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I wrote a longer version of this, but I will summarize as not all the commercial flash systems are x86's driving SSDs. Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM, and hav

I wrote a longer version of this, but I will summarize as not all the commercial flash systems are x86's driving SSDs. Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM, and have no commercial interest in what i'm about to say. I had the pleasure (a rare statement for me) of recently having access to a TMS/IBM flash system 840 for a year. Frankly, if the goal is shared network accessible performance, nothing you can build with PC's and SSDs will come close. The on the wire latency and bandwidth that even a single 2U (60TB) unit provides is fairly shocking. And that performance doesn't degrade over time, even under extreme load. The official performance numbers on the IBM site are actually conservative, which is unusual itself. The units are all custom (in a way that is a negative, cause they aren't cheap) and built like tanks. Although from an end user perspective they are very simplistic. AKA they provide a RAIDed volume(s) on the SAN and nothing else. Your on your own for replication and the like, although I think they have a canned solution for that now. Bottom line, they cost a mint, and are built like old school over engineered IBM hardware. But you won't be kicking yourself a few months down the line as you baby your custom storage solution. Normally i'm the guy building stuff like this, but sometimes I would rather just sleep at night than get called because the garbage collector kicked in on a SSD and it dropped out of the RAID in the middle of a big load. Plus, being IBM, you can probably get a unit with a POC agreement, just to see how it compares.

johngalt 12y ago
> you won't be kicking yourself a few months down the line as you baby your custom storage solution. Normally i'm the guy building stuff like this, but sometimes I would rather just sleep at night... "Even Southwest doesn't build their own airplanes." I have this argument with myself all the time. If you don't have an IT pro who works on storage every day, then buy something from someone who does work on storage every day. Their time is worth the price. Your time is worth it too.
- mrmondo 12y ago
  I've taken this from where I replied to a comment on my blog: Support 4 hour on site response offered from vendors is not good enough for us and to improve on that is expensive. With using more standard components we are able to be on site at either our primary or secondary datacenter within 30 minutes with spare parts in hand if required. Choosing one vendor as an example, the support we've received from HP has been atrocious - they've caused more outages than they've be able to fix. The engineers they send to smaller organisations are generally relatively incompetent and they have certainly shown that they don't care about your uptime. Proprietary storage systems offered by HP, DELL and EMC are not only expensive to purchase and license but they're very time consuming to manage as they're essentially a 'snowflake' in your infrastructure. It's hard to make them integrate with modern automation tools such as Puppet and CI requirements and they all use their own management tools that are specific to the vendor or range of product - usually this involves having a Windows VM running Java or some equally frustrating technology to manage the system. Performing updates on proprietary systems can often be painful as hardware vendors generally are not very good at designing software. It's very hard to outsource quality and it comes at a large cost.
  - StillBored 12y ago
    You have hit the nail on the head for why most "enterprise" gear is basically overpriced junk. That doesn't mean there isn't quality hardware out there, just that you have to be more selective. AKA do your own research and don't be dazed by the feature lists. Some of those features shouldn't actually be used. I personally tend to like the KISS arrays that don't have dedupe/replication/etc built in, and are web manageable. The extra bonus is that there are a metric boatload of tier 2 array vendors (imation's nexan for example) that provide rock solid hardware for a small fraction of the prices of EMC/etc. Its quite possible to get native capacity for less than a company like EMC charges for deduped capacity (aka 100TB from a tier two company can cost less than the 10TB deduped to 100TB from EMC). Raw RAID is pretty simple/understood in comparison to deduped solutions, and I think that has a significant affect on reliability. AKA more features, more latent bugs... Finally, get a bunch of demo units, and if the configuration UI is a mess of esoteric proprietary command line junk, or it is only configurable with a 32-bit java app that won't run on a 64-bit windows (yah I've seen that) then send the unit back. Be clear about why it won't work for you. The only way to convince these companies to behave is to show them lost sales.

johngalt 12y ago

> you won't be kicking yourself a few months down the line as you baby your custom storage solution. Normally i'm the guy building stuff like this, but sometimes I would rather just sleep at night... "Even Southwest doesn't build their own airplanes." I have this argument with myself all the time. If you don't have an IT pro who works on storage every day, then buy something from someone who does work on storage every day. Their time is worth the price. Your time is worth it too.

mrmondo 12y ago
I've taken this from where I replied to a comment on my blog: Support 4 hour on site response offered from vendors is not good enough for us and to improve on that is expensive. With using more standard components we are able to be on site at either our primary or secondary datacenter within 30 minutes with spare parts in hand if required. Choosing one vendor as an example, the support we've received from HP has been atrocious - they've caused more outages than they've be able to fix. The engineers they send to smaller organisations are generally relatively incompetent and they have certainly shown that they don't care about your uptime. Proprietary storage systems offered by HP, DELL and EMC are not only expensive to purchase and license but they're very time consuming to manage as they're essentially a 'snowflake' in your infrastructure. It's hard to make them integrate with modern automation tools such as Puppet and CI requirements and they all use their own management tools that are specific to the vendor or range of product - usually this involves having a Windows VM running Java or some equally frustrating technology to manage the system. Performing updates on proprietary systems can often be painful as hardware vendors generally are not very good at designing software. It's very hard to outsource quality and it comes at a large cost.
- StillBored 12y ago
  You have hit the nail on the head for why most "enterprise" gear is basically overpriced junk. That doesn't mean there isn't quality hardware out there, just that you have to be more selective. AKA do your own research and don't be dazed by the feature lists. Some of those features shouldn't actually be used. I personally tend to like the KISS arrays that don't have dedupe/replication/etc built in, and are web manageable. The extra bonus is that there are a metric boatload of tier 2 array vendors (imation's nexan for example) that provide rock solid hardware for a small fraction of the prices of EMC/etc. Its quite possible to get native capacity for less than a company like EMC charges for deduped capacity (aka 100TB from a tier two company can cost less than the 10TB deduped to 100TB from EMC). Raw RAID is pretty simple/understood in comparison to deduped solutions, and I think that has a significant affect on reliability. AKA more features, more latent bugs... Finally, get a bunch of demo units, and if the configuration UI is a mess of esoteric proprietary command line junk, or it is only configurable with a 32-bit java app that won't run on a 64-bit windows (yah I've seen that) then send the unit back. Be clear about why it won't work for you. The only way to convince these companies to behave is to show them lost sales.