No, this is not a relationship or lonely-hearts column … it’s about technical specifications for products … and when you can’t find answers to basic questions like “what processor does it have onboard”.

Adaptec have for years spent their life quoting statistics and specifications for their products. We have people who speak a strange sort of language that is unintelligible to the normal human being … 1.2Ghz processor with 512mb of RAM capable of x number of IOPS and so many Mb/s throughput … so on and so forth etc etc etc.

So when I receive an email from a customer asking me to compare product x with one of our cards (call it product y), and for me to tell them why product x is so much cheaper than our card. Now I don’t normally worry too much about price, because (a) that’s the salesman’s job and (b) when you compare apples to apples we come out OK.

Now this is a pretty normal occurrence for me … quick flick of the competitor’s website, read the specs, send back some salient points to the person who asked the question, then move on to the next email without putting too much thought into the matter.

So I check out the competitor’s website on their card. Looking at the capabilities this is a pretty good product (RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and 6). No mention of RAID 50 or 60, but that’s OK (gives me an advantage). Lots of memory, and options for more with a battery. Hmmm, sounds good so far. Let’s check out the processor to see what sort of grunt this thing has to do both day-to-day parity calculations and, just as importantly, rebuild arrays after drive failures.

Check the main page, check the tech specs, read the fine-print, look at web-based reviews from third-parties … no mention of processor speed. Now that is, to put it bluntly, strange. If this competitors marketing team is anything like mine, they’d never let a page go by without putting something as basic as a few Mhz on there. But … no, not a mention anywhere of the processor speed.

So where does that leave me? How do I answer the customer’s query? Simple really … the competitor doesn’t mention the processor because it’s not there. It’s a “hostraid” card … not a hardware RAID card. Nothing unusual with this, except it’s being promoted as a competitor against our hardware-processor based cards.

Is this unusual? Not really, but it brings to light that if today’s heavily-pressured marketing departments don’t say something it’s generally not a mistake … what they don’t say counts as much as what they do say.

So make sure you are comparing apples against apples next time you check out two products.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 and is filed under General, Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Neil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.