I get disturbed whenever a reseller, or even an end user asks for a competitive statement about storage Brand X or storage Brand Y. Given my background of everything storage, many a times, they want me to “dish the dirty stuff” of the storage brands I am competing with. And I often resist. Here is my philosophy and my approach.
Many storage consultants love to say bad things about others. It is one of the ways to get a bright glow about the product(s) they are pitching, and dim the prospects of their competitors. I don’t like to do things this way because what I say reflect on my professional ethos. In the closely connected storage networking and technology industry, we have folks that make career moves from one company to their competitors. Heck, I have a friend who recently joined Hitachi Vantara® after almost 20 years at EMC® (now Dell EMC®). We make career choices but it does not mean we should take the moral low ground to bash which storage competitor we are facing at that moment.
Where do I start?
This blog
The motivation to write this blog came from an article from CRN where NetApp®’s CEO, George Kurian, “corrected” Pure Storage®’s CEO Charles Giancarlo about his “inaccurate” statements about “true cloud storage”. Whatever Charlie said may be innocuous, but it has certainly stung Georgie.
And in any technology-based industry, this technology bashing habit is rampant. Like it or not, marketing has played a role in creating the perception and the aura of strength with the technology it represents. Over the years, I have my fair share of beliefs cultivated through marketing, although as I wizened over the last 2 decades, I spend a lot of time diving deep into the specific storage technology. If time and resources permit, I even do technical hands-on, just to understand the technology more intimately. And that became the basis of running this StorageGaga blog in the past 12 years. To go beyond the FUDs and the fluffs, and share meaningful details and knowledge. Through my sharing, I learn from others as well.
