Competitors for Exablox
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@coliver said:
I've always wondered what market Exablock is marketing toward. It just seems like a product that you won't see the benefits/advantages over traditional storage until you are in the 10's of TBs with 10-30% yearly growth where re-provisioning a storage server would take a silly amount of time.
It's pretty much anyone who needs medium scale or larger, dedicated SMB storage. If you need scaling, it gets even better, but just large SMB needs is enough. It's amazing as a large scale backup target, as an example. Or a great way to provide large scale file storage for user storage, for example. If you are looking to handle lots of "mapped drives" and personal files, this is an ideal platform once you get to the scale where it makes sense.
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@lance said:
It looks like Server 2012 introduced dedup, I guess you learn something new every day. Thanks
Windows Dedupe is good. Their scale out is crap, though. But they are working on it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
For $10k (my assumed cost of a single OneBlox) you can get a kick ass server with really sexy stuff
$10K is a huge price, though. It's not very sexy until you use the scale out feature, and that is a minimum of two of these $10K units. And you are not big enough for it to make sense until you go another unit bigger. So realistically, it's $30K to get started and that doesn't include the disks. So that's a ton more money. It's not that cheap until you leverage the scale out feature that it is built around.
And then you are limited to nothing but SMB. It's a great scale out SMB system at a good price. But that's not something many people need, at least not in the small business space. When you need it, it's the best solution out there.
SAM is correct. One of the biggest value props of Exablox is our scale-out. Going from 4TB to 50TB over some period of time huge growth! Instead of buying something that may support you in 3 years, just buy what you need today. As your needs change (and they always will) simply add more storage/OneBlox and you'll never have to do a forklift upgrade again. Moreover, since you source your own drives (yourself or your partner) your $/TB will only decrease over time and will do so rapidly.
PS. The $10k is list price. With our YE special it will be significantly less than that.
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@lance said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@lance said:
Another thing to remember when comparing it to a windows server is that windows servers don’t have dedupe, CDP, backup target, replication, scale out, and cloud management.
What Windows Server are you using? Windows has scale out, replication, dedupe, compression, etc.
Cloud management is nice, but just use LogMeIn and you have that with Windows. Easy peasy.
It looks like Server 2012 introduced dedup, I guess you learn something new every day. Thanks
yes Server 2012 has file dedupe, but I don't believe it a dedupe target for Backup Exec, Veeam, others. Moreover, without CDP (immutable) it's not a persistent protection scheme for primary data.
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@SeanExablox said:
@lance said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@lance said:
Another thing to remember when comparing it to a windows server is that windows servers don’t have dedupe, CDP, backup target, replication, scale out, and cloud management.
What Windows Server are you using? Windows has scale out, replication, dedupe, compression, etc.
Cloud management is nice, but just use LogMeIn and you have that with Windows. Easy peasy.
It looks like Server 2012 introduced dedup, I guess you learn something new every day. Thanks
yes Server 2012 has file dedupe, but I don't believe it a dedupe target for Backup Exec, Veeam, others. Moreover, without CDP (immutable) it's not a persistent protection scheme for primary data.
Gotcha
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
I've always wondered what market Exablock is marketing toward. It just seems like a product that you won't see the benefits/advantages over traditional storage until you are in the 10's of TBs with 10-30% yearly growth where re-provisioning a storage server would take a silly amount of time.
It's pretty much anyone who needs medium scale or larger, dedicated SMB storage. If you need scaling, it gets even better, but just large SMB needs is enough. It's amazing as a large scale backup target, as an example. Or a great way to provide large scale file storage for user storage, for example. If you are looking to handle lots of "mapped drives" and personal files, this is an ideal platform once you get to the scale where it makes sense.
We are introducing NFS now as well. So those that need SMB (3.0)/NFS file services and video storage (we have a number of non-profits using for digital asset management)
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@scottalanmiller said:
@SeanExablox said:
Hi MattSpeller, I'm Sean (Sr. Director, Product Management @Exablox).
Hey Sean! Great to see you here. Great to see vendors actively watching the threads.
I'll second that, I almost choked on my coffee when you replied! I have meetings this afternoon but I"ll be watching this space and reading up on your product. Thank you very much for dropping in!
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@SeanExablox said:
PS. The $10k is list price. With our YE special it will be significantly less than that.
Good to know!
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@SeanExablox said:
Hi MattSpeller, I'm Sean (Sr. Director, Product Management @Exablox).
Hey Sean! Great to see you here. Great to see vendors actively watching the threads.
I'll second that, I almost choked on my coffee when you replied! I have meetings this afternoon but I"ll be watching this space and reading up on your product. Thank you very much for dropping in!
Cool. I don't know forum etiquette, so apologies if posting industry analyst videos is taboo. We just worked with Enterprise Strategy Group and Terri McClure explains a bit more about object storage and what we're doing.
my email is [email protected]. I look forward to speaking with you at your convenience.
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@SeanExablox said:
We are introducing NFS now as well. So those that need SMB (3.0)/NFS file services and video storage (we have a number of non-profits using for digital asset management)
That will make a huge difference. Having NFS really changes the use cases.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@SeanExablox said:
We are introducing NFS now as well. So those that need SMB (3.0)/NFS file services and video storage (we have a number of non-profits using for digital asset management)
That will make a huge difference. Having NFS really changes the use cases.
You would be able to use this as a VMWare/Xen backend at that point? Although not sure about the speed of the unit for virtual workloads.
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@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@SeanExablox said:
We are introducing NFS now as well. So those that need SMB (3.0)/NFS file services and video storage (we have a number of non-profits using for digital asset management)
That will make a huge difference. Having NFS really changes the use cases.
You would be able to use this as a VMWare/Xen backend at that point? Although not sure about the speed of the unit for virtual workloads.
For lower end workloads yes. We've optimized OneBlox more for file serving/digital asset/backup target and not around higher virtual IOPS requirements. Additionally, as we're just introducing NFS we don't have VAAI integration completed--just want to set expectations.
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@MattSpeller said:
I'll second that, I almost choked on my coffee when you replied! I have meetings this afternoon but I"ll be watching this space and reading up on your product. Thank you very much for dropping in!
That's how you know you have a good vendor!
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@SeanExablox said:
@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@SeanExablox said:
We are introducing NFS now as well. So those that need SMB (3.0)/NFS file services and video storage (we have a number of non-profits using for digital asset management)
That will make a huge difference. Having NFS really changes the use cases.
You would be able to use this as a VMWare/Xen backend at that point? Although not sure about the speed of the unit for virtual workloads.
For lower end workloads yes. We've optimized OneBlox more for file serving/digital asset/backup target and not around higher virtual IOPS requirements. Additionally, as we're just introducing NFS we don't have VAAI integration completed--just want to set expectations.
Good to know, thanks for that information.
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@coliver said:
You would be able to use this as a VMWare/Xen backend at that point? Although not sure about the speed of the unit for virtual workloads.
With NFS yes, in theory, VMware and Xen would be able to use Exablox as primary storage. People do this today with other scale out storage, like Gluster. My guess is that once they have NFS it will work just fine. Might not be the absolute fastest solution, but for general workloads probably very adequate. Will be interesting to test.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
You would be able to use this as a VMWare/Xen backend at that point? Although not sure about the speed of the unit for virtual workloads.
With NFS yes, in theory, VMware and Xen would be able to use Exablox as primary storage. People do this today with other scale out storage, like Gluster. My guess is that once they have NFS it will work just fine. Might not be the absolute fastest solution, but for general workloads probably very adequate. Will be interesting to test.
That would be interesting indeed!
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Looks like we are going ahead with a trial of the Exablox, once we have it and I've beaten on it I will post more thoughts.
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@MattSpeller Awesome, looking forward to seeing some real world feedback on it.
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@MattSpeller Good to hear.
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Very cool, those look like really neat units.
