Even though my office employs around seventy people at any given time, but judging by our server room you might say we have closer to two or three hundred. Once again, I am looking to upgrade our systems. This time, it's storage.

We are currently in talks with one of the largest storage vendors for an upgrade to our (comparatively small) storage systems. We're about fifty percent through the process of researching our options and I have noticed a pattern with many of the vendors. Most of these companies act like you either have people on staff who just sit around thinking about terabytes all day, or that you don't have a clue. I think they are missing a VERY BIG segment of the market. There are thousands of small businesses out there that have IS departments, just not big ones. Even Microsoft has figured this out with products like System Center Essentials (haven't tested this properly yet, but it's designed for small business IS). 

As a small business, everyone in our IS department wears many hats. We know what we need, we know what our systems need to do. We DO NOT care about splitting hairs over every little detail. During a recent conference call I spoke with a team of people from one of those big storage vendors. We had provided several logs from our servers and they were going to cover the results of their research for us. I was sitting there wondering why I was on this call. They were detailing the results of our drive activity/utilization based on our current system and not once recommended any products that were in the appropriate range to meet our needs. Nothing. After 20 minutes of details, I finally had to ask.

What a waste of time. If they had jumped on the call and said this is what you should use and based on your current system design this is why, they would have saved nearly an hour of time and scored some goodwill points too.