More tales from the field: Sizing best practices – does Compellent follow them?

Another one came in. I’ll keep calling the offenders out until the craziness stops. Fellow engineers – remember that, regardless of where we work, our mission should be to help the customer out first and foremost. Then make a sale, if possible/applicable. I implore you to get your priorities straight. If it looks like you’re losing the fight, figure out what your true value is. If you have no true value, you always have the option of bombing the price. But please, don’t sell someone an under-configured system.

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More FUD busting: Deduplication – is variable-block better than fixed-block, and should you care?

Before all the variable-block aficionados go up in arms, I freely admit variable-block deduplication may overall squeeze more dedupe out of your data.

I won’t go into a laborious explanation of variable vs fixed, but, in a nutshell, fixed-block deduplication means that data is split into equal chunks, each chunk given a signature, compared to a DB and the common chunks are not stored.

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Vendor FUD-slinging: at what point should legal action be taken? And who do you believe as a customer?

I’m all for a good fight, but in the storage industry it seems that all too many creative liberties are taken when competing.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that we’re talking about the car industry instead. I like cars, and I love car analogies. So we’ll use that, and it illustrates the absurdity really well.

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