Mike,
You don’t publish on your blog comments from people who do not think your same way, ok, it’s not good but hey, it’s your blog. I don’t understand your hate (or simply envy?) against Compellent, I don’t know if you have an installed base here in Italy, (I found pillar just once and I won!), so i can’t verify anything first hand about Pillar.
Well, you are gearing up with FUD! it’s funny for me, I will answer point by point to your misleading post to try to put some more reality into this “discussion”:
1) I have had a lot of Compellents installed in enterprise class environments with Solaris, Linux, Windows, VMware, and one Oracle VM! I saw disks crashing without affecting the customer, error messages in the logs of the hosts nor timeouts of paths or LUNs. If a path doesn’t respond for more than something like 30 seconds a timeout will accour, I never saw this behavior! And i don’t remember something similar for LUNs.
FUD 1: where did you take your data from? Moreover I saw better rebuilding times than sported by your graphs! please let me know more on the compared systems, from Pillar and Compellent. Are they really comparable, and well done configured with similar workloads, used capacity and type of disks?
The Real World 1: I saw a complete rebuild of 1TB SATA disk (out of 45 rotating disks) full at more than 80% in less than one day, without evident performance impact to the hosts! Are you sure you have done the right work with the Compellent tested? I have the logs of the Enterpise Manager, the Compellent’s management tool can produce a lot of logs, reports, and graphs: i can show them in public! can you do the same?
2) We have Data Progression installations all around Italy with different kinds of workload, operating systems, and type of disks installed. Never seen or heard about what you are saying. Customers are all satisfied and, according to indipendent analysts surveys, Compellent can show a 98% (and growing) level of satisfaction: can you do the same?
FUD 2: It’s very difficult to tell a potential customer that you don’t have the features he is asking for! But it ‘s foolish to say “that feature doesn’t works properly!, i heard about outages somewhere in the outer world!!!” Hey, i have heard about outages of HDS USPs in the last months (very well advertised and in the inner world): but, can you tell USP is it one of the worst storage systems of the world? and more, When you will be able to release your automated tiered storage v. 1.0 Compellent will release the version N.0th version! BTW, wait just a while before speaking about strange and not proven issues on a feature you haven’t already released…. are you sure you will be flawless?
Real World 2: Compellent customers use data progression (automated tiered storage) since years, they are very satisfied and they continue to buy Compellent (take one more look at the surveys, please!). Can you do the same?
3) WOW! Pillar can upgrade firmwares (seems only minor releases) without outages? Compllent does it very well since years, where’s the piece of news?
FUD 3: I personally saw firmware upgrades without service disruption, change of number and quality of ports, recabling, hot restriping, and other activities without any inconvenient. can you say the same?
Real world 3: hot firmware updates (not only point releases but major releases) are an ordinary job! Compellent can migrate from an old controller to a new one without service interruption! can you do the same? Compellent can live temporarily with different controllers generation in the same system, can you do the same? Compellent can migrate LUNs between systems without service interruption (live volume) can you do the same? Compellent has ONE system capable to scale from 5 to 1000 disks without needs of forklifts upgrades, can you do the same?
4) A statement like this one does not make sense for a Compellent, so i have nothing to answer. Do you have problems with your systems in that way?
Real World 4: Compellent is well designed, I never experienced what you are saying, probably you are talking about a bad configured one.
5/6) hard to think about a technician with a solder in a Data center, where did you see one? Never saw this about Compellent but ok, FUD is FUD!
FUD 5/6: Compellent is a Standard hardware vendor (more standard than Pillar), if you are guessing about the fact that the Controllers are standard x86 servers. Yes, they are! and this is one big advantage!!!!
Real World 5/6: The big advantage is that standard hardware (developed by tier 1 vendors like Qlogic, Seagate, Intel) is more realiable, bugs free, cheap, already tested at 100%, developed by multibillion dollars companies with huge R&D budgets! Compellent is doing only integration. Can you say the same for your hardware? Can we trust in you with your poor installed base? or in your small R&D department? (i would like to remember to who is reading that Compellent is hiring while Pillar is firing! 😉 ). Standard hardware, I wrote a lot about this in the recent past, allows Compellent to spend more in development of software features (asked by the customers), Compellent uses standard hardware so they don’t need factories but use the multibillions dollars companies ones to assure quality and response times, can you do the same?
BTW, you have not answered to my latest post about features from Compellent that we can’t see in Pillar’s arrays and about your financials.
ciao,
Enrico
PS i’m a Sun Reseller since 1996 and i never mentioned or heard someone referring Sun Microsystems as JAVA! 😉