Controversy, crap and confusion – Alan Simpson

I was listening to an interview with Alan Simpson this weekend , and this was his quote about the Washington scene. What struck me is how similar it is to the bunk that we hear on a regular basis in the storage industry. The storage press for the most part, just rehashes corporate press releases, and this causes nothing but distrust within the end user base. Jon Toigo, seems to much or the trade press as a controversial guy, but he is the only member of the industry press that I know who actually seems to dig down and check out what the corporate spin marketers say.

I have to go to Dallas this week to talk to a client that has dug down, and read some of Jon’s articles on the lack of verifiable performance figures within the industry. The client asked me to visit their offices and put on an executive presentation for them to about our legacy service and support services, and in particular to compare the performance of the NetApp F700 series and the NetApp F800 series filers. This client has FAS3000 series filers and legacy filers and has seen that our whitepaper correlates with their findings. Jon Toigo has been waiting for about 6 months for NetApp to provide him the basis for their performance figures, and many customers are watching this story, and noticing that NetApp is not forthcoming with their performance figures.