Rafiu > True. And with Openfiler let's take a look at what we're asking them to > bet this on: > > 1) ext3 > 2) Samba > 3) Apache > 4) Linux NFS > 5) LVM2 > 6) mdadm > 7) Enterprise Linux 2.6 kernel > > Pretty much common fare. They've been betting the integrity of their > data on this list of technologies for years now. What we've done is > brought them together into a small, easy to manage solution that > provides the same functionality which the uninitiated currently pay > proprietary vendors a significant amount of money to get.
Excellently and extremely succintly put: that's the first serious or credible 'marketing' statement for OF that I've seen. So why isn't something like that on the web site? > > Whilst products such as e-NAS, EMC/Clarion, and the like aren't cheap > > they are mostly just plug and go, with a relatively well known 'name' > > and a fairly high level of street cred to back them up, and with a > > fairly global coverage of support and service etc. Recommending and > > supporting such products falls into the old "No-one got fired for > > buying IBM" zone. > > > Sure thing. And no amount of effort we could put into promoting > Openfiler would ever overcome this. But then again anyone with enough > coins to afford EMC, NetApp et al would not be looking at Openfiler > anyway. Except perhaps in the capacity of a gateway to an existing SAN. > You now have the prospect of using Openfiler within a VMware virtual > machine - so you could give multiple departments their very own NAS to > play with at the flick of a (virtual) switch. That's perhaps where we part company: when the better corporates pay out money they're not necessarily looking at e-NAS and other such products. They do serious cost/benefit analysis and often do pick products such as Apache or Postgres or Berkley or Zope on the basis of the benefits. I believe OF /can/ compete in that market; the code is mostly already there, or getting there remarkably quickly - so I'm not worried about that side - what I was concerned about was the 'business' behind OF - the ability to deliver support and to "market" OF properly and to the different levels required by those potential enterprise and SME customers. > Premature how? I'm not being defensive I just need to find out, in > concrete terms, where exactly we're not meeting expectations so that we > can close the gaps. It's about the presentation and marketing and about the business organisation. Right now OF doesn't appear to 'sell' itself at all well. For example the web site is under-developed. the knowledge base and documentation and information is at best slim [yes I know it is there, but one has to really dig for it], the links to the Voluna site sometimes fail or lead nowhere: there's no overall sense of who the organisation actually is, or that they are credible serious players etc. > Actually, Openfiler is 4yrs old (at least) now. And AFAICT from similar > NAS appliance software available today, performs pretty much all the > functions required of a solution of its kind. Some things we do even > better than the shrink-wrapped (and closed) commercial stuff you get > currently. In other areas we lag in features/functionality - but then > thats what you have release versions for :). In your view how long a > development cycle would justify its commercialization.....? It's a /business/ development cycle too: not just a software dev cycle. It's possible to fast track business development and have it up to speed in only a few months, but it takes a lot of serious committment to achieve it; right now [and perhaps wrongly] I don't get any feeling from the web site or from discussions here etc that there is that committment or sense of business purpose. On the software side I think the main lack is in docs and KB and web site; the fact that some features are missing isn't as important as ensuring that the presentation of info about OF and the state of the code are actually in synch. To give one fairly recent example; I pointed a specialist Linux journalist colleague at the product a few days ago and suggested he really needed to look at OF in the context of a discussion we were having about the virtues [or not] of LVM, RAID and volume management etc. He was in a bit of a rush, so after a quick trawl of the OF web site he felt he had to come back and ask /me/ what the major /practical/ differences were between OF 2 beta and 1.1 when deploying in a mixed OS environment [e.g. Mac, W32 and Linux]. Yes, I do know there's info there about 2 beta and there's even some comparative info, but his response points out the basic gaps in the business strategy. > You revolve around the point of it being 'unproven' and I'm curious as > how you came to such a conclusion. The software is being used in mission > critical environments currently. What else does it take to get it > proven? You forget (or perhaps are unaware) that OF is built on top of > CentOS - which in turn is a rebuild of a Prominent North American Linux > distribution (you know who). We chose to use this as a base for a very > good reason, one which makes your point about OF being 'unproven' moot. > CentOS, and the distribution upon which it is based, arguably have more > of an installed base than any top-tier storage vendor you could name. > More people using it means more bugs being found and fixed, which leads > to a more robust solution. We may know all that, but the information isn't made explicit anywhere. OF is 'unproven' because it doesn't have the street cred because you're not shouting it loud enough and letting the "public" know that OF is doing these things in so many situations. This isn't unproven in the sense of an inability to do what OF claims to do; it's unproven by virtue of market perception because the "market" hasn't been informed. That was the point of my IBM anecdote: the same is mostly true of Apache and MySQL/Postgres and DB2 and Berkley and various other OSS tools that are now seen and treated as mission critical: the de facto standards for the industry. They've been well marketed as well as well developed. The 'sales' and marketing pitches are as good as the code. > Several times we've been asked about supporting filesystems or features > that are not provided by the base kernel in the distribution. While the > desire would tend to be to support everyone's feature requests and to > have the latest/greatest functionality, we temper our development in > order to ensure the very stability that you point out is required of a > solution that is as important as a repository for critical data. Yup: I wholeheartedly support that objective. It's one that needs to be blazing out from the very top of the web site. "We go slow quickly!" Or something like that :-) > Sure thing. The value-add is in the support and services offerings. > Detailed documentation would fall into that category. Folks who are > technical enough and know what they're doing really don't need anything > aside from minimal documentation in order to use OF. Having said that, a > full administrator manual was made available for Openfiler 1.1 and many > (not all) of the complaints and questions on the list were related to > items that could easily have been garnered from the manual or from the > release notes if people actually cared to take a look. The term RTFM > exists for a reason :). Yup - I know that: despite 35+ years in the business [developing and marketing] I fell straight into that trap the first time I tried OF and landed you with an irritated couple of messages here - which you were very patient about. So I /did/ RTFM :-) > What changes, specifically, would you like to see in Openfiler that > would make it easier to use with Windows? I believe there /may/ need to be a far better ability to use LDAP et al to interogate and 'drill' down through the AD infrastructure and to integrate with that infrastructure. The problem for many smaller businesses [particularly those without dedicated technical staff] is that there is not much in the way of easy simple and straightforward storage management product available at the bottom of the market - and especially not product that fits into a proper HSM strategy. At the top end there are the MS Datacentre products etc., then there are products like EMC/Clarion etc., but where OF /could/ fit in absolutely perfectly is in the SME market where the existing solutions are too complex and too expensive [both time and money] and far too bureaucratic. > There you go again ;). Yup :-) > Not at all. I'm proposing a subscription model for users of the software > in commercial environments whose needs are being served by Openfiler and > whom have derived significant cost savings in the implementation and > management of their IT infrastructure as a direct result of Openfiler > being available to them. Much is being argued in the corner of Joe > Regular User but it seems to have escaped the conscious that JRU > probably doesn't have an LDAP server, doesn't know what a snapshot is, > and thinks iSCSI is the name of a fizzy drink. I take all those points on board: /my/ point was that if one wants to use Apache or MySQL or Firefox in a SME environment where there are few techie skills around then it's entirely possible to do so - download the executables [rpm or win.exes] and just 'run' them and they mostly just work as described. The developers have put a lot of work into ensuring that this is so. The entry path into OF isn't that simple; almost by default one has to have some technical skills in order to understand and manage the deployment. I'm trying to suggest that until it becomes easier for SMEs and others to use OF without lots of technical skills then OF itself won't become a mass product; and until it /does/ become a mass product it is unlikely to deliver an adequate revenue stream to make it self-supporting in the manner you have said you want for it. To get to that point is /mostly/ a business issue rather than a technical issue; better and more up to date docs; better web site presentation explaining the why and wherefore of OF and delivering genuine information advantages, smarter/better choices in the prepackaging of the OF installer - e.g. asking the 'user' questions about the lan they want to integrate into and doing some 'smart' detection of both the lan and host hardware for OF /before/ doing the install. > Thanks for your detailed comments Robert. I can't say I agree with many > of the points you laid out, however it's good to get your perspective on > the topic. I didn't expect agreement :-) But it's good to have the discussion. Robert _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
