Centera Complaints
In San Francisco, one of the attendees asked why I was so down on EMC’s Centera, which his organization was considering buying. He wanted to know the sources for my criticisms of the product and whether any comparative analysis had ever been done regarding EMC’s CAS product and others on the market. To my shame, I have not (yet) created such a document. So, I began to reach out to disgruntled users of the product for an objective, in the trenches, consumer view. Here is one account I wanted to share:
We have 2 Centera’s at the present. The one that is used for the Radiologist has not shown any performance issues (the reason being that these are very large images that are not accessed on a regular basis). The Centera that we use for medical records archiving has had a number of performance problems. The 1st version (3.0.1) had a limit of 32,000,000 objects. Since the way Centera stores files uses 4 objects per file, and since the medical records files range in size from 5KB to 60KB we ran out of objects before we ran out of storage space on the 20TB of storage available (we wasted about 8 TB of space). EMC replaced this older (not quite a year since purchase) with a version 4.0 device.
Our performance has improved, but it is still not up to the level that we would prefer. The migration form the older version to the new version took 6 months (just to move 12TB of used space). Another problem is that if you lose a disk in a node and replace it, the rebuild time for that disk is about 2 months. The trash clean up of deleted files takes forever, and has never completed (this was with the older version, we don’t know if the clean up process works the same in the new version).
I am looking for other Centera users, both those who are happy with their investment, and those who aren’t, in order to meet the requirements of those who are considering the product for adoption.
November 15th, 2006 at 11:41 pm
Interesting perspectives
November 16th, 2006 at 7:14 am
I think it’s more than interesting. When I voice my views, I get flamed for having some sort of axe to grind with EMC (I don’t, by the way). When Paul Carpentier or Jonathan Ring vocalize their comments based on an intimate familiarity with the software running on Centera (Carpentier architected it at Filepool and knows where the bodies are buried), their views are discounted because their new company, Caringo, is offering competitive hardware agnostic solutions. But, here we have a consumer experience with the product. A real world experience. That has got to mean something and the fellow’s experience is echoed in other consumer views that have been shared with me.
November 16th, 2006 at 7:55 am
It is Paul Caringos legacy that is causing the current woes with the Centera product. They should have bought the idea and thrown away the implementation when they took over filepool. They did not and now they are suffering.
November 16th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
We’re also evaluating Centera and any input (good or bad) would be appreciated. Anyway, if the rebuild time for a failed disk is really 2 months, we’ll steer clear from Centera.
November 20th, 2006 at 1:39 am
For a in depth comparison report, you can go to http://www.procedo.com - Look on the right hand side. There is a very in depth article written that compares the NetApp 3050’s to the Centera G4.
November 20th, 2006 at 10:22 am
We have had two centra’s replicating across North America for a couple of years without issue.
We are very satisfied customers, they do exactly as advertised.
November 20th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
We’ve been an early adopter of Centera since the G1 days. Everything was working great until our first subpoena for info. That’s when everything changed.
We couldn’t locate about 5% of the records we know (via the front-end archiving app which shall remain nameless because they are a helpful innocent party in this debacle) were actually stored on the Centera. We then initiated an audit and found out this was not an isolated incident. Over the past few years, we have unfortunately accumulated an 8% discrepancy between what was written to Centera and what it actually stored.
EMC assured us this “issue” was fixed with the next-gen nodes, and we endured months-long migrations from G1 -> G2 -> G3 -> G4. None of these HW upgrades fixed what seems to be a fundamental SW / architecture problem with the CentraStar OS. The worst part of it all is that EMC service personnel now admit they can’t even tell us that the Centera has actually retained from all those archived records over the years.
Our legal dept is now reviewing the Centera EULA to see if we can take legal action against EMC for deliberately misrepresenting the capabilities of their product.
In the meantime we are busy performing an audited one-way migration of our known archived data from the Centera cluster over to a NetApp FAS with SnapLock.
November 20th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Let me know what happens with your suit.
November 20th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Fred, If you’re interested, we may be able to help you out. Post a reply here and I can contact you if you would like.
November 29th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Mike, I bet cluster B does not have Cluster A’s data when the replication queue is zero
January 7th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
A few stats on Centera:
EMC owns the majority of the Content Addressable Storage market share at 94%.
- Over 400 ISV’s see the value of and have invested the resources to create API’s for archiving directly to Centera
- As of Centera’s 5 yr anniversary in April ‘07, EMC had more than 3500 Centera customers, including the top 20 companies on the Fortune 500. These clients were storing more than 150 PB of info on Centera.
I’m not saying that your support issues aren’t legitimate, but you gentlemen appear to be in the vast minority.
January 7th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
woofpack4life,
Thanks for the feedback. But market share numbers are pure BS. We are not questioning how many folks have deployed Centeras, but rather how many regret it now or will in the future. If the issues cited here and in the other post where you put an identical comment are any indication, Centera has issues that mitigate its value proposition.
Unfortunately, a lot of adoption appears predicated on exactly the basis that you are suggesting: go with the flow. I want to make sure that folks don’t regret their decisions later.
Since you are so pro Centera, it seems, how about encouraging EMC to respond to the most recent post, which asks what improvements have been made to the product or for explanations of the reality behind the marketing foo the company is using to sell it (”compliance certified”).
Thanks for the input.
January 10th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
How many do regret it now or will in the future? That’s a good question. If you blog is the only indicator, it sounds like a pretty small minority (10ths of a percent based on the 3500+ installs). That’s why your arguement that market share numbers are BS is erroneous. I would agree with you in certain situations, but not in this case. If the issues you site were truly as widespread and as extreme as you make them out to be, then the marketshare numbers wouldn’t be what they are, and would be shrinking, when in fact they appear to be growing. You make it sound like the 3500 corporations that purchased Centera are lemmings, walking over a cliff with Centera in hand…”go with the flow” as you put it. The market doesn’t work that way. People do research before making purchases, and bad products get bad reputations and lose marketshare, not maintain or gain marketshare. By the way, technology support issues occur with the best products and best companies in the world, including EMC. Most of these companies don’t have the 94% marketshare that Centera does either (per Gartner).
By the way, readers of Window’s IT Pro Magazine gave Centera the award for the best Enterprise Backup/Recovery/Archive Hardware product last year. I don’t think those kind of reader’s choice awards get handed out to bad products.
Finally, you mention that “compliance certified” is marketing foo. A cursury review of EMC’s website leads to this 3rd party link that details the SEC17a-4(f) compliance that EMC’s “foo” is based on:
Cohasset Report.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Thanks for the feedback woofpack4life. The Cohasset Report is interesting, but it doesn’t change the fact that EMC claims the government has certified its wares, not a paid analyst assessing its operations against its interpretation of a reg.
I have invited EMC to clear the air regarding the statements of the “misguided 10%” and will wait for them to do so. So far, I have only the numbers of analysts to describe shipment volumes and only parabalistic and second hand information about both customer satisfaction and issues.
IT Pro magazine’s award is also not a compelling reason to buy a product. Never has been. I was let go from Byte and Switch a while back for publishing the email chatter between editors regarding their nascent awards program. My impression of most editorial awards is that they tend to go to big advertisers as often as they do to great products.
Since you are a big Centera fan, why not ask the folks at EMC to join our quest for accuracy — truth, justice and the American way — and to respond to the questions that have been put here directly. Unless you are on the payroll and can address them directly?
January 12th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I am not on the EMC payroll, but I do work in the industy and know a fair amount about EMC’s technology (and other vendors for that matter). From what I understand in talking with people at EMC over the years, they have directly addressed your “issues” with factual evidence, and you’ve pretty much ignored them, or tried to spin the info they provided. So they have stopped responding to you. I can’t blame them based on the obvious blind bias I see in your posts.
January 13th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Woofpack,
I am sorry if your reading of this blog has led you to the conclusion that I (1) ignore factual evidence or (2) provide a biased account of EMC input. You can draw whatever you want from the blog, I guess. As for the input from EMC, it hasn’t happened. You are misinformed.
With the exception of a couple of chats with David Black, for whom I have enormous respect by the way, I have not heard one peep from EMC except via their bloggers who always put ad hominem attacks ahead of answers, then do not address factual issues at all.
If you see the most current blog, I have provided the world with the link you offered to the paper supposedly justifying EMC’s claim that they are “compliance certified.” The EMC sponsored paper from Cohassett explicitly states that they have never seen or deployed a Centera, that their opinion is based on EMC oral input and collaterals alone, and that nothing they say should be regarded as legal advice viz compliance. When I criticize this as insufficient to justify the vendor’s claim that their product has been certified by a government entity, is it spin? I guess in your view it must be, but not in the view of hundreds of thousands of readers of this blog (or why would they keep coming back?)
Your opinion is yours, and there are a lot of other blogs you can visit if you find this one biased against your preferred vendor.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Hello,
Speaking of Centera complaints, can anyone tell me how to migrate data off to another vendor’s SAN box or if that’s even possible? I don’t want to hijack this thread, but if anyone can just point me in the right direction or email me some links it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks very much,
MBB
exit311@hotmail.com