I have long been a believer of monitoring systems, even back when computer systems were less complex than they are today.
My journey began with NetIQ AppManager, a product designed to monitor Microsoft Operating Systems, and more, by providing a framework into which you could create custom monitoring rules. It was the bees knees of monitoring at the time. I could create a rule to monitor anything and even tied it into a paging system with a bank of modems (that shows how long ago this was!
There are non value added resellers (as I like to call them) out there that won’t care, won’t check, that just want the sale at the lowest possible cost of sale (whilst this is an important metric to keep low, it must be balanced with other factors).
Staying away from such non VARs applies to any product that is important & has configuration choices.
When a vendor or VAR makes negative comments about competing products (commonly called fud) that I know is not accurate or later find out once I check into their claims, that tells me that they lean towards “the sale is more important than the customer” side of the scale, increasing the likelihood of an incorrectly specced solution.
First decide what is important to you, performance, capacity, scalability, maintenance costs, reliability, quality of suppliers etc over the required life of the storage (eg what extra workloads would be added over the next 5yrs).
You will get sales people all over you saying they have a solution that will meet your needs, but there are so many options that to get the one that works best for you requires competitive analysis based on your criteria.
Below is a collection of statements I have came across whilst doing a technical due diligence on Nimble Storage, along with some observed after becoming a Nimble customer.
They are listed here to benefit people performing a similar exercise.
As an aside, when performing due diligence on any product, I strongly advise anyone to obtain information direct from the manufacturers (not resellers) and if possible speak to existing customers.
“It only uses commodity hardware so why does it cost that much?
So I did it. I made a new post on reddit, as opposed to just commenting.
I was pretty surprised with the result, that in no time at all there were quite a few people discussing the post, by people that I have no idea who they are!
Reddit: Windows embedded thin clients - yes or no?
Here’s a quick tip: When I first joined I signed up to whatever subreddits looked interesting.
The world is peppered with people having issues with slow performance to storage arrays, that is traced down to packet drops on switches.
What’s going on, and how can you protect yourself against it?
Usually, it is due to the wrong switch being used for the role, a configuration issue that reduces available buffers, or a network design that makes the situation more likely to occur (e.g. high oversubscription rates such as 10Gb hosts pointing to a 1Gb storage array, or vice versa).
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