I really thought we'd got away from guarantees which were caveated to hell and predicated on using the vendor's services but EMC I mean VMWare are at it this now. Chuck and Barry must be fuming; well if they weren't concentrating on their rare cat cross-breeding program allegedly!
It just goes to show really, that you can't keep a good/bad* (delete as appropriate) idea down. What has kind of amazed me is that VMWare have appeared to put even more caveats in place than NetApp. Can they actually fail? In two years time, will all of the savings be realised? It'd be interesting to see a long term review of these programs to see if the results are actually real. But I suspect in two years time, we won't care and it won't really matter that much.
And it also shows, don't make too much fun out of your competitors' marketing gimmicks, you just might find yourself doing the same thing. Still, it made me chuckle more than a little bit.
Don't get me wrong, virtualisation and consolidation is a good thing and I am sure these guarantees are a good way to get customers thinking about what they are doing. But at the end of the day, they are still about getting you to spend money and you might be able to realise significant savings without spending money.
Have a look at the guarantees and the caveats; the caveats do a nice job at helping you identifying where you should be concentrating your effort and identifying the low hanging fruit.
p.s I know why Barry has been so quiet but what about the other Barry? What is the Madster Inventor up to?
