Enterprise Computing: 3par and HDS – 50% Saving – Guaranteed?

Thought provoking post, and highlights the ‘conditions apply’ aspect of the vendor guarantees.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cost underwriting and ‘putting your money where your mouth is’, but at Computacenter we have developed a cost underwriting programme whereby we calculate the customer ‘do nothing’ costs for a five year period and the costs savings predicted over a five year period by using thin provisioning, storage virtualisation, data deduplication, data compression, ZPR, et al with a view to underwriting the costs savings such that if we are wrong in any one year we will write you a cheque for the difference. Whilst conditions would also apply for the Computacenter cost underwriting, I would argue that a) they aren’t onerous, b) take into account the unlikely nature of deploying all technologies simultaneously as it would introduce risk, and c) by providing a £ guarantee it allows customers to ‘unlock’ budget they would have spent on storage to purchase head count or other technologies which will enable them to be more competitive in their respective space.

I guess the point I’m making here is that customers are very keen to reduce costs, but also need a way to ensure that the cost reduction doesn’t negatively affect their production business as well as having a guarantee which produces real business benefit and, ideally, allows them to introduce innovation elsewhere in their business with the savings.

Anything less does run the risk of appearing much like the markitecture of the ROI calculators which were strangely absent pre recession but are now ubiquitous in the storage industry.

Personally, as a storage guy I find these types of things insulting to my intelligence and profession. If you are doing your job in being a good steward for your company none of these things apply to you and all they do is force you to waste time explaining it.

I don’t find that these things are pitches to the guys trying to manage the storage resources as well as they can, but to some executive tier extremely far removed. You then have to talk the executive back down from the from the stars they have in their eyes, as you are already using something other than raid-1; or you are using thin-provisioning; or you are using snapshots rather than full clones.

Additionally while if you haven’t moved to some newer systems, every single vendor can pretty much supply all the feature they are using for their “guarantees” (with the exception of dedupe of primary storage i.e. NetApp which I have a number of); so there is nothing really unique about these pitches either from vendor to vendor if you are buying a new array (who doesn’t do raid5, who doesn’t do thin). In the end all it does is try to “shock and awe” some executive who doesn’t realize that they aren’t really getting you to buy anything unique, all the other vendors would give you the same level of savings because of the features (who much those features cost is something else)

I’m just tired of all the BS coming in from the vendors that I have to waste massive amounts of my time with because somebody who doesn’t know anything about real differences read some crap on the internet (don’t even get me started on the whole did you see the Backblaze article that was forwarded to me ad nauseam: why can’t our Oracle OLTP database storage be $118.00 for a terabyte? questions that flooded me for weeks)