Stop buying more gear than you need
A tale of woeful overspending shows why you must really, truly know your IT infrastructure requirements
Follow @pveneziaPart of the fun of being a consultant is having a ringside seat at vendor meetings, generally as an advocate for the client, otherwise known as the vendor's sales prospect. These meetings are simply chock-full of unintentional humor, usually presented by a straight-faced salesperson who honestly doesn't know any better. Few and far between are the salespeople who understand their product's true strengths and weaknesses. Most just read their own PR and sell, sell, sell.
This is how just about every company spends too much on products they don't need. Fact is, when neither the salesmen nor the client actually understands their requirements, magic happens. Ten times out of ten, that magic is bad mojo for the customer. I have been privy to many examples of this, but one instance in particular stands out. The names and key facts have been changed to protect the innocent and, unintentionally, the guilty.
It was a relatively simple virtualization deal -- a single-blade chassis with some number of blades and a SAN back end was required to virtualize about 30 light- to medium-duty servers, with the potential to grow. An RFP was distributed, and several proposals were selected for in-person meetings. The first vendor was a platinum reseller for Brand X and had packaged everything in a nice, neat bow. The solution started with eight dual-CPU quad-core blades, 64GB of RAM, and an 8Gb fibre-channel SAN back end for a total cost of well over $250,000. It worked out to nearly $10,000 per planned virtual server.
When I mentioned this to the vendor in the meeting, I was suddenly awash in completely false claims: "Well, VMware won't run on anything other than 8Gb fiber-channel," and "Our testing shows that you can get maybe four or five VMs per 8-core blade." The CFO was blown out of the water. The reality is that the proposed solution could have run the entire existing datacenter probably three times over, and the vendor was trying to sell it as if it was barely enough. I can only imagine how often that pitch works when dealing with the uninitiated.
The next vendor was a bit more realistic, coming in at $150,000 with a 4Gbps FC SAN and slightly lower-spec blades. It was still way, way more than was necessary, with the vendor's worst sales offense coming in the guise of dual-path FC licensing that couldn't even be used with VMware, when the vendor knew that this was for VMware exclusively. The rep was trying to sell that on top of the original deal for an additional $35,000.
I'll spare you the rest of the sordid details and tell you how it all worked out.
