Wow, 2 posts in as many days 🙂
Spent the day at Storage expo looking at shiny things.
Sun
+ plenty of kit to play with
+ people on stand who actually knew what they were talking about
+ plenty of reading material for train journey home
– no freebie pens or lanyards or pointless stress toys
HDS
+ loads of info to read on train
+ shiny new uber kit on display (still looks crap though :))
+ *loads* of techie staff who new what they were talking about
+ *free* sushi bar with chefs preparing sushi for you
+ loads of free squishy sumo wrestler stress toys \o/
– not able to demo the new shiny kit interface (need to see if it’s as pap as the SMS100 one…)
HP
– hard work to find anyone to chat with us
– no technical people available….we wait
– technical person appears about as technical and knowledgeable as my mum
– no freebies. One crap leaflet.
Bluearc
+ Impressive uberperforming san magic
+ cool freebie pens with bl00 leds \o/
– how much???
Dell/EMC
+ well, they were keen…
– …and utterly useless
LSI (they make the Sun boxes we are interested in – 6xxx series)
+ really helpful, knew what they were talking about
+ cool visualization stuff that allegedly “only costs a few K” (can’t quite believe that tbh… we will see)
+ actual real kit to play with
ITC
+ free innocent smoothies \o/
– shame we can’t buy from them (and shame they only sell EMC stuff)
Falconstore
+ really neat
+ another layer of complication
+ price…
So, who wins? Well, based on Storage expo (obviously there are no other criteria we need to worry about) I reckon we will go with HDS (the sushi chefs and dressing their staff up in Japanese outfits gets them extra points :)) or maybe Sun/LSI. HP once again were utterly shit (but at least they turned up this time unlike most of our meetings with them!)
Interesting that it was a lot smaller than previous ones – and freebies were really in short supply 🙁 Bloody credit crunch – need more stress toys dammit