Naughty or nice?

Now that I have caught your attention especially with the word naughty as that probably does a good job of describing me..... 

The phrase is mentioned with (mostly) children around Christmas (sorry to all non Christians out there but this is related to a particular event and time in the year) and if you have been good, Santa Claus/Father Christmas/St Nick, etc, etc, will reward you.  I thought my 46 inch Sony Bravia Full HD 1080p LCD TV (and perhaps a new BMW M5) was as good as it gets but I was mistaken.  Well, no... not really but you all know I live for my job. 

I wandered into one of our datacentres yesterday and found a rather strange 19 inch rack with some HDS stickers plastered over it.  So, whats this I thought?  WMS Storage, servers, switches (fibre channel and ethernet), heaps of cables and power rails.  The rack was bristling with hardware.  I don't recall ordering anything new from HDS that did not fit into a USP. 

Now, this gets down to the concept of communications.  If there is none, then whats the point of trying to get anything done.  But if your management and HDS sales people are left alone for a split second, you might get rewarded.

So, to cut a long story short, the new rack is a HCAP solution.  For all the non savvy HDS people out there, check it out on the HDS web site.  So I asked my HDS Technical Account Manager what was this stuff sitting on the floor?  He gave me some shockingly boring reading material that discussed archiving.  Funny about that.  I raised this a couple of weeks ago at work and with HDS and was met with blank sullen looks and the promise of another webex presentation.

I don't have a clue what HCAP does as I nodded off reading the documentation and banged my head on the desk.  The policy part of it looks like hard work.  I wanted ProtecTIER but we have gone way beyond it at a much higher complicated level.  Speaking of ProtecTIER, its amazing how many companies out there have solutions so much better than Diligent (or EOM'ed HDS stuff).  Well, that what they tell the less informed but higher up the management chain and most of them are NetApp sales people and Symantec wanna be's.   

At least I am not involved in any purchasing decisions right now so any thoughts about HCAP or alternatives, etc would be most welcome.  That includes EMC's solution now that we are a part EMC shop.

Naughty = HCAP, nice = BMW M5.... So where do I fit in with that?

Stephen