After a short hiatus; Barry B is back blogging with a vengeance and I like this entry a lot; there's a lot of truth in it and it does reflect some of my own feelings. And it especially reflects many of my feelings/opinions about vendor blogs; I find vendor blogs a lot more interesting when they are blogging about the 'why' of a product as opposed to the 'what' of a product.
The best blog entries barely mention a product, you know that there must be a product or at least there is a product coming but that's not really important. It's this discussion of 'why' which should really fuel the debate about the future of IT and data-storage.
Too much time is spent creating answers to questions which don't exist; time and time again you see kit sitting idle in data-centre because it was bought to answer a question which really wasn't there or at least shouldn't have been asked.
Here are some of them;
Sometimes, the answer to a question which used to be asked but is no longer. If you dig, this is the 'well, we always do it like that' without realising that actually your customer does not want to do it like that anymore.
Sometimes, the answer to 'what are we going to with the Capex budget which we have left at the end of the financial?'
Sometimes, it's the answer to 'How do I hit my end of quarter/year target?' I discount the crap out of everything and offer a special too-good-to-be-true deal.
Sometimes, it's the answer to question which goes, 'We need to buy something but we've not really spent any time thinking about it…'
And of course, it's the answer to 'What happens if we cancel this project?'
But idle kit should almost never be answer to these questions; if as customer, you don't need the kit pretty much immediately (immediately varies somewhat), you shouldn't by buying it. IT kit depreciates too fast in value to have it sitting idle or even worse, turned on and doing nothing. And even in the case of the canceled project; it is unusual today, that a project requirement is so specific that it's infrastructure cannot be re-deployed.
I like listening to vendors talk about the 'why?' but we as customers should also be talking about the 'why' and why the answers we get from our vendors are right or wrong.
