Beware of square-peg salesmen with hammers

Open any IT magazine, read a technology news website, or subscribe to any data storage mailing list and you’re probably fed up to the back teeth with headlines that make such bold statements as “How to use SSDs in your business” or “Why Hard Disk Drives are dead”. Whilst most technology savvy readers will have the sense to take over dramatised headlines with a pinch of salt, there are sadly many falling for the hype.

All marketing noise aside, there’s a concerning trend emerging here and that’s the over-use of vendors selling storage components (be it in the form of flash, SSDs, hard drives or cardboard boxes) rather than selling business effecting solutions. “Customers don’t buy storage, they buy solutions” is an old clichéd saying amongst sales teams, however it suddenly seems to have been forgotten in the storage industry.

If I look back at some recent customer projects that I’ve been involved in, the opening line from IT departments has been phrases such as ….
• Our SAP system is running slow and we think thestorage layer might be an issue
• Our system performance drops when we’re around 85% full
• We spend way too much operational time escorting service engineers in the building

With all of these, the customer was leading with a business challenge that may require differing toolsets to solve the underlying technical issue. Would running in to their building shouting “hey, swap out all your HDDs for SSDs” solve their problems? Well whilst there’s always a chance someone could get lucky, they may well find that this is just a short term solution, that they’ve shifted the bottleneck elsewhere in the stack, or even that they’ve just dramatically increased the risk of system failure.

What we’re seeing all of sudden is a dramatic increase in the number of single-technology vendors, particularly all-flash-array sellers trying to argue that their technology is the only tool for the job and therefore that flash is the saviour of all storage woes. To coin a commonlyused analogy, this is a great example of a salesman that only sells square pegs trying to convince you that his product is a perfect fit for a round hole and he’ll give you a free hammer if you buy them. Of course the answer is to buy the right shaped peg for the appropriate hole, but of course he’ll have a go at convincing you that the hammer option is much simpler and will save you time.

Flash is a great innovation for the storage industry, there’s no doubt about it, however it’s just a tool, not a solution.. The better way to look at all these new storage approaches is to first look at the challenges your organisation faces and then, when it comes to building out a solution, see what toolsets can help you solve those challenges in the mostefficient manner. Somehow I doubt that the most efficient approach will involve a hammer.