Pricing on Evan Hoffman

VMWare 5's new licensing model.

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:20:56 +0000

After reading up on the new VMware licensing&pricing model I understand the uproar. Limiting vRAM is a reasonable constraint, but 32GB per socket for Enterprise? 48 GB for “Enterprise Plus”? If you have a dual CPU server with 144 GB (easily configurable last year), with 4.1 you’d only need 2 enterprise licenses to use all 144 GB, since in 4.1 an “Enterprise” license covered 1 CPU (up to 6 cores) and up to 256 GB memory on the host.

Compellent Doesn't Suck

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:28:59 +0000

I noticed a bunch of people landing on this site by searching for “compellent sucks.” I just want to avoid any confusion: Compellent doesn’t suck. Now that the pain of spending the money to expand our Compellent SAN is in the past, I am back to being in love with the product. The only gripe I’ve really ever had with Compellent is the price, and as Ben Franklin said:

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

Compellent Doesn't Suck

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:28:59 +0000

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

FiOS speed 10 months later, better than ever.

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 23:44:48 +0000

I switched to FiOS in December, 2009, and I was pretty apprehensive, having been a Cablevision customer for many years. I really had no problem with Cablevision’s service, I just thought their pricing was much too high in the face of the new competition (and deals) Verizon was offering. I ended up going with Verizon due to their awesome deal, but now it’s almost a year later and I can’t imagine going back to Optimum. It’ll probably come down to price when the current promo pricing I have with Verizon ends, but if the price was equal then no contest - I’d stick with FiOS.

The bright side of Compellent

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:07:46 +0000

Since I was bemoaning Compellent’s pricing recently I figured it would be unfair of me not to highlight the upside. Their tagline is (or was when we purchased it) “The only SAN so sophisticated it’s simple.” While I can’t say whether they’re the ONLY one, the idea is definitely true. This is the first SAN I’ve ever used, and aside from the learning curve for iSCSI itself (targets, spinup delay, etc.) it’s totally simple and intuitive. Create LUNs, map them to servers. Don’t worry about things like RAID levels or hot disks. We’re into our second year with Compellent and it’s definitely lived up to its promise of simplicity.

The SAN Scam

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 11:03:11 +0000

It’s time to buy some more disks for the SAN we have at work. The SAN is made by Compellent and we’ve had it for a year and it’s been great. One of the selling points was the ability to add disks however we wanted - one at a time is possible, which apparently isn’t the case with other SAN products. The one we looked at from LeftHand expanded by purchasing entire nodes, so the incremental cost was pretty high. Compellent seemed to have a higher initial cost but cheaper incrementally.