By Ian Duncan 

You almost certainly shouldn't have a favorite child - that can't end well.

At some point in your life you may well find yourself having a favorite pair of socks - this is a normal sign of aging. Don't fight it - it's inevitable.

You can (in fact I may argue you should) have favorite words - I find myself utilizing some words in conversations more often than perhaps I should simply because I like the way that they sound. Rambunctious, Panacea and Diametric all fit into this category - If I can find a way to fit them into a sentence I will.

I spent a lot of time thinking about diametric forces last week - we had one of our regular customer councils where about 40 or so customers from across the country were good enough to come and spend some time telling us about their experiences with our products. These are some of our most loyal customers and so there's little to no attempt at selling in this forum - we really just want to get a deeper insight into what their day to day lives are like and how we can make sure our product marketing and development teams really understand the issues and opportunities that they live with every day.

The diametric forces that many of them talked about can be summarized (fairly) briefly:

• On the one hand everyone continues to experience dramatic information growth - the trajectory varied between 50% and 200% per year but there were some common themes - most of the content was file based, much of it related to static or streaming media, collaboration tools or replicated data.
• On the other hand no one was claiming that their IT budget was growing at anywhere near these levels - in many cases folks believed they'd have to deal with a budget reduction.

This puts them in a challenging position - data keeps growing yet budgets don't keep pace - something has to change and whilst technologies like file optimization, deduplication and smart snapshots can help reduce the amount of content stored many in the room believed that the biggest opportunity is aligning data with the most appropriate storage system.

Since we announced the 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100) back in May (and incidentally it started shipping recently) one of the most interesting aspects of talking to customers about it has been how quickly the conversation turns to price - I've sold hardware and software for a number of years and typically price is a part of the conversation that you try to keep away from for as long as possible. With the ExDS9100 we're very open about the price (under $2/GB since you're asking) and we're finding that it's becoming a more prominent component of the customer evaluation process.

It's understandable with the world economies collapsing around us that price is high on many people's agenda but there's more to it than just acquisition cost. The fact is that people are staying in roles for a shorter amount of time right now - the average CIO tenure is around 3 years and so people are looking for a Return-On-Investment that is front-end loaded. Why should they sign off on a piece of infrastructure that will only benefit their successor? Customers have every right to expect storage vendors to apply innovation to reduce storage costs as much as increasing levels of performance or protection - we think that the ExDS9100 is targeted at a very clear customer issue today - those that need high scalability AND petabyte administration AND ridiculously low acquisition costs. Data Mobility Group recently undertook a study to look at how the ExDS9100 improves the economics of large scale storage - it's well worth a read - http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA2-3467ENW.pdf.  

Ian Duncan, Director of Scalable NAS