Richard Siemers wrote:
Kieth - I don't think its fair or accurate to say "3PAR never thought about scaling this technology to large enterprises". I think the 3PAR support model worked well, and had a plan and means for scaling. When HP bought them, that plan had to be redesigned to use HP resources, which caused alot of change, and introduced a lot of people unfamiliar with the product at the exact same time the product popularity was booming... double whamee.
I am not sure I agree. They may have thought about it and had a plan, but they did not vet it out. When you look at their supported limits their corresponding tools and technology do not scale to meet those limits. Also their support model is very back end remote tech heavy and that model does not scale well for high volume products regardless if HP bought them or not, if their sales were at current levels they would have collapsed if not for HP's resources.
There is no way the current Remote Copy limitations work in a large array that has frequent short interval replications when you can only replicate 20 volumes at a time and there are known bugs when some of those volumes are multi-TB volumes that the array takes too long to process what changes occurred before it can even start the movement of data thus using up valuable slots of replication.
Also what Enterprise product does not have a concept of Consistency Groups for replication? There is no such thing in 3par RC Groups for periodic replication. And there is no current plan to fix this. Replication in 3par is a huge Achilles heel, very limited and does not scale up.
And don't get me started in the IMC, worst Java app I have ever used, has conflicts with many other apps, also can't handle hundred of volumes, let alone thousands. Last decent IMC was 4.2.0 all down hill from there.
They could have thought about scale-ability all day lone, but they did not architect it for it, even if they think they did.