50Micron.com

Just a quick question as it’s *WAY* past my bedtime. 

Has anyone else ever heard of a customer that a sales-person or tech would quit rather than set foot in?

I’m remembering my days back at Disney in California.  (over 7 years ago, so I’m assuming the statute of limitations has expired on that one)

I got called up for a 6-week scripting engagement, and 18 months later I had to actually quit the consulting firm I was working for and move across the country to get away from them.  (Happiest place on earth?–Not if you’re in their IT dept.)

These words actually came from one of their “cast members”:

“Once you work for the mouse, you ALWAYS work for the mouse.”

When I told them i was moving to Virginia/DC to do goverment work, the response was even more ominous…

“The sun never sets on the ears…you can’t move far enough away.”

In the end, the experience I got at Disney (Scripting TimeFinder to back up AIX/DB2/SAP) was invaluable and one of the guys there basically taught me more about kornshell scripting than I think I’ve learned from any single source since then.

But the environment was toxic.  I’m curious as to whether anyone else has stories like these or if I’m the only one who runs into them?

Ok – certain people do certain things well.

I’m a storage administrator/architect.  If you present me a problem I will *ALWAYS* look at it from a storage standpoint.  If you present me with a non-storage problem, I’ll try and make it fit.

I’ve identified four types of systems engineer-type-people:

Storage people

Server people

Network people

Desktop people

I think that just about anyone in IT either fits into one of those four roles or supports one of those roles.

Now when you are looking to solve a problem, the solution you get depends on who you go to.  If you ask a desktop person to solve a network problem for instance, they will probably come up with something under the desk.  (IE throwing a linksys router under a desk.)

If you try and throw a server person a storage role, you’re going to get a server solution to that role.

Enter IBM GPFS.

GPFS is a server solution to a storage problem.  It’s obvious that the person who came up with the idea of solving a storage problem by loading software on a server is not a storage person.

POSIT:  Mutliple hosts in a web-farm need access to data.  Filesystems need to be R/W to an ingest server and R/O to the web-content servers.

Storage Solution:  NAS/NFS – Trunked connection to a real backbone and multiple Apache webserver front-ends running at 1G to play out data.  (Fastest data transfer is going to be the 45MB/Sec backbone coming into the building, so a single Gigabit connection can handle it.   F5 Round-robin load-balancer to distribute the front-end load.  (might also be proposed by Savvy network people, who tend to understand NAS)

Server Solution:  IBM GPFS solution.  Over a million dollars in net-new server hardware + software licensing (not including storage).   Each host accessing storage requires HBA’s, Drivers, fast RELIABLE network. and a level of complexity unheard of even in government.

From what I can tell, and maybe someone can give me a little more insight, works very much like Sun’s Shared QFS.  A metadata server acts as a gatekeeper telling which member servers can access which blocks on which disks.  There is still no simultaneous disk access because a SCSI lock is a SCSI lock.

Now from a storage standpoint, this is rife with problems.

First off, it would seem that if network access was compromised during a write data integrity could easily be compromised.

Secondly, Other than block-level mirroring of the underlying disks, I can’t see a good way to replicate this.  And block-level mirroring of the underlying disks would require an identical infrastructure at the remote/DR site wouldn’t it?  That is of course assuming that the metadata can be mirrored.

Now in database uses or other types of distributed computing I can see it being VERY valuable.  But for flat file storage and web retrieval I can’t think of a single good reason to use something so obnoxiously complicated.  Especially when EMC Celerra, NetApp, or just about any of the other higher-end NAS appliances would cost *SO MUCH* less and be *SO MUCH* more reliable.

/EndOfRant

Ok, I’ve heard the term “Vendor Abuse” before.  I always discounted it as whiny vendors who think that customers should just hand them sales without any actual work.

Apparently, I was wrong.

I’ve now seen it first hand.

Don’t believe me?  Here are a few examples:

Scenario One

Two days before thanksgiving, Mr. Customer says they’ve got a project going that’s going to require, quite literally, millions of dollars in storage.  The sales team gives up their thanksgiving weekend, in fact one of them working on it WHILE AT TABLE EATING TURKEY.

First thing monday morning following the holiday they present to the customer what amounts to 20-30 man-hours of work, only to be told that the project is no longer funded.

(This happens often enough to be commonplace)

Scenario Two

Mr. Customer sits in a meeting with the vendor and his management and throws random comments that have no bearing on the discussion at hand, accuses the sales team of being outright incompetent (they weren’t, I was in this same meeting) and storms out of the room ranting about sending all business to another vendor.

Scenario Three

At 2pm on Friday afternoon Mr Customer fires off yet another request for a ‘ballpark estimate’ for 5 Petabytes of data storage.  With a “P”.

When the vendor asks for specifics about the storage, IE, type of data, access speeds, rates, replication, access method, this customer accuses them of stalling and not being responsive.  After a long weekend, all questions answered, vendor is then told that the business went to a third party.

(When pressed, vendor finds that there never was a project to go along with this quote)

A few tips to stop this type of abuse:

1. Make sure all communications are CC’d above the troublemaker’s head.  Make sure the troublemaker knows this is happening.

2. And this is hard for a sales-person to do, once you’ve identified a truly abusive customer, don’t take their calls.  The one in the above scenarios likes to consume people’s time, but in the past six months has not ordered anything of significance.  If the abusive customer is causing you to miss deadlines with other customers, kick them to the curb.

3. Push the abusive customer off to a reseller if you can.  I’ve heard CDW-G can take LOADS of abuse.

4. Ask if this is a budgetary quote or if this is for a committed project.  If it’s for a committed project the customer should be able to provide specifics.  If it’s a quote for budgeting reasons, it can be back-burnered until “real” sales work is done.