* Storage vendor fluff
IT management – for many of you it’s not just a career, it’s a wardrobe. Vendor visits become free T-shirt and coffee mug time, occasionally with a lunch thrown in. And maybe a pen. And a sales pitch, perhaps.
A sales pitch? Sure, why not. After all, you have a fabulous new shirt and other free stuff, so why not listen?
Hear enough of these pitches however, and you may come up with a few unprintable answers to the “why not listen” question. Sometimes the rep just doesn’t know when to stop, and sometimes the “facts” they share are just plain nonsense. Rather than upping your blood pressure meds however, I suggest you stop being annoyed by these people and just sit back, listen, and enjoy the show. I do.
I speak with about 20 vendors each week and, interestingly, each has better technology than the last. Unfortunately for me, when they say something particularly dumb I can’t just set the dog on them. Unfortunately for them, I have other means of coping.
Here are a few suggestions on what to do when a vendor goes astray. Each derives from a real-world situation. I’m sure many of you can find close parallels in you own experience.
Suggestion No. 1: Before doing anything else, go out on the Web and look up the word “bloviating.” You will likely have occasion to use it (I did, in an article last week), if not during a vendor visit then immediately following.
Suggestion No. 2: Take nothing for granted, and make the rep back up every number that appears on a PowerPoint. My all-time favorite example of this is the depressingly popular statement that “storage is expanding exponentially!” Sick of that one? Try my response: “Really? Wow! What’s the exponent?” Their reply will have some interesting implications, particularly so if the answer is less than “0”.
Suggestion No. 3: Make sure their cure fixes your disease. A solution that optimizes database WAN traffic, for example, isn’t necessarily going to do you much good if your site typically moves file data, and what works best with DB2 may be a clinker with the latest version of Sybase.
The answer here, of course, is to do what managers have occasionally been doing since the first benchmark was perpetrated on the first IT manager: make sure the benchmark addresses your flavor of data traffic, network topology, etc., and if it doesn’t, clone your data, sanitize it, and run the test again.
Some vendors out there already have had the good grace to extract much of the fluff from their presentations. Thanks for that.
If you are one of the others however… well, hopefully my readers will treat you kindly, even though they may think that on this particular day you are one neuron short of a synapse.
