EMC isn’t the only vendor forcing customers into gold plated solutions. Microsoft only certifies Exchange using Fibre or direct attached storage and just recently announced support for iSCSI. Why not NAS? On a dedicated network running gigabit Ethernet I see no reason why NAS would not work just as well and Fibre or iSCSI given the ingenious approaches to NAS these days. Fibre and iSCSI are moving SCSI commands and NAS moving NFS or SMB, but the application impact under any of these technologies given the state of networking technology is becoming less and less noticeable. The reason vendors like EMC and Microsoft only certify one or two configurations is to keep their support costs down and direct revenue into the most profitable product lines regardless of what might be most cost effective for the customer.

posted: 11:05:25 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I was talking to EMC the other day about an approach to storage for a large Microsoft Exchange deployment. EMC recommends that email go on either Symmetrix or Clariion storage. What? They have a great new line of products perfectly suited and specifically designed to work with Exchange in Centera. It was explained to me that Centera is for email archiving. Actually, no that is what cheap storage is for.

It was clear to me that EMC is up to their old tricks of not wanting to push another product ahead of the Symmetrix line. There are many other companies out there selling Centera-like products that are making decent in roads into the storage market by selling their storage as primary email storage, not archiving. A good one that comes to mind is LeftHand Networks.

I attended a couple of session at the EMC Technology Summit on Centera. If it is all that was claimed in these sessions, I see no technical reason why Centera can't be used as primary storage for large email systems. EMC needs to separate their support policies from sales and marketing objectives.

posted: 10:54:26 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()