Mike’s Rant
OK, so I’m “borrowing” Steve Duplessie’s (old?) title (which I just noticed looks like it’s changed) for this blog post, but I felt it fit perfectly with my thoughts. So, thanks Steve!
I’m a techie type that knows enough to get most things working but, sometimes I change one too many configurations and everything gets screwed up. In this case however, it’s not me…it’s them! I’m talking about my last two week battle trying to get my VoIP phone in working order. I changed nothing in my network (really, nothing!) and my voice quality started to fall apart. Unfortunately, my VoIP provider is not the same provider as my cable internet provider. One simple feature is keeping me from getting everything through my cable provider. But, until then, I have to live with two throats to choke.
My last two weeks went like this:
- Call cable company – checked signal, looks great. Must be a VoIP problem.
- Call VoIP provider – do some tweaks and test and things look good. Next day, back to the same issue.
- Call VoIP provider again – make some more tweaks, firmware update, reboot. Try again. Good for a day. Then same old story. Must be a cable problem.
- Call cable company – They send out “PC tech” to check it out. Modem’s acting a little flaky – enough for him to want to replace it. He does. Good for a day. Same problem.
- Back to VoIP provider – some more tests, tweaks. Sounds good. Until next day. Everything always sounds great after a fresh reboot. It’s the next day it sounds awful.
- Back to cable company – They come back out. Check signal. Looks great. No problem.
- Back to VoIP provider – agreed to get on phone with me and cable company. Says latency is too long, dropping some packets. Cable company says looks good on their side. Suggested replacing modem again. Don’t know what else to do. So replaced and now I’m in a 24 hour wait period to see if it sounds like crap tomorrow.
This got me thinking about my little personal data center crisis. If I could just get everything from one provider, I’d have one throat to choke. But, the features just aren’t there. I started thinking about the folks that run the “real” data centers and now really understand the desire to buy from one supplier, but understand why they typically veer of course. One stop shopping doesn’t always give you the best of the best. It gives you one throat to choke, but it doesn’t give you every feature you want.
Why can’t everything just be “plug-and-play” vs. “plug-and-pray?” When we talk to customer prospects, it’s pretty standard to see that most aren’t a one vendor shop when it comes to storage. They buy the best for what they need for primary. Typically use something different for NAS vs. SAN and totally different for backup. Even with market consolidation, you still have best-of-breed solutions deployed to solve specific problems.
With Permabit, that’s exactly what we do. No matter what storage you already have, we’re simply a “plug-and-play” scale-out NAS solution that can have dramatic savings across your entire storage environment. With our built-in Dedupe 2.0 technology, we can store more data in less space than primary storage solutions. By offloading static data to our storage, you also dramatically reduce your active backup sets saving both time and backup costs in the process. So, while we can’t help you choke your other vendor’s throats, we can help put a choke on your storage budget dollars!