The best don’t always win
The storage deal on disk replacement is over. A decision has been made.
Are we happy? Sure, why not. Did we get what we want? Well, technically we had a better option, but financially, we couldn't refuse this final offer. The financial gap between the winner and the runner up, was just to big. The technological differences aren't enough to justify the extra investments.
So we didn't get the best money could buy, but we did get a good deal, and we do get good storage for these euros. Besides, the big-iron players' high-end range storage subsystems are all good stuff and they do not differ too much in capabilities.
Another plus for my company is, that we do not need to go through a massive migration, don't have to rewrite tons of scripts, don't have to change multipath drivers on hundreds of servers. That's worth something too, right? We were willing to go through all this changes, but in the end, like Meja said in track 2, it's all 'bout the money.
My company is happy, because we made sure that the next four years, we have a good price per gig. Which in turn will make our customers happy as well. And this is why we have the job.
A donwside to this is, that we don't get experience with new equipment, new vendors, new methods, and more. Well, better luck in about 4 years.
Later.
PS: Merry Christmas to you all.
December 23rd, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Merry Christmas to you too.
Its a shame you didn’t get the new vendor in, its always cool to learn new kit and see how other people do things slightly differently. But at the end of the day we are there to supports our various companies and most companies are about making money and not spending it – so the cheapest option is usually the one that wins, shame!
A friend said to me when I was sitting in a brand new football stadium waiting for the exhibition game to start – “most things these days are built by the lowest bidder with the cheapest parts”. A bit scary in a brand new football stadium that only passed its safety inspection that same afternoon.
Enjoy!
January 1st, 2007 at 11:40 am
Those of you who are starting to know me, also know we are an IBM shop for years now. In the recent renewel we had IBM and HDS compete in the final round. EMC and HP were dropped in the preceding round.
I will not go into details on the deals, because that would get me into a lot of trouble, neither would it be professional. But IBM won the deal.
In the next few weeks we will be preparing the transition from our SVC 3.1 to new SVC 4.1 code. Due to old AIX4 systems, we cannot simply upgrade the current SVC environment, but we will keep them as a deathbed environment. No treatment or cures for the illness in this environment. We definately need to force a migration/upgrade to AIX5.
The new SVC4.1 will be a “greenfield” where the supported platforms will be migrated to.
We will also be replacing our ESS800 (sharks) and DS4300 systems by IBM DS8300 (932)’s.
I’ll be posting the details on these scenario’s here in a while. When they become clear.