The days that an IBM rep could walk into a large enterprise and sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of proprietary mainframe equipment (because that was the only choice) are largely over. Most Wintel based hardware and software today is commoditized and prices have accordingly reflected the wide range of choices and interoperability of systems. So whether you buy an x64 server from IBM, HP, Dell or even Sun is largely irrelevant.
This is not to say that companies like SAP, CA, HP and the usual crew still come in with “solutions” rather than products, and try to sell you their “vision” that has a seven figure price tag. One vendor solutions usually turn the customer into what is in gambling parlance known as a whale. And even though there are benefits to sourcing from a single vendor, like stronger accountability and ostensibly lower prices, usually this kind of relationship is to the detriment of the customer. And consequently it is almost always advantageous to acquire “best of breed” systems for non-commodity IT hardware and services rather than be locked into an all encompassing Jack-of-all-trades solution from one vendor.
Yet there is one area in IT where this “solution” mentality still has an iron strong grip: enterprise storage. With discounts of 60-90% being the expected norm on Greenfield installs one can only try to imagine how preposterously high the profit margins on these systems are when bought at standard price down the line. With costs reaching over $50,000 per TB for the most sophisticated SAN systems it’s not uncommon for medium and large enterprises to spend a significant chunk of their capital budget purely on storage and related services. Yet because the data on this storage is so critical, handing over POs for half a million or more to the top tier vendors is the only choice CIOs have today. The problem comes when an end user (or CFO for that matter) questions why your recovery rate is $1000 a month per TB and yet BestBuy is selling 1 TB disk drives for under $500.
Relatively new companies in the storage space like Pillar, LeftHand and Equallogic were all started up on the premise that they would peel back the curtain on this technology space and provide enterprise storage in a more transparent way. Pillar and Equallogic have taken the route of including all (or most) software options with their hardware. Instead of buying $40k of disk, then $40k for snapshot licensing and then being surprised with another bill for $40k for NAS connectivity (and another $40k to license AIX hosts and so on) you get everything in one bundle for one price. LeftHand, on the other hand, has tried to commoditize the hardware by allowing you to choose your hardware vendor and just buy the appropriate software licensing for SAN connectivity. Each approach has made inroads and brought some refreshing change in the industry.
However, until there is standardization on technologies like LUN level replication and disk interoperability, IT shops will be forced to buy monolithic solutions from one vendor or be forced to rip everything out in order to switch. The gilded age for EMC, Hitachi, and NetApp, will only be over when C-level execs stop being addicted to “business solutions” and start doing the hard work of figuring out what vendors are providing value where.
