Trust but Verify: Ronald Reagan

Do you believe the claims made by your storage vendor’s marketing brochures? Do you believe the claims made by their marketing and sales folks? Can you renegotiate your contract terms if their performance does not meet their claims?

JonToigo touches on the issues relating to this in a blog over the weekend….

Prove It!

When a vendor makes a claim about the performance and value I am supposed to obtain from their stuff, they ought to be able to prove it. Stupid ROI calculators don’t fit the bill. They are tools for marketing that cannot capture my real operating or support costs, since I generally don’t know what they are and cannot contribute them to the equation anyway. I need performance data to help me compare products from several vendors who are competing for my business.

Zerowait is finishing up our tools that will be available very soon, they will provide NetApp Storage managers insights into how efficient their NetApp storage infrastructure is in comparison to our sample population of NetApp systems which we monitor. The interesting thing about our tools is that as we get more and more NetApp systems under our support program, we also get a better and better view of how efficient the sample population’s storage is. The more customers we gather, the better the information. This model works in much the same way as a Barracuda firewall does. As more Barracuda’s are sold, more spam is caught.

Is the mission critical data on your NetApp filer worth $5.00 a day? If so, you may want to call Zerowait.