Hadrian Barron

So when the data growth rate is really high and they're kind of looking at that 100 terabyte FlexVol ceiling with some unease, then FlexGroup is a cool option.

So right now we see it a lot in Isilon migrations where Isilon is just, you know,

not keeping up with the demand.

You know, customers wanting to run big workloads faster, get their jobs done faster.

They'll look at migrating to Flex Groups, and we've done a few of those with XCP.

Other times it's, you know, slow storage or archival stuff, and they just want a humongous, that one big container target system.

So, you know, Flex Groups has kind of been an eye-opener for a lot of customers to say, wow,

You know, this is really an option.

And NetApp used to rule this space, you know, back just a few years ago.

But with Isilon's 1FS, they came out with something pretty cool.

But now with big performance and, you know, all the enterprise capabilities you kind of get with ONTAP, it's a real game changer.

yeah we that was kind of one of the big eye openers for me was you know we had a customer that was an isolon customer and they were you know trying to get some you know some business processes done faster so they were kind of comparing their isolon they had you know one of those early you know all flash isolons and they had a cdot system right running nine or nine one i forget which and they were testing it between isolon flex vols and flex group and

The crazy thing to me was for the same two node head right cluster net up ha pair that the FLEX groups were giving orders of magnitude faster performance and the FLEX vaults would and that was kind of just blew my mind was.

You know, that's the real difference, right?

It's not just the big container, but the way that they designed the flex groups.

And you know more about this maybe than I do, but it kind of lets the IOs thread out really nicely on the waffle, right, on data on tap.

Yeah, and the thing that's...

know that's kind of the new age of it right now is these analytical workloads and we as storage administrators might not think about it a whole lot other than saying well this volume is always high io but there are certain data sets and it's not just like when i'm designing a circuit board it's everyone are doing these kind of big data analytics and a lot of times they're over nas protocol

whether I'm a retail store and I'm looking at my sales trending data or, you know, all kinds of use cases for this now.

Everyone's trying to take advantage of big data.