Crying over spilt beer

So, some blogs and I stress the some part here, have turned into "my last employer sucked because..." diatribe. I guess people need to vent, but I really don't care if I am honest. There have been several recently on the NetApp versus EMC. Well I have some interest here. I need to store things reliably, performance does matter to my application users and yes cost is always an issue. Sure, even my a supplier gives it to me at no cost (that will be the day huh?) there is still cost of managing the thing.

I guess the thing that gets my goat here, is that all these blogs read (and I read them all) like "your technology sucks because of X, Y or sometimes even Z". I guess that is the difference between somebody who cares about business versus the technology. The technology guy will say my technology is best because of some great feature that his or her competitor does not have. Well I don't give a monkeys adam to be perfectly clear. What I really care is the business value. I don't care that EMC's BCV's are technically superior than NetApp FlexClones. Sure the business value is that I can clone my application in an instant. If, I need to make a change to it, for example to change is SAP ID or Oracle Database SID, then I change a block. Well for BCV's, which are basically a copy-on-write, well darn it, I have a complete physical copy after I make the first byte of change. Its cool that NetApp FlexClones only store the change, so if I had used that technology then I would have saved storage right?

Wrong. I never, read never store my copies of Dev and Test on the same piece of storage as production. That would be dumb. Not just for performance, but you think I would let developers see a real copy of actual data. Our current financial data? Your HR records? Your are kidding right? So, no matter what I have to make a physical copy, simply to ensure the operational integrity of my system and privacy of the data. Now, NetApp does provide me business value in making the secondary copies basically cost free. The technology is cool, but that is real business value to me.

Do I expect that both can make a consistent point in time copy, sure. But both have consistency group features that allow that.

So, vendors, don't blind me with science. Tell me something that I care about. Tell me how you are different. Don't slag off your competitors, if you talk about them *that* much, then sure I'm going to get a trail unit. And sure, I'm going to love it to. Remember to speak about the business value and how it solves my problems, not the technology. Its your money and quarters figures to throw away.