Sam's SAN Diary Week #34: VAR Lessons

VARBusiness

1. The customer is likely to be a novice. The technology is very new. When I began networking in the '80s with IBM's coax network and later Pronet-10, it was hard to actually accept that packets from all the computers were traveling over the wire and that all the PCs could thus communicate. Similarly, customers will need to learn that disk I/O amounts to SCSI commands, and a disk array with proper buffering and caching can deliver performance that is actually faster than internal drives. And the terms can be confusing, too. Fibre is a protocol, while fiber is a media. Add in host initiators, WWN masking and options to do SANs over IP. VARs must accept that first-time purchasers will require a long lead cycle. 2. Customers are trying to manage data, and the wealth of technology options is sometimes overwhelming. We want to snapshot, clone, leverage SAN technology for better backups, etc. And the market provides options to implement these functions at various components of the overall infrastructure -- NAS devices or gateways, SAN "controller" based software, switch software, host software and in-band appliances. You need to be able to discuss all of these and support as many as possible that might be mature enough and the right fit for the customer's needs.

3. Don't assume SAN technology is more mature than it really is. Verify components and test solutions. Invest in a lab. We worked with major vendors and still had serious disconnects about IP replication for our Exchange environment. That complicated and lengthened the overall project. Vendor interoperability is limited. Because SAN technology is new to many customers, they are unwilling to take risks. Today, my HP SAN and my EMC SAN are separate islands. Granted, Brocade is marketing a router that both vendors will eventually support, but that seems like overkill for interoperability. If you are a good VAR, work with the array vendors and the HBA vendors as necessary (in my case, Emulex) to provide your customer with a server HBA driver that can see both arrays and be supported by the array manufacturers.

4. The channel is evolving as the business is growing. My first HP SAN purchase was from my VAR. Since then, HP has developed a robust B-to-B offering for my size enterprise (less than 1,000 employees), and my next MSA purchase will likely be through that channel. The VAR still gets some compensation, in the way of an agent fee. My first EMC purchase was direct, through a vertical group focused on the New York law-firm industry. My next EMC purchase (ATA drives for the current CX 600) will likely be through an EMC reseller (MTI), which was a major Legato dealer. (This same reseller will be helping me with the Legato RepliStor midterm solution for Exchange replication.)

5. Provide 24/7 integration service -- we will pay for it. Having my mission-critical systems on EMC storage has been comforting, not only because of the excellent project team, but also because they have a robust, mature, support service -- SAC. The HP investments have been more difficult to manage. My local reseller staff mostly keeps banker hours, not IT hours. Even with a prepaid hourly service commitment, they have sent me to HP's direct support for many of my MSA questions, which is an effective but time-consuming alternative. When I had a hardware problem with the MSL 5052, the VAR would not get engaged; I eventually got proper attention from the local HP service team only after escalation to management and screaming into the phone. Do not leave your customers alone -- be the partner you claim you want to be.

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