Beware square-peg salespeople

Gavin McLaughlin explains where current SSD hype might be going wrong

Open any IT magazine, read any technology news website or subscribe to any data storage mailing list and you will quickly get fed up to the back teeth with headlines that make bold statements such as "How to use SSDs in your business" or "Why hard disk drives are dead".

While most technology-savvy readers will have the sense to take any overly dramatic headlines with a pinch of salt, there are sadly many who are falling for the hype.

However, all marketing noise aside, there is at least one concerning trend emerging here. That's the trend for too many vendors to sell storage components - be this in the form of flash, SSDs, hard drives or cardboard boxes - rather than selling business-affecting "solutions".

Customers don't buy storage, they buy solutions - that is a cliché known to many sales teams. However, it suddenly seems to have been forgotten in the storage industry.

If I look back at some recent customer projects in which I have been involved, the opening lines from IT departments have included phrases such as:

"Our SAP system is running slowly and we think the storage layer might be an issue."

"Our system performance drops when we're about 85 per cent full."

"We spend way too much operational time escorting service engineers around the building."

In all these situations, the customer was leading with a business challenge that may require different sets of tools to solve the underlying technical issues. Would running into their building shouting, "Hey, swap
all your HDDs for SSD" solve their problems?

While there is always a chance someone could get lucky in this situation, it is more likely they will find that this is just a short-term "solution". They may have simply shifted the bottleneck elsewhere in the stack, or even just dramatically increased their risk of system failure.

All of a sudden we are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of single-technology vendors, particularly all-flash-array sellers, trying to argue that their technology is the only tool for the job and therefore that flash is the saviour of all storage woes.

This is a great example of a salesperson who only sells square pegs trying to convince you that his or her product is a perfect fit for a round hole - and that there's a free hammer in it for you if you buy them.

Of course, the answer is to buy the right-shaped peg for the appropriate hole, but this type of salesperson will have a go at convincing you that the hammer option is much simpler and will save you time.

Flash is a great innovation for the storage industry. However, it's just a tool, not the answer.

A better way to examine all these new storage approaches is to first look at the challenges your customer's organisation faces, and then, when it comes to developing the right offering, see what toolsets can help them solve those challenges in the most efficient manner.

Somehow I doubt the most efficient approach will involve a hammer.

Gavin McLaughlin is solutions development director at X-IO