I’ve seen EMC’s Rainfinity app in play and it works, but I don’t think it has much in the way of tape/optical support.

Do you worry about long-term risk due to laser-rot? I know that CD’s and DVD’s pose that rish, BD-Ram may as well but hasn’t been around long enough for a definitive test.

GH

Another great feature is that you can easily upgrade the storage controller. From the lowest entry level controller to the highest end. It’s a simple head swap, potentially some changes to ifconfig statements (if eth ports change), or wwn changes/zoning changes in fcp environments. Can be done in minutes. And you can do it yourself. Though NetApp would certainly prefer you involve NetApp PS.

Could it be that the higher-functioning contingent within EMC (as illustrated by membership in sangod.com ) actually agree?

I know the little exposure I’ve had to Centerra I’ve heard good things about it. A contact at the Library of Congress loves the one he’s got in there. Once they got it set up it really has been fire and forget.

But then again, LoC can afford to get locked into a something like that. A smallish start-up really can’t afford to get locked into that kind of high-end technology.

We’ll see – for the moment we’re not spending money for whatever reason the lords at the top have come up with this week, so all of my projects are on hold.

- First of all you’re right: You’re locked with that technology in the archiving space. Only Archiving nothing else. That means if a customer wants to do Tier1 storage (let’s say FC array), Tier2 (let’s say ATA array or NAS) and Archiving, he has to go with at least 2-3 frames of different technologies. It’s not possible to have all in one frame. Missing the Unified Storage message!

- At next you’re always dependent from the API integration of the ISV. It doesn’t matter if EMC announces a new API, it depends on the integration of the ISV. In some situations this can be really bad.

- EMC tells customer always that you don’t have backup you’re Centera. Why? Because the performance of current backup integration are worse! They offer it but they know that it’s practically not working. To slow. But there is need for customers in some environments to backup their solution. The difference is in working with a CIFS/NFS solution. You can do a NDMP backup with much more speed and with an additional software feature you can backup in just a few minutes.

- What about regeneration of a failed disk or node? How fast can it be recovered? From the technology point of view you have regenerate objects. The more objects you have the more time you need. If you’re disk has 5-10 million objects a regeneration can take 1-2 days. And that environment is quite normal. Think about a customer with TIFF or PDF documents in his archive. There are ways to improve it, e.g. using container but this always depends on the API integration in the application.

- Have you ever seen the power consumption of a Centera compared to a NetApp solution? It’s getting more and more important to look at your power and BTU consumption. Centera uses up to 4x more than a comparable NetApp solution.

- What about migration? Maybe after 3-5 years you want to migrate your data off Centera or to a new Centera. For the first point you have to migrate your data through the application. Because of the bad performance that can take time. A lot. For the second case you need the EMC PS to do that. Currently this is only an EMC offering where customers have to pay for. They can’t do it alone in a safe or compliant way with a kind of protocol. Who wants to do that? Compared to a NetApp solution where you migrate your data over NFS/CIFS or with easy to use applications which customers can do alone, EMC Centera sucks in that case.

- Double Disk failure. What about a double disk failure? It’s not very unusual with SATA disks to have a a double disk failure. For Centera this could mean: Data Loss! And it doesn’t matter if you have replication enabled as replication is asynchronous with at least 2 minutes delay. Working with a RAID-DP solution it doesn’t matter if two disks go down at the same time. The concept is working.

Overall EMC Centera is a one-way solution for customers. The concept works for very small archives with some things to be aware of but as your archive grows and it will grow you will see that the technology doesn’t scale!

My2cents