Simplivity - anyone use them?
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@scottalanmiller Maybe. But bigger than I'm willing to worry about here. Specific issue was "is SimpliVity a bucket of assbutts". Answer: "no, they're not."
The rest of this is to existential to worry about for me right now.
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I think it's a useful tool for quickly conveying information, though. We don't want the IBM effect where they totally lose touch with their audience or wind up in a community where they have no place.
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Not that ML is one of those, ML isn't an SMB community. It's a general IT community, but there is a strong leaning towards SMB and SME.
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@cakeis_not_alie said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@Breffni-Potter Who says SimpliVity wants to enter the SMB space? Anyone telling you that is nuts.
Everyone else who plays down at our level...well...Groucho Marx said it best:
I wouldn't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member.Well, they said they wanted to enter the SMB space.
The definition of SMB is really easy, They might be a 15 seat office or a 95 seat office but I've seen the 15 seat office turn over more money and generate more profit 10X that of larger offices. So number of staff is not a good measure.
I don't really get your last statement though, are you saying that any company wanting to enter the SMB space must be crap? What about all the other players making lots of money from it.
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@cakeis_not_alie @scottalanmiller
Metric versus English measurement system conversion in SMB counting practice!
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@JaredBusch said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@cakeis_not_alie @scottalanmiller
Metric versus English measurement system conversion in SMB counting practice!
That must be it.
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@Nic said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
I saw a presentation from them at a Chicago SpiceCorps meeting last night and the technology seemed impressive. Has anyone had any experience using them? Curious to see if they're as good in practice as they promise.
Well I'm at the other side of the fence really and it's difficult comment w/out look like I want to mock the competitor so... Let's flip it other side: SimpliVity and StarWind are very similar in terms of how we get the things done so I'm pretty familiar with the design they use. It's a combination of a local data protection with a hardware RAID (erasure coding) and some replication between a pair (or more) nodes on top. This approach definitely has it's benefits but drawbacks are there as well - any time your workload is bigger than a local data stores you're in trouble: either scale isn't going to happen or there's a performance penalty on that. So... I'd strongly suggest to do a POC with them and when you do provide a data growth estimations for another year and a half. If you'll go with them and you'll hit a roadblock later you can always backpedal providing info they have been warned.
Good luck!
Anton
P.S. It's a great pleasure to see known faces everywhere. It turns out IT is a very small world really
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@KOOLER My guess would be that SMB workloads have a high tendency to fit within single node storage limits and when they don't tend to be the big, low performance file servers. Always exceptions, of course, but SMB has a lot of standard patterns.
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@KOOLER said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
P.S. It's a great pleasure to see known faces everywhere. It turns out IT is a very small world really
Amazing how much of that there is!
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@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@Nic said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller not sure, they didn't delve into that level of detail. Their idea of having a hardware accelerator card is interesting though. Basically a combo of RAID, dedupe and their own custom file system under the covers.
It's an ASIC, I believe. An interesting approach to be sure.
Xilinx FPGA to be exactly correct. ASIC is a totally different level of engineering. Very few companies can actually afford one to have built.
https://www.simplivity.com/blog/2015/03/deduping-io/
P.S. There's nothing wrong with FPGA at all. As long as it gets the job done user shouldn't care is this CPU, FPGA or ASIC moving the bits behind the screen.
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@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@KOOLER My guess would be that SMB workloads have a high tendency to fit within single node storage limits and when they don't tend to be the big, low performance file servers. Always exceptions, of course, but SMB has a lot of standard patterns.
ELI5: Why should anybody buy a single node hyperconverged appliance? What value can bring HCI vendor to a Dell or HP or SuperMicro server running Hyper-V or VMware? Do I miss anything obvious? Thanks!
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@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@KOOLER said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
P.S. It's a great pleasure to see known faces everywhere. It turns out IT is a very small world really
Amazing how much of that there is!
My petty officer in Navy was telling something like "Life is a line of a shops and people stay the same and only signboards change the text over the time".
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@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@Nic said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller They said they work with Dell now.
They should really get that up on their site. If I didn't know to look at them, glancing at their current offerings would be enough to turn me away.
I think this is a meet in the channel thing (Kinda like Nutanix and Cisco, or like Scale's relationship with Dell). Its not explicitly jointly supported, but they have pre-install and possible redirected OEM support.
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@Kelly said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller I cannot help but feel a bit like I'm being attacked. {salesdick?}
That particular line was from @RojoLoco who is not known for mincing words in general. @scottalanmiller also has a tendency to break up his responses into multiple posts. It adds some clarity, but can be overwhelming, and he is also very blunt (although his language is less...colorful in online postings compared to Rojo). It can be a hard pill to swallow, but if you sift the wheat from the chaff you will find some very significant competitive advantages for the SMB market. I fall into the same category as most here. If a vendor doesn't post basic pricing information I will typically walk away unless there is a significant motivator aside from the product itself (peer recommendation being the largest).
To be fair, Its a channel product and channel products typically don't have "list pricing" outside of general schedule stuff.
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You want to qualify what exactly they need. 90% of SMB"s have zero architect skill in house, and when your system uses proprietary non-traditional RAID/layouts or data reduction, or is a hybrid based system so performance sizing takes some skill you REALLY don't want people either over-quoting what they need (And not purchasing) or worse under spec'ing their needs (and the product failing to deliver).
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The primary channel partner with deal registration gets preferential pricing and can offer you a steeper discount (This is to protect partner who staff SE's and architects and educate customers about the product, as these cost money). You don't want bob's cut rate VAR getting every sale just because they can operate at 2% lower margin than everyone else. This is bad for the partner and bad for the customer. This is why on any IT product over 20K someone will ask you why and what your using it for and some basic questions before they get a quote. They need to document this to show intent for them to "Lock" good pricing.
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Discounts may be deeper depending on the business case your looking for it. I've seen storage vendors (and especially startups) discount and sell the starter kit of something at 80% discount (Even loose money!) because the use case shows that if it works it will grow rapidly. If your Kroger and your buying a cluster to test in a store as a pilot before you roll it out to 500 other stores your going to get deeper discounts because of the potential business upside. All kinds of factors can influence pricing by "showing your cards" in a competitive deal before you know how deep you can discount because of the potential, you are exposing yourself to loosing the deal as the customer's procurement will often quit responding to questions once they have a quote (especially if there is an internal bias for another product).
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@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
I've done enterprise branch office, it's very different than an SMB, in most cases. ROBO and SMB have a lot of overlap, but a lot of differences, too.
Enterprise ROBO is different in a few cases...
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Can I manage and monitor availability and performance of 300 sites from one dashboard isn't something I've had a SMB ask.
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SMB's might get down to 6-20VM's at a small office with a dozen people. ROBO can be 1-2VM's in the back of a gas station/dairy queen etc.
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Can I build an HA cluster All in (software/hardware/licensing/networking gear/UPS/Labor to deploy) for UNDER $10K is something I hear form both, but in ROBO its something that can actually be delivered on because of how spartan the hardware requirements and the existence of a primary data center to provide quorum services and absorb the shared management overhead resources.
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SMB's typically need backup software at the edge and a traditional backup workflow and vault to cloud/offsite system. ROBO can often just be basic replication offsite, or in many cases DR/BC is handled by the application layer (although some have historically done this at the array/storage layer).
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Some ROBO Edge systems are effectively "disposable" but they still want HA for maintenance window reasons (vMotion), or so they can have something fail and not need a 4 hour parts contract (That a SMB typically will want, as the overhead isn't murderous like it is with 400 sites).
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@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
But that's not a viable customer anyway. Don't hurt good, real possible customers in order to protect someone too stupid to operate in IT anyway. That's not sound logic. You are protecting the wrong people... punishing the qualified buyers to assist the unqualified ones.
Also known as the majority of the people purchasing IT equipment?
@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
That means that that customer can't do things like order food in restaurants, buy a car, buy a house, etc. This is a level of incompetence that is so bad, that there is no way that they could be an operational company.
Yah about that. From my consulting days I was confused how people remembered to put their pants on their legs and not their heads some days...
Withholding pricing till its qualified is part of a game in the enterprise that fixes the following situations...
Sometimes its malicious...
- Cisco Fanboy network admin decides he wants to buy a new 5K switch he does't need... He is required to get 3 bids so he calls Broacde and asks for the biggest baddest VDX config so they will be too expensive.
Sometimes its just someone in a hurry....
2.HCI dude In a mid market company has decided he want some HCI! He mistakenly assumes that Simplivity does RAID 10 on top of RAID 10 like he used to do with LeftHand and vastly oversizes the solution. At the same time he quotes vendor xxx he assumes they have dedupe (even though its large block and doesn't really work or only scans the first couple GB of disk before it gives up). He quotes vendor Z and because he only got pricing missed the fact that they don't have a (Magical FPGA card) like simplivity and their VSA will require 8 core's be assigned (and hard reserve a good chunk of them!).
There is HUGE differentiation in a lot of solutions.
SMB's Quote first, learn later attitude works when your buying commodity low friction products (Printer Ink, generic rack mount servers etc). When you buying stuff like HCI or fancy Networking gear, or storage arrays I'd argue that getting quotes too quickly can (and I have seen) can lead to poor outcomes if someone doesn't stop in the quoting process and educate the customer. (When you end up running your entire business on a VNXe with 6 SATA disks because it was the only thing you thought you could afford). HCI appliance pricing is even trickier as with meet in the channel type solutions you are at the mercy of the underlying OEM for prices (and Dell's SSD prices have been changing almost daily in some cases due to changes in their supply chain!). Getting a price today carries the risk that another solution may appear cheaper if you get your quotes to far apart.
Disclaimer, for what its worth my employer posts most of their list prices on the internet (or doesn't do a very good job of suppressing them). Thankfully we don't sell hardware (So that risk/shifting price) isn't part of our exposure and prices stay pretty constant with a fairly well known multiplier for support and updates till the end of time. We do sell primarily though channel though, and require you call someone to get a quote on anything but the smallest packages (like essentials plus, and even then you'll still pay less from a partner). The reason is to see if they can qualify and maybe get you something else that you might not know you need, or make sure your purchasing the right "SKU". It could be something basic like an academic institution not realizing we have special pricing, or someone deploying for a VDI pilot not knowing we have per user licensing that will cost them 20% of normal socket pricing, service providers missing per GB pricing, or ROBO missing per VM pricing stuff.
I remember many years back someone called out Steve Balmer on Microsoft licensing being confusing with all the options. He calmly responded that he recognized it as a problem having lots of options to buy something, but he contented that to simplify it would lead to someone being angry.
Complicated purchasing and pricing and packaging is fundamental to any class of products that doesn't have a laser like focus on a single vertical.
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@scottalanmiller Just find out about this thread, so sorry if I reply to a months-old discussion, but this way at least someone passing by can get some numbers (disclaimer: I am NodeWeaver CTO).
Pricing is based on licensing per node; the unlimited per-node license costs 1100€ (with no limits on VMs, memory, disks etc.). Some partners do provide hardware platforms with NodeWeaver preinstalled, with prices ranging from 3500€ per node to 10650€ for a full-SSD node (128GB ram, 4x960GB ssd); many customers use Dell and HP, other opts for white box servers.
Node license includes backup and DR services, VDI agents and VM introspection. -
@cdaffara said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller Just find out about this thread, so sorry if I reply to a months-old discussion, but this way at least someone passing by can get some numbers (disclaimer: I am NodeWeaver CTO).
Pricing is based on licensing per node; the unlimited per-node license costs 1100€ (with no limits on VMs, memory, disks etc.). Some partners do provide hardware platforms with NodeWeaver preinstalled, with prices ranging from 3500€ per node to 10650€ for a full-SSD node (128GB ram, 4x960GB ssd); many customers use Dell and HP, other opts for white box servers.
Node license includes backup and DR services, VDI agents and VM introspection.Thanks for taking the time to pop in... and welcome to the community!
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@scottalanmiller Thanks! Love the sysadmin communities
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@cdaffara said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller Thanks! Love the sysadmin communities
This one is pretty active and has a big geographic, industry and size spread.
