Competitors for Exablox
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@lance said:
@MattSpeller said:
Thank you both
I've got a lot of questions about how object based storage works but that's another topic entirely
Would you be confident in their product without a backup solution?
I think Exablox has a deal going on now that if you buy two OneBloxs you get a third for free and you can then create a cluster which would work great for what you are looking to do. If you buy just one OneBlox, you are going to need to do something for DR. Currently the only way I know of for this is using robocopy to send the files off site to another device.
very interesting, thank you
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@MattSpeller said:
My stumbling block with them while doing my research seems to be the $/GB
For $10k (my assumed cost of a single OneBlox) you can get a kick ass server with really sexy stuff
That's true, but it is going to be a big pain in the you know what once that server starts filling up and you will still need more space for your backups. The good thing with Exablox is that you can keep adding and removing disks on the fly.
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@lance said:
That's true, but it is going to be a big pain in the you know what once that server starts filling up and you will still need more space for your backups. The good thing with Exablox is that you can keep adding and removing disks on the fly.
Yeah, true
The lack of data duplication still weirds me out though, probably because I don't really understand OBS. As Scott said, I'll still need a backup system. AFAIK if you have 3+ of these things it's still not duplicating data between them
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@MattSpeller said:
@lance said:
That's true, but it is going to be a big pain in the you know what once that server starts filling up and you will still need more space for your backups. The good thing with Exablox is that you can keep adding and removing disks on the fly.
Yeah, true
The lack of data duplication still weirds me out though, probably because I don't really understand OBS. As Scott said, I'll still need a backup system. AFAIK if you have 3+ of these things it's still not duplicating data between them
I think how a Oneblox cluster works is that once you have a cluster it pools all the storage together and kind of replicates the data across all of the Oneblox so you can withstand multiple drive failures across multiple Oneblox and incase of a oneblox failure. I only have two Oneblox and have them in a mesh so I don't know the exact details on how the cluster operates.
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@MattSpeller said:
The lack of data duplication still weirds me out though, probably because I don't really understand OBS. As Scott said, I'll still need a backup system. AFAIK if you have 3+ of these things it's still not duplicating data between them
The data is still duplicated, that doesn't change. This isn't some crazy solution without duplication.
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@lance said:
I think how a Oneblox cluster works is that once you have a cluster it pools all the storage together and kind of replicates the data across all of the Oneblox so you can withstand multiple drive failures across multiple Oneblox and incase of a oneblox failure. I only have two Oneblox and have them in a mesh so I don't know the exact details on how the cluster operates.
Hmmm very interesting. I can't thank you enough, you've given me much more to go on and I know better what questions to ask them now. I still can't see how they're alone in this SMB NAS segment, it seems a little too good to be true
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@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
The lack of data duplication still weirds me out though, probably because I don't really understand OBS. As Scott said, I'll still need a backup system. AFAIK if you have 3+ of these things it's still not duplicating data between them
The data is still duplicated, that doesn't change. This isn't some crazy solution without duplication.
When you insert a new drive it claims to give you 100% (or close) to that space, do they reclaim that with their internal de-dupe?
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@MattSpeller said:
I still can't see how they're alone in this SMB NAS segment, it seems a little too good to be true
They are not in the SMB NAS segment at all. This is enterprise storage. They are all alone because this is an incredibly niche solution. It would be extremely rare for Exablox to make any sense for an SMB. What company needs nothing but SMB protocol today and would want it on dedicated hardware? Not many, mostly only very large firms using it for just one specific portion of their storage needs.
It's a great product but neither its price nor its technology make it an SMB product. It makes total sense that they are alone.
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@MattSpeller said:
When you insert a new drive it claims to give you 100% (or close) to that space, do they reclaim that with their internal de-dupe?
I don't know how the space allocation and display work, I'm not sure how they are showing it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
When you insert a new drive it claims to give you 100% (or close) to that space, do they reclaim that with their internal de-dupe?
I don't know how the space allocation and display work, I'm not sure how they are showing it.
They show it's 1:1 - put in a 2tb drive, get 2tb more space. Creeps me out! I chalk it up to not understanding OBS and how their setup works internally
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I clearly have a lot more reading and learning to do about these things.
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@MattSpeller said:
My stumbling block with them while doing my research seems to be the $/GB
For $10k (my assumed cost of a single OneBlox) you can get a kick ass server with really sexy stuff
Another thing to remember when comparing it to a windows server is that windows file servers don’t have dedupe, CDP, backup target, replication, scale out, and cloud management.
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@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.
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@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.
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@MattSpeller said:
I clearly have a lot more reading and learning to do about these things.
Hi MattSpeller, I'm Sean (Sr. Director, Product Management @Exablox). As SAM mentions we're unique in this space. I'd be happy to have a conversation and answer any questions you have. Since we have an object-based file system 'under' SMB that we make accessible to applications and clients we have a lot of flexibility in managing your information efficiently.
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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.
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.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@MattSpeller said:
When you insert a new drive it claims to give you 100% (or close) to that space, do they reclaim that with their internal de-dupe?
I don't know how the space allocation and display work, I'm not sure how they are showing it.
They show it's 1:1 - put in a 2tb drive, get 2tb more space. Creeps me out! I chalk it up to not understanding OBS and how their setup works internally
we report a few things. We report raw storage capacity, usable capacity, and your deduplication ratio for the OneBlox. As your applications write data, we deduplicate it and protect it from 2 drive (or 2 OneBlox) failures. This is all represented in raw/usable capacity reporting.
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@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.
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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.
Thanks! Great to 'be' here!
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@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
