#95 – Quantifying Storage Vendor Guarantees with Chris Mellor and Eran Brown

This week, Chris E is joined by Chris Mellor and returning guest Eran Brown.  The team discuss the usefulness of storage vendor guarantees like de-dupe ratios and uptime.  Do vendors use these metrics as a marketing tactic to attract new customers or is there any value in them?

The idea of a sales/marketing guarantee sounds appealing.  Storage vendors have been using them for years to entice customers and offer some sort of incentive to buy.  Most recently we’ve seen de-dupe and compression ratios being a battleground for optimising the cost of all-flash arrays.  Digging down, what’s actually on offer?  How do vendors quantify what these offerings mean?  What’s the penalty if the vendor doesn’t meet the agreement?  Should you get these guarantees written into contracts?

More details on INFINIDAT’s Always On guarantee can be found here – https://www.emea.infinidat.com/always-on-guarantee.

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Timeline

• 00:00:00 – Intros
• 00:01:00 – What is a guarantee and how do they work?
• 00:03:30 – What are storage vendors offering?
• 00:05:00 – Are these simply marketing guarantees?
• 00:06:50 – With de-dupe – how is the X:1 ratio calculated?
• 00:08:00 – Should all data be accepted for dedupe ratios?
• 00:09:00 – What does 100% data availability mean?
• 00:10:30 – Do guarantees actually mitigate business risk?
• 00:12:00 – How do vendors ensure they can pay out on guarantees?
• 00:16:00 – Vendors can offer safe guarantees if they know their systems are reliable
• 00:18:00 – Uptime and availability are not necessarily the same thing
• 00:20:00 – How should vendors compensate customers for guarantee failures?
• 00:24:30 – Does Chris Mellor have a disaster recovery car?
• 00:28:30 – Financial regulation may impact giving customer money back
• 00:30:00 – How can we know if vendor guarantees are paying out (or not)?
• 00:32:00 – How should guarantees be contractually managed?
• 00:35:00 – Should guarantees affect your purchasing/consumption model?
• 00:37:40 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

• #58 – Storage Vendor Hero Numbers
• Garbage Collection – Implementing a Multi-Vendor Storage Strategy
• Evolving Enterprise Storage Buying Models

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