Simplivity - anyone use them?
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@cakeis_not_alie said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller Then SimpliVity needs to be kicked for it. Twenty lashes with a wet noodle and no internet for a week!
SME? Yes. SMB? No. SimpliVity doesn't play down at my level, except for my very largest clients.
Let me be perfectly clear: SimpliVity started with a MIDMARKET focus and moved up channel.
Now, we could have debates about what is SMB, what is Midmarket and what is Enterprise, but I have actual definitions to use for this: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/061.nsf/eng/02804.html
The midmarket is defined by the Canadian government as 100+ employees. And that's about right for where SimpliVity starts to be a real consideration. I'm going to say whomever believes that is "SMB" is out of touch with the real mass market and what SMB means, especially outside the USA.
And maybe that's the kicker. US definitions and "pretty much the rest of the world" differ a lot here. Important to consider.
What I"ve always heard in the US (except for IBM) is that SMB is 500 and fewer. But ten or fewer is SOHO. So 10-500 for SMB. Still a loose number because employee count is not a solid gauge of size.
IBM considered SMB something like 5,000+ which is why they were so confused when they tried selling on Spiceworks.
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@scottalanmiller Which is my point: there is a massive disconnect between what vendors and pretty much anyone else means when they say "SMB", especially
- If they ARE an small business
- If they aren't American
Which is why I point to https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/061.nsf/eng/02804.html as my definition of terms. Because it's an official source, with statistics that can be discussed and is relevant to me, personally, as a Canadian.
So based off of the definition of "small" contained in that source, I stand firm on my statement that SimpliVity doesn't have - and won't for quite some time - an SMB play. If you want to use an IBM definition of SMB, they sure they do.
But maybe, for the sake of sanity, we should all agree to the definition of terms if we're going to have a poo-flinging contest over who is priced right, or using the right pricing approaches for a given market segment.
Otherwise, we might as well just shred some dictionaries and throw the confetti at eachother whilst screeching incoherently and beating our chests.
Ook, ook, ooooooooooooooook!
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Even with the definition that SMB is 10-500, and SME is 500-2,000 (which is what was taught back when I was trained) it doesn't change the fact that most SMBs would still be under 100 because the smaller SMBs are the larger percentage within the group.
I don't like an SMB break line at 100, because the behaviour of a 40 person company and a 150 person company and a 220 person company are essentially identical in IT. The bigger ones just spend more.
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@scottalanmiller I should also point out here that in Canada, which is a fairly advanced economy, only %0.14 of businesses are larger than 500 employees. If your definition of the market is that SMB is < 500 seats, the midmarket is > 500 seats and the enterprise starts north of 1000 (or 5000) seats, then you're shrinking "enterprise" down below a fraction of a percent of all businesses.
Which, when you consider that basically every "thought leader", salesdroid, marketdroid and CEO dismisses non-enterprises as "irrelevant" makes me want to start punching things.
It's bad enough for only %0.14 of businesses to be "relevant". I am a strong advocate of not shrinking the number of "relevant" businesses, if possible. If only so that I don't feel even less like a mote of dust in an uncaring and actively hostile universe.
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@cakeis_not_alie said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller I should also point out here that in Canada, which is a fairly advanced economy, only %0.14 of businesses are larger than 500 employees. If your definition of the market is that SMB is < 500 seats, the midmarket is > 500 seats and the enterprise starts north of 1000 (or 5000) seats, then you're shrinking "enterprise" down below a fraction of a percent of all businesses.
Yes, in the US it is accepted that something like 98% of businesses are SMB, and far less than 1% are enterprise. Only a handful are considered enterprise. Fortune 500 and little else.
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I've worked for 1,400 seat hedge funds making many, many billions of dollars per year (the company, not me personally) and they would never call themselves enterprise. They were mid-market but called themselves SMB because they felt so small.
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@scottalanmiller Okay. shrug. This is your clique man. I've said my piece, I've defined my terms, and I've linked to the statistics and rationale behind choosing those terms. I don't care what anyone else in any of the other cliques wants to call things. Anyone who cares to consider what I have said can use the definitions as I have listed them to understand what I said. That's all that matters to me.
The rest is just ook, ook ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooook
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@cakeis_not_alie said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller Okay. shrug. This is your clique man. I've said my piece, I've defined my terms, and I've linked to the statistics and rationale behind choosing those terms. I don't care what anyone else in any of the other cliques wants to call things. Anyone who cares to consider what I have said can use the definitions as I have listed them to understand what I said. That's all that matters to me.
The rest is just ook, ook ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooook
Hey, it's what the US used to educate us on in IT training stuff in the late 90s. I didn't make up the terms. It might not be ratified by the Canadian government, but it was drilled into us at some point.
Here are the US standards for it. Notice that they consider Small to be 250 or fewer in some industries, up to 1,500 and fewer in others.
https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/files/Size_Standards_Table.pdf
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@scottalanmiller Hey, I like definitions, that's great! I don't actually care whose terms are used, or why. All that I care about is that we're using the same terms, so that when we all argue, we're arguing about the same thing, and not past eachother.
"This is SMB" or "this is not SMB" is a really pointless bit of chest-thumping nonsense unless we're all using the same definitions of these extremely fluid-to-the-point-of-almost-meaninglessness terms.
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@cakeis_not_alie said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:
@scottalanmiller Hey, I like definitions, that's great! I don't actually care whose terms are used, or why. All that I care about is that we're using the same terms, so that when we all argue, we're arguing about the same thing, and not past eachother.
"This is SMB" or "this is not SMB" is a really pointless bit of chest-thumping nonsense unless we're all using the same definitions of these extremely fluid-to-the-point-of-almost-meaninglessness terms.
Which really, I think vendors might need to lead that charge. For example....
Vendor 1 does VDI: SMB is defined by seats.
Vendor 2 does Accounting Software: SMB Is defined by revenue
Vendor 3 does wireless: SMB is defined by production floor square footage -
@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.
