Greetings from the road…. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks on airplanes and have had the opportunity to talk to a large number of midsized customers as well as systems integrators and wanted to take a second to comment on an interesting theme that arose during many of these conversations.
In a sea awash with a dizzying range of interconnect protocol options, disk array technologies, data protection strategies, and other technical intricacies it can be confusing for many IT managers forced to wade through the marketing hype to determine which solution is right for them. Those of us in marketing and sales have been the brunt of cartoons and jokes portraying us as blatant opportunists willing to promise anything during the course of a conversation with a customer but as a former IT Manager I've not completely gone over to the dark side. I’ve noticed many storage vendors hiding behind a one size fits all approach to positioning products to customers and that's no joking matter.
If you are an iSCSI only vendor then voila… iSCSI is the answer to all your prayers. Worried about data protection? Is it any surprise that the up and coming disk based backup only company is going to tell you that tape is old news. The truth of the matter however is that the IT landscape is complex and there is no single technology solution that will be a panacea for customer problems.
Instead I would posit that as companies grow and evolve that their IT infrastructure needs to reflect the best mix of these technologies to answer their unique business problems at a given point in time… it is the mix of these storage technologies integrated with servers and business applications which can truly be called a ‘solution’.
The answer starts at the software layer with a business application which in turn lives on a server that is part of a broader infrastructure which can be made more efficient and better protected by bringing in the elements of storage consolidation and multi-tier backup that are right sized for you.
Your business needs a strong partner who has deep expertise and experience with all of these technical elements and who can bridge the gap between explosive data growth and an optimized end-to-end IT infrastructure.
Call me biased (I am, after all, in marketing) but I’m not making any promises that can’t be backed up by facts. The fact is that HP offers a choice of flexible change-ready technologies to optimize an IT infrastructure made up of clients, servers, applications, networks, and storage and it is the integration of these technologies that ultimately delivers solution value.
My $0.02…. or maybe $0.04
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