner has a ‘pay-to-play’ business model that by its design rewards Gartner clients who spend substantial sums on its various services by ranking them favorably in its influential Magic Quadrant research reports … and punishes technology companies that choose not to spend substantial sums on Gartner services,”
Agreed I have said that many times in meetings. But CIOs use it as a break glass in case of emergency. I had to fight to get iX in the door for this very reason.
I agree with Tom that Gartner is pay to play, but it’s no accident that those companies also have the largest market share, which I don’t think is attributed to them just being on a Gartner list. When I think about the companies on those lists, I don’t think about them being the cheapest or the best price, but I do see them collectively having the better support, feature sets, and performance than those not on it. IMO, you can’t go wrong using it as a starting point. If cost sensitivity is really high on your list than I agree it might not be a good place to start.
I work in a reasonably sized organization that is moving away from Dell/EMC (Vmax3, XIO) to Pure for many reasons. I won’t bash EMC too much but I will say that they are not the same company they were before Michael Dell bought them. Although their engineers are great, their overall service organization is a mess. EMC used to “do the right thing” until a problem was fixed to the client’s satisfaction. Since Dell that attitude has changed from the top down and they just don’t seem to care.
As for Gartner, it seems that the larger the organization the more “management” is likely to use organizations and ratings like Gartner to backstop/validate purchase decisions to CYA. And in some cases you simply cannot look at certain storage if your application vendor does not “approve” of them.
Regarding Pure, its simple. I have worked on many arrays in the past 20 years and Pure’s is the easiest I have come across. While some vendors justify their complexity by saying they “give you more options”, most of the time we just want to provision storage and be done with it. If you want to spend your day watching your storage grow and constantly worrying about it there are plenty to choose from. From provisioning to snapshots to replication Pure is WAY simpler to use than every other array I have touched. If you are a small to medium shop then you have plenty of other things to do and spending time stroking your arrays all day is not one of them.
To be clear, Pure, like most flash arrays, is a great solution for non image, non video storage as one of its greatest features is dedupe and compression, which those formats do not do. Do not make that mistake - do not put video or image data on ANY flash array! Your vendor should make that VERY clear to you.
Personally I would engage at least 2 VARs to help you make your decision. In theory they should be looking out for your best interests but sometimes the “best” array might be the one they get the best comps on… Make sure you ask what they sell the most of before you engage with them…
My last comment would be that I spend very little of my week tinkering with our (5) Pure arrays but a lot of time with Netapp, and EMC products… Just my 3 (?) cents.