3PAR won't make it as far as BlueArc did, but will mostly likely fail for many of the same reasons. A box is a box is a box...."What's the price per megabyte?"....This is unfortunate, but what customers really want and need is faster, better, cheaper storage WITH integration with all the other pieces of the SAN and applications. Building a bigger, faster box takes a while. Certifying and integrating useful applications, host support, switch support and the ENDLESS list of combinations with this and HBAs takes a LOT longer. Not to mention costly and engineering-intensive real-world performance testing to prove it really is better.
As with many things, if it's not faster, cheaper and better, there isn't much motivation for large customers to take the risk; especially in this climate.
Five years later, I don't know about BlueArc but 3PAR seems to be on its way to becoming a successful established subsystem vendor.
At SNW, I heard praise for 3PAR by several customers who were using 3PAR subsystems and also prospects who were in evaluation phase. What was surprising that not one of them mentioned much-hyped thin provisioning to be the primary reason for selecting 3PAR. All pointed out the 3PAR volume manager and striping of data across available disk resources being the primary reason with comments like "HP EVA like capabilities in 3PAR go far beyond EVA."
Both, 3PAR marketing at SNW and CEO David Scott in Byte & Switch, seem to be highlighting thin provisioning as the main reason for their success in highly competitive subsystem market with very conservative large enterprise customers. Is it really so?
What are your reasons for selecting or not considering 3PAR subsystem?
0 comments:
Post a Comment