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50 per cent savings guaranteed?
50 per cent savings guaranteed?
By Greg Cornfield | Nov 24, 2008 | 8339 reads
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PrintA recent press release that arrived in my inbox was titled: NetApp guarantees customers will use 50 per cent less storage for virtual environments.
I thought this sounded interesting, a "real" guarantee from a vendor.
This was not the first I had heard about this offer. The first was when I read an entry on Storagezilla, Someone had a bad Vmworld. Storagezilla is a blog written by Mark Twomey who according to Linkedin is Information Protection Subject Matter Expert at EMC and almost the same time it was referenced on Storage Shenanigans written by someone else from EMC, Chuck Hollis, VP Global Marketing CTO.
To say the least these entries were not very complementary about the offer, this in itself stirred my interest.
A few months ago before the real financial crisis hit, I spoke to Simon Green, Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific.
Much of the conversation at that time was based around the business outlook, the situation has changed since then, but I was interested in one of the comments made by Simon Green, "that in difficult times, there is greater opportunity for NetApp, because of the cost savings we offer".
Just as a sideline, NetApp was one of the first companies I saw that recognized the downturn when in early October, CEO Dan Warmenhoven said that "NetApp has put hiring plans on hold, and is seeing customers putting off spending. The crisis is spreading like a nuclear chain reaction from the automotive and financial sectors."
But let's get back to the 50% guarantee. The first sentence of the press release reads: "In an unprecedented announcement, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) has offered customers a guarantee* that they will use 50 per cent less storage in their virtual environments with NetApp compared to traditional storage."
Now the * (asterisk) after the word guarantee worried me a little and sure enough if you read down to the bottom of the document there is a large paragraph in somewhat legal terms that points to this link www.netapp.com/guarantee.
Checking this link it pointed to a number of other links and a list of requirements. This was now getting a little complicated.
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Bravo! I say, Bravisimo!
There is a lot of fine print in these guarantees. It would be interesting to see if any company has actually been able to get additional storage space for free. I remember Hitachi Data Systems once offered a US$1 million guarantee. I don't recall anyone ever getting that guarantee either.
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Greg Cornfield runs a management consultancy firm based in Hong Kong. He has 40 years' experience in the IT industry. Most recently he was the Asia Pacific Vice President for COPAN Systems (one of the early developers of MAID technology). Prior to COPAN, he was Executive Vice President and General Manager for Hitachi Data Systems' Asia Pacific and Latin America business.
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