Okay, storage vendor posts another stupid guarantee; it’s like deja-vu all over again.
And EMC, if you are so confident about your claims…make the guarantee unlimited, not time-bound and so when there are enough of the arrays around to ensure that there is a decent sample-base of strange corner-cases to cause problems.
Otherwise it’s just another marketing stunt!
Oddly enough I was part of the creation of the first “million dollar storage challenge” back in 2009. It wasn’t so much of a marketing stunt as our ANZ VP of the time being pissed off with EMC.
During a press interview when he was vein pressed with a bunch of FUD that EMC were throwing out way, and suggesting that the guarantee was worthless because nobody would ever take us up on it. “Pistol Pete” (the VP), asked me in front of the press guy and our PR people, “Can we do it ?” I said yes and that the guarantee program (at the time), needed 50TB RAW to qualify, so he says NetApp ANZ would give an existing Australian EMC customer up to 50TB of raw storage, including controllers, software, and services for free if they’re willing to migrate their existing VMware environment to NetApp and go public with the results. Regardless of the result, they get to keep the kit. The PR people had a fit, but the press guy loved it.
When I had to figure out all the details it turned out that the configuration we needed to do this had a list price of about $1M australian .. and the first million dollar storage challenge was born, I wrote about it on a now migrated NetApp blog here (now attributed to Mike Riley, but my sig is still at the bottom)
https://communities.netapp.com/community/netapp-blogs/efficiency/blog/2009/04/09/its-wartime-which-means-doing-more-with-less
If you’re interested in what happened, we actually went through the whole process it took us months to get all the details together, got an independent adjudicator to audit the findings found a client (A deserving charity), did the paperwork, pulled together the kit. I then did the analysis of their existing environment, ran the numbers. It was going to be awesome in terms of savings vs the kit they had recently purchased from EMC, and I was excited about doing a public case study of what was in 2009, revolutionary new technology.
Unfortunately, the board of the Charity changed their minds and decided they really didn’t want to be drawn into a PR battle between us and EMC, and asked to leave the program, which we were all disappointed about, but we understood, so we all agreed to drop it. I wanted to re-run the program with a different customer, but the time had passed. Since then there have been other million dollar challenges, but I can assure you the first one wasn’t a cynical marketing exercise, it was just about a leader who believed in his people and his company and putting his money where his mouth is (or at least was).