Comparing EMCs VPLEX and Compellent Live Volume Comments

@rickbrunner

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:56:37 -0600

[b]First Truth in lending statement .... EMC Employee and SME on VPLEX..[/b]

Wow.. lots of mistakes in this post.. makes you wonder if you can trust any of it.
1) you only need a single engine for VPLEX to be an HA configuration NOT two as stated. This would be the same as saying a single VMAX engine is not HA.. nuts.
2) the port counts and memory per engine are also incorrect
[quote]
"Compellent’s focus is on integrating a software solution that scales."
[/quote]

hmmm... software must use resources somewhere.. to get scale the resources that one depends on must scale..

[quote]
"VPLEX uses a great deal of high end hardware to bring several of the Live Volume features to the EMC platform."
[/quote]

Funny, post mentions EMCWorld launch.. but VPLEX is bringing [quote] several Live Volume features to EMC platforms'[/quote]

WOW.. must say with this much spin someone should be in politics.

Most of this article is focused on cost of VPLEX -vs- software solution of Compellent ..

[b]You can have anything you want, but you can not have everything[/b].. there are always tradeoffs in life and in technology..

Compellent Live Volume may work fine for a small environments or all Compellent environments, but will not suffice for any data intensive environment or one that is heterogeneous in nature.

My advice. Review the architecture determine if it will meet your needs and short term growth, if so great. Just do not review this article and assume you are getting accurate facts on the competitions product or pricing.

michael

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:53:00 -0500

The cost. EMC’s response to Live Volume non-disruptive data migration capabilities further validates Compellent’s vision for a global, shared storage network. The difference is in the implementation
ccie

mlbe

Mon, 17 May 2010 15:18:00 -0500

Interesting comparison - really comparing enterprise vs. entry level, and heterogeneous vs homogeneous solutions.

IBM, HDS, and HP have been offering similar live mobility functionality for years, software and appliance based... EMC's iteration is taking their architecture/offerings (hopefully) to the next level. The hardware is a necessary component to enable real time, heterogeneous movement in true enterprise sized datacenters.

Heterogeneity is a key value proposition - no one should be locked in to Compellent, or any other provider. This is a big statement for EMC.

We'll see how VPLEX moves forward, today I'm still partial to IBM SVC, in a year we'll see. SVC has done great work in almost every environment I've worked in, personally I believe it's a pre-requisite for every datacenter.

Liem

Wed, 12 May 2010 15:44:00 -0500

Jim, we started shipping Live Volume to select customers last quarter, so we’ll have case studies later this year as users go into production. The feedback has been very positive on the time and cost savings, which is why we began showcasing Live Volume at C-Drive last week. Live Volume is optimized for campus migration at this time. We will continue to update our site with more information on Live Volume.

Our perpetual software licensing is actually based on system and drive count, not controller, drive capacity, drive type or software version. A base license covers the first enclosure, then as customers add more enclosures they pay for appropriate expansion licenses with a cap for the enterprise.

Since our software licensing is system based, customers can upgrade generations of controllers and the Storage Center OS without having to re-purchase software. For example, if a customer initially purchased the first generation series 10 controller and upgraded to series 20 and later to series 30, the software license they already paid for continues with the new controller and OS release (hence, perpetual). Likewise, updating the Storage Center OS from release 3.0 to 4.0 to 5.0 is at no cost with current maintenance plans.

Similarly, customers don’t have to purchase a new license if they want to swap drive capacities, spindle speeds or drive type. For example if a customer initially purchased 8x300GB 10K FC drives, and later swapped those out for 8x650GB 15K FC drives, they don’t need to pay for a new license even though they just more than doubled raw capacity and increased spindle speed. If they replaced those 8x15K FC drives with 8 SSDs in the same enclosure they’ve had for a couple years, they don’t need to upgrade the license even though they just increased performance exponentially. With our perpetual licensing, customers don’t have to keep paying for the same software just to attain new hardware support or software features as we roll them out.

Jim

Wed, 12 May 2010 14:13:17 -0500

I retract my distance limitation question. async implies "unlimited"

Jim

Wed, 12 May 2010 12:45:00 -0500

Couple of questions:
Can you provide some links to case studies of successful implementations of Live Volume?

The starting price is $5000 but how do you tier that? Lots of your software is priced on drive count. Is that the same with Live volume? Is the $5,000 the base price per controller or per system or per solution?
What are the distance limitations? VPLEX has a 5ms round trip max latency limitation. Do you have the same?

Since it looks like you rely on async replication for Live Volume, how far behind is the remote side? seconds? minutes? How much data can be lost is the primary site goes down?

Looking on your site I see no mention of Live Volume (except press releases). Do you have a a white paper on this technology?