THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"

Last night I went to a Fresno user group meeting.  I couldn't make last months as I was up in Redmond for the Security MVP summit, so this was my first meeting.  The event had a vendor sponsor, Xiotech Corp which had an interesting presentation on SAN storage and Pat Zielinski had a technical talk about how they are moving towards a “tiered” storage structure.  I was thinking of Anne during the presentation as the “tiers” started at the low end using SATA drives, SCSIs, then fibre channel and ended up at the top with Solid State Storage.  Anne used to work for a Stolid State Storage Company.  Me being the wacko, I asked if there was a process to totally “overwrite” as the SAN was used and reused for privacy purposes and forensics and what not.  [Yes, there is a way to automagically do this]  They also had Justin Kauffman there and I just had to laugh a bit as in typical sales fashion, he walked around the room shaking hands saying “Hi, I'm Justin” which reminded me of the Tim Matheson character in Animal House who kept saying “Hi, I'm Eric Stratton...... I'm the Rush chairman.  Damn glad to meet you”

One interesting part of the presentation was that he kept his sales talk VERY short.  In fact he turned most of it over to the greatest salesman he had in the room.... a customer.

That customer gave a testimonial on how they had another SAN storage product and over the Christmas holidays a couple of years ago the SAN died and they tried to get service and support and the company was closed over the holidays.  They made the decision then and there to find a company that could provide SUPPORT.  He said that the Xiotech's responsiveness was superb and he could not say enough good things about them.

Hmmm.... see a pattern here?  If you depend on something.... support is key to a decision a business owner makes.