The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3
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Imagine having this same conversation about an EMC VMAX or an HPE 3PAR... it would feel silly. And in those cases you know that they are on proprietary everything and that you cannot get parts at the local supplier. Yet you assume that they are bulletproof (and they are, literally in the case of the 3PAR... they've actually put an artillery round through it.) When dealing with enterprise appliances, you care about the quality of the support, the reliability of the product.... but you don't care about mitigating those things should that fail.
And in the case of 3PAR or EMC, if they just disappeared you'd be in horrific shape. But with the Scale, you just take a backup, restore to another box and away you go. The lock in risk is fractional in comparison.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Imagine having this same conversation about an EMC VMAX or an HPE 3PAR... it would feel silly.
I have this conversation about any and every product I look at. Assumptions are stupid.
Take Webroot. The conversation was exactly the same, what ifs, ands or buts. Now it's my favourite endpoint product but there is a level of scepticism the product (and the people promoting it) had to pass.
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If I was building and supporting my own XenServer cluster, then the questions that you are asking are exactly what you would need to ask... where do I get my parts, how quick will it be, have I set it up to be reliable enough until the parts arrive and so forth. That makes total sense.
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
@scottalanmiller said:
Imagine having this same conversation about an EMC VMAX or an HPE 3PAR... it would feel silly.
I have this conversation about any and every product I look at. Assumptions are stupid.
Take Webroot. The conversation was exactly the same, what ifs, ands or buts. Now it's my favourite endpoint product but there is a level of scepticism the product (and the people promoting it) had to pass.
You are missing my point, I think. My point is that the questions that you are asking are not sceptical ones, but unrelated ones. That's the difference. You aren't asking sceptical questions about if the product is bulletproof, which is what you were actually concerned about, right? You are asking questions based on the assumption that it is not going to be bulletproof and how will you work around a system you are expecting to fail when the entire point of the product is to rely on that system.
No matter what the answers are to your questions, they should not change your faith in the system itself, hence why I am confused by them being asked.
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But the problem is, a Scale system is too expensive to take a leap of faith with, you need to get it right the first time. It's not like I'm buying a toy tablet I can mess around with or a demo or some software.
There's only 1 place in the UK I can even see a Scale system at the moment. It's a risky risky thing to even be thinking about looking into them. They've got maybe 12 installs when I last checked. Versus how many non Scale deployments.
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
They've got maybe 12 installs when I last checked. Versus how many non Scale deployments.
12? I know more than that many customers personally. They have lots of deployments.
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@scottalanmiller said
12? I know more than that many customers personally. They have lots of deployments.
That's what the rep said at the SW booth...He named one of them which is a big uni.
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
But the problem is, a Scale system is too expensive to take a leap of faith with, you need to get it right the first time.
That I understand. But... that is less of an issue with a Scale than with any other enterprise appliance, right? The VMAX and 3PAR come to mind, neither can you get a single node for the starter price of a Scale.
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@scottalanmiller said
That I understand. But... that is less of an issue with a Scale than with any other enterprise appliance, right? The VMAX and 3PAR come to mind, neither can you get a single node for the starter price of a Scale.
But are we comparing Apples to Apples here?
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
@scottalanmiller said
12? I know more than that many customers personally. They have lots of deployments.
That's what the rep said at the SW booth...He named one of them which is a big uni.
Something fishy there, there has to be some confusion.
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UK only, how many deployments of your systems.
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
@scottalanmiller said
That I understand. But... that is less of an issue with a Scale than with any other enterprise appliance, right? The VMAX and 3PAR come to mind, neither can you get a single node for the starter price of a Scale.
But are we comparing Apples to Apples here?
No, the Scale is a full cluster and total stack at that price, not only one node and one little piece of the big picture. So the Scale is dramatically more accessible and more complete.
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@scottalanmiller said
No, the Scale is a full cluster and total stack at that price, not only one node and one little piece of the big picture. So the Scale is dramatically more accessible and more complete.
But Won't VMAX and 3PAIR say otherwise?
Ubiquiti is 1/4th of the price of Cisco kit but I know and understand why.
Why is Scale much much cheaper?
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
UK only, how many deployments of your systems.
OH, UK only. That would be a smaller number. I know lots of US deployments. The only concern there would be Dell's supply chain though, right? I mean it is the same product, there is nothing UK specific about it. Do you have concern with Dell parts in the UK?
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
Ubiquiti is 1/4th of the price of Cisco kit but I know and understand why.
Because Cisco sales through marketing and can charge anything they want because value is not part of the equation.
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
But Won't VMAX and 3PAIR say otherwise?
No, they'd be lying through their teeth to claim that one node was two or that storage was compute.
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
Why is Scale much much cheaper?
Same reason Ubiquiti is... high volume, commodity hardware, open source base, in house technology with low overhead cost, high vertical integration to capture revenue from all points in the platform pricing (compute, storage, platform, support, etc.)
The real question should be... why would you assume that it would cost more? It's hard to explain why something is "cheap" when it seems like a reasonable price. What makes you feel that it is unreasonable low requiring explanation?
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@scottalanmiller said
The real question should be... why would you assume that it would cost more?
Because if everyone else is selling Apples at $10 a pack and has done for years and a new shop opens which sells them at $5 a pop.
Either the new shop is doing something screwy.
Everyone else is ripping you off/charging because they can.9/10, the answer is generally the cheaper guy is doing something screwy but every once in a while you get a nice surprise.
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If you were to price out the Scale hardware yourself, you could figure out where their profit opportunity is. Then figure that they deal in large scale so they get better deals than you will, as well. If all you wanted was the Scale hardware, you could do it much cheaper. Their system is designed to need minimal support which keeps their support costs low by not needing to do so much. Since the software that they use is in house or open source, there is no hard cost associated with that. So if you look at the difference in sales cost to the hardware cost, that's the margin and it is very clearly there. They need it, as there is a lot of in house development and such, but you can see that they have solid margins built in.
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@Breffni-Potter said in The Four Things That You Lose with Scale Computing HC3:
Because if everyone else is selling Apples at $10 a pack and has done for years and a new shop opens which sells them at $5 a pop.
But the issue isn't that someone was selling apples and now someone else is selling apples. It's that someone was selling oranges at $10 and now someone has a pear for $5. It's a different thing, there is no reason to assume that it would cost the same.
But, this costs more, not less. If you compare three Dell R430 without Scale, that's $5. If you look at the Scale, it's $10. So they aren't selling the same thing for less, they are selling it for more (with more value added, of course.)
That's the "apples to apples" pricing difference. What EMC and 3PAR do is unrelated, it's only a talking point because they are similarly appliances, not competing devices.
