StorageMath
Cutting through storage vendor marketing with mathematical truth
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VAST Data's '29x Data Reduction' Claims: The Storage Industry's Most Brazen Lies
VAST Data's co-founder claims customers see 8x to 29x capacity advantages versus HDFS. We expose the fraudulent math, the deliberate straw man, and why VAST has become the storage industry's most prolific source of misleading claims.
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Pure Storage's FlashBlade//EXA '10 TB/sec' Claim: When Vague Numbers Replace Real Benchmarks
Pure Storage claims FlashBlade//EXA delivers 'more than 10 TB/sec' read performance. We analyze why this vague claim tells us almost nothing about real-world performance.
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VAST Data's 99.9991% Uptime and 10x Kafka Claims: The New Standard for Unverifiable Marketing
VAST Data claims 99.9991% measured uptime (4.7 minutes downtime per year) and 10x performance advantage over Kafka. We analyze what these numbers actually mean and why they're nearly impossible to verify.
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DDN's '11x Faster' IO500 Claims: What the Benchmark Actually Measures
DDN claims it delivers '11x more AI training runs per day' based on IO500 benchmark results. The claim confuses benchmark score with operational capability, excludes higher-scoring competitors, and uses significantly different hardware configurations.
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Hammerspace's 'Standard NFS' Achievement: A Technical Reality Check
Hammerspace achieved #18 on IO500 using pNFS v4.2, claiming this proves 'standard protocols' can deliver HPC-class performance. The technology is legitimate. The positioning about 'standard' is misleading.
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HPE Alletra's DASE Strategy: Learning From VAST Without the IP Risk
HPE is adopting VAST's disaggregated architecture concept for Alletra MP but implementing it two ways: partnering with VAST for file storage, developing independently for block storage. The strategy avoids litigation but creates different operational risks.
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IBM's $11B Confluent Acquisition: Event Streaming Infrastructure, Not an AI Platform
IBM acquired Confluent for $11 billion to create a 'Smart Data Platform for Enterprise Generative AI.' The technical reality: Confluent provides Kafka-based event streaming. That solves specific problems well. AI is not one of them.
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VAST Data's $30B Valuation Ignores Operational Complexity Costs
VAST claims 90% gross margins enabling $30B valuation. But VAST's three-tier protection architecture, proprietary algorithms, and metadata asymmetries create operational complexity that will compress margins through support costs. Investors are underestimating this risk.
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MinIO ExaPOD: Credible Architecture, Questions on Methodology
MinIO's exabyte-scale reference architecture makes defensible claims backed by historical benchmarks. We examine what's verifiable, what needs more transparency, and how the commodity approach compares to appliance vendors.
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Pure Storage FlashBlade//EXA: Verified Benchmarks vs. Marketing Claims
Pure Storage submits to STAC-M3 auditing—a credible approach. But claims of '30% better than competitors' and '10 TB/s from early testing' deserve the same scrutiny applied to any vendor.