Free Insight Here!

It never ceases to amaze me that often vendors believe that they can charge an additional fee for something which makes their product work right in the first place.

A founder member of the ‘Free PowerPath Alliance’ who strongly believe that PowerPath licenses should be provided free for any host talking to an EMC block-storage array;  in light of EMC’s intransigence, I’ve abandoned that cause for the time being and as I’m not really responsible for that much EMC block storage….I don’t really care so much anymore.

But I have a new target; another product which should be free and I struggle in many ways to understand why it’s not. I can’t imagine it gets sold an awful lot and probably most customers only come across it when an evaluation license is given to them. And normally, this because something is broken and 3rd line support need more information and granularity than the normal free tools give.

I want you to imagine a self-tuning storage device; one that offers very little opportunity for the end-user to tune; one that if any bespoke tuning is carried out on it, it is almost always at the behest of the vendor. So charging for a tool which monitors performance at a level that is incredibly hard for a customer to make any real use of…is a little strange; charging for a tool which actually makes the vendor’s support teams live’s easier, well guys…not really on!

And wouldn’t you know it….wouldn’t you know who the vendor is…Yep, it’s EMC again.

The tool…’EMC Isilon InsightIQ’

This tool is really useful when you need it but you really don’t need it very often; it makes EMC’s life easier both from a support point of view and from a sales point of view.

It gives really good performance diagnostics; many of which tho’ are not that useful until you are in a support situation. It allows growth forecasting; so you can buy more EMC Isilon. It is an invaluable tool to the EMC account team…in fact I should charge EMC to let them use it against my estate…but I’ll settle for them just making it free!