Part 2 of 5: Your lack of trust in DRR is because your legacy storage vendor is failing you!

Ok so quite a bold statement in that title, but I’m right, …right?  You’ve been promised a certain DRR by your storage vendor, you saved a bunch of dollars buying the cheaper array, and then as time has gone by, you have realized that you aren’t getting the DRR the salesman promised.  Pah! – he was a salesman – what did you expect, a rock solid guarantee ? 🤷‍♂️

It gets worse, you’ve now had to go and buy another array.  The new array doesn’t fit in the rack, so you had to relocate them, and then you paid to license a few more ports on your SAN switches, and now the lovely datacentre guys send you a bigger bill each month for the extra space, cooling, power, and break fix for your extra arrays…… 

Oh, did I mention that you’ve just negated all the CO2 savings your company was making with those soya bean burgers in the canteen, and cancelling all your travel approvals, so you can’t even get to the datacentre to have a little cry in the cold aisle.

Sound familiar?  Well I’ll actually make just two claims on this topic, and explain myself.

• One.  You don’t really understand your data.  This sounds ridiculous in this day and age.  Surely you know what your data types are, how much data you have, where it is, how much its growing (or shrinking) and who’s accessing and using it?  Right?  Truth is, somebody somewhere in your organisation might know – but you didn’t involve them in your procurement project did you.   Your vendor may have offered to run some tooling on your old arrays too, to help identify the data and how well it might reduce.  But there was no way you were gonna let anyone run that nonsense on your precious data eh…

Well then, you may not be surprised to know it’s pretty common for the people in charge of choosing your storage arrays to have no idea what kind of data you have.

• Two.  You’ve been let down.  A poor indictment for our industry, but you don’t trust the vendor.  Just like the little scenario I described earlier – its all too common for procurement to ignore a vendors DRR claims on the basis that they just don’t believe them and the greasy snake oil they peddle..

The problem now though is that you’re oversizing your arrays…  You’re buying bigger arrays than you need and what’s worse – because you don’t get the DRR you were sold on, that means your $ per TiB is a whole lot more than you thought when you made your vendor choice….  I cover this is part 3 of this blog series.  Read about why procurement teams even in very large organizations are making serious errors and misjudgements when buying their storage arrays.

Comments always welcome. In Part 3 I explain why ignoring DRR can be a huge mistake.