ORIGINALLY POSTED 1st September 2007

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I find it interesting that v2 of Invista has been so quietly ‘introduced’ – very unlike EMC.

I spotted a reference to it a few months back on Mark’s blog, but couldn’t find any press or EMC website coverage.

The article from CBR covers some interesting points that I wanted to bring up here. I’ve already made reference to the ‘humour’ from D’Errico. Isn’t there something to be said for ‘the first thing that comes to mind is always the truth’…

Anyway, I’d also question the remark regarding :

“its most significant effect has been to boost confidence among customers who were wary of implementing the first version of a technically ambitious product”

when taken into consideration with :

“Now EMC says that Invista has been taken up by around 200 customers”

To me, a field population of 200 (note that the number of customers using v1 is a lot less according to the article) is pretty slim and would not boost my confidence in a product. I also read this to signify they have simply upped the number to try and convince people that its not the first generation, still if its working and helping sales – fair play. However, I presume most of the increased throughput claims come from the support for more powerful Intelligent Switch Blades, so maybe the version number statement from D’Errico is closer to the truth.

I also find it amusing that during the quarter leading up to July 2007 IBM sold more SVC installations than the total number of Invista’s EMC have sold in its 18+ months in the field.

One final point I don’t quite understand is the closing remarks made by Tim in the CBR article :

“or new source of customer control and lock-in”

The whole point of a virtualized SAN is that it removes vendor lock-in – especially when it comes to storage purchasing. I think all of our 3000+ customer installs would agree.