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Tool ConsolidationLarge storage vendors are great at reporting on their products, but in case you have more than one vendor in your environment (like most do), it can become difficult for any one vendor to suggest an accurate and informed purchasing decision that fits your specific business needs.
We recently helped out a client who was in a panic because she believed she had reached the maximum capacity of the storage in her environment. The end of the year was approaching but still at a distance, and she did not yet have the budget to purchase more storage, nor did she have the insights to make an informed decision on her own. Unsure of what to do, she contacted multiple vendors based on the arrays she already had installed in her environment. She asked these vendors for any insight on what she could do to keep her environment running through the end of year when she planned to just purchase more storage to meet requirements. Each of these vendors came back with the same suggestion – to buy more storage and to make the purchase immediately to avoid any outages. They too believed she had met capacity, or they wanted to reach their quotas by end of year.
Because of the lack of insight she had in her environment and the pressure from her current vendors to make a purchase right away, she was still worried she would not be able to keep her environment running until the new year when an adequate budget was available. That’s when one of those vendors referred her to Visual One Intelligence (Visual One) for help in running a quick assessment of her entire storage environment.
Visual One was able to provide her with the reports she needed within 24 hours and much to her surprise, after running the Visual One quick assessment of her environment, she could see that she had only used 25% of the capacity available across her arrays. Once there was clear and indisputable evidence that she was not, in fact, running out of storage and could prolong her next purchase, she was able to evaluate the right kind of storage for her companies needs. She was also able to negotiate a price for new storage with her vendors that fell within her budget by referencing the insights into capacity and utilization made available through the Visual One quick assessment reports.
In addition to prolonging her next storage purchase, she received health insights on her environment through the Visual One quick assessment health alerting report that showed her where she could reconfigure a few arrays to get better performance. A win, win.
The Moral of the Story
In a multi-vendor environment, an individual vendor does not always have the insight they need to recommend an accurate and informed purchasing decision that will best fit the client’s needs.
We often run into these kinds of pressured and reactive purchasing situations and in the long run, they can do more damage than good – even in the case that budget is not an issue. The next time you assume you need to make a purchase or are being pressured to purchase more storage from your vendors, just say no. Let us run a quick assessment of your storage environment, free of charge, and provide you with the actual data from your arrays that will either back up or dispute any assumptions.
We are here to help. If you have this issue, or know someone who can benefit from a Visual One assessment, reach out for a demo and we will be in contact with you shortly.
