I love people who are passionate about what they do and I love Technologists that are passionate about the technologies they work with. Although I am not a storage guy by any stretch of the imagination, I do enjoy eavesdropping on the threads that float around the office related to storage (It is such a critical part to a successful Virtualization strategy). Last week, there was a blog post that was passed around about a company that had chosen EqualLogic as their storage solution and some of the limitations the architect had run into over the course of 3 years..
You can read the full text here (Three Years of EqualLogic).
A colleague of mine, Joel Ramirez, on the storage side responded with a great summary to the basic question of ‘Why do we recommend Enterprise Storage Solutions?’ that I wanted to share.
The great thing about being consultant-centric is that we use the breadth of our experience to present solutions to fulfill our clients’ business requirements. As enabling as our partnership with EMC is from the storage end, I know it can appear counter-intuitive to that approach. Of course, we are not limited to EMC product to solve storage problems, but I’ll tell you why I believe in their solutions.
I think of EMC as a Jeep. It does everything. Some things it does inherently well, some involve some manual intervention, but the thing runs. It’s technology that you can bet your business on. And when you need to do more and varied things, you know that you won’t have to go buy a different vehicle. You can add to what you have and know it will work. I say this all the time, but it bears repeating. Once you empower a business with storage technology, they will leverage it. At year three (or when they turn on an advertised feature of the array), you don’t want a client with a paperweight.
You can see from the blog that the storage admin is not unhappy with EqualLogic, but he does have to prioritize his business. He has himself a Honda Accord at a rally event. It’s just not made for that. And the vendor has no desire to make it do more than what they sold it for. This is common in the storage sector. We don’t have to pitch Clariion CX4-480’s all of the time, but we do have to recognize that even small shops need to be able to use mature and efficient snapshotting, for example. Innovation happens nearly every quarter at EMC. Since I’ve been working here, they’ve developed solid state technology into higher capacities while driving cost down, developed VM visualization all the way to disk, and made free de-dupe a checkbox among several other key innovations. This is just in the CX4 platform. We are not even talking about backup and replication technologies.
There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, EMC just makes it as straightforward as anyone available to us.
Joel
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