Read the Manual

I was just reviewing the daily competitive win report where a new customer stated that, beyond successful testing of the Data Domain solution, much of the evidence pointing against the viability of the competition's solution was found in their product manuals. Data Domain is fortunate in that many customers are able to make a purchase decision based on our proven technology and large reference base. On occasion a customer requires a competitive bake-off, typically to see past an incumbent vendors claims, allowing us to reinforce our message - that doing deduplication well (as we do) is hard, and that our competition tends to fall flat outside the world of PowerPoint's and glossies.

As a Data Domain SE, I would treat each proof-of-concept as if it were an implementation for a paying customer. We would gather the same pre-installation information, they would be shipped the same equipment, and I would configure it exactly the same way that I would for any other customer. A typical Data Domain configuration taking less than an hour of setup from crate to running backups made this reasonable task - if it took days of PS consulting, our approach may have differed. As part of our packaging, we include a screwdriver (handy in post 9/11 world where having one in your luggage is suspicious), and of course, the product manuals. I was always very proud to give customers our manual - I have written technical manuals before, and ours is very thorough.

Reading the manual not only offers the obvious operational guidance, but it also tends to reveal the truth of how a product really works. Other times, there is a noticeable lack of details. After all, most manuals are read only AFTER someone becomes a paying customer, when it is probably too late to do anything about what you learn. Everyone seems to accept that there is a process that happens as a technology's engineering reality meets marketing spin. Most savvy IT customers read brochures with a grain of salt, and accept that the truth might be somewhat different. But if you are serious about evaluating a vendor's product (and if they are serious about you as a customer) ask them to give you the manual BEFORE you agree to buy anything, take the time to read it, and ask questions based on what you learn.

Comments

[Rich Colbert]

Daniel,

You hit the nail on the head with this one. It’s sometimes a very short trip to go from RTFM to ROTFLOL. Here are some key things to look for:

- Any time a normal admin process involves the instruction ‘then execute ./stupidlongpathname/crypticscriptname.sh’. There are several products on the market that have upwards of six hundred pages of aggregate administrative manuals, and many instances where four or more scripts must be executed from the command line in a specific sequence to accomplish one simple task.

- Any variation of the phrase ‘or data loss may occur’ during an operation that should be fairly routine or benign.

Here are a few of my favorite examples of things that sales teams don’t want their potential customers to read:

- “Reclamation may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending on the amount of de-duplicated data to be discarded.”

- “Reconciliation may take several hours on systems that are replication targets (they must wait for replications in progress to complete.)”

- “Once truncated, the file must be reconstituted using it’s [sic] tag before you are able to access the file.”

- “If NAS shares exist on this system and you change the network information, the system will reboot. Ensure that there are no backups running before changing the network information.”

And of course, most importantly, you can figure out if EMC is being forthright when they say “The DL3D doesn’t have anything to do with the Quantum DXi products. We just license the Rocksoft code.” (Which is like saying we don’t use EMC backup software, we use Legato NetWorker.)

If you read the manual for the Quantum DXi3500/5500 (81-81701-02_D01.pdf) and the EMC DL3D 1500/3000 (300-006-695_a02.pdf) you can see exactly how different they are(n’t). Here’s one example out of dozens:

Quantum Page 28

The Internet browser software is not supplied with the DXi3500 and
DXi5500 systems; you must obtain and install it independently. The
DXi3500 and DXi5500 systems support the following Internet browsers:

Windows
- IE 6.02 or later
- IE 7.0
- Firefox 1.5 or later (not including 2.0)
- RE 1.4.2 or later
Linux
- Firefox 1.5 or later (not including 2.0)
- JRE 1.4.2 or later
Solaris
- Firefox 1.5 or later (not including 2.0)
- JRE 1.4.2 or later

EMC Page 28

The Internet browser software is not supplied with the DL3D 1500
and DL3D 3000 appliances; you must obtain and install it
independently. The DL3D 1500 and DL3D 3000 appliances support
the following Internet browsers:

Windows
- IE 6.02 or later
- IE 7.0
- Firefox 1.5 or later
- JRE 1.4.2 or later
Linux
- Firefox 1.5 or later
- JRE 1.4.2 or later
Solaris
- Firefox 1.5 or later
- JRE 1.4.2 or later

The admin and installation guides are essential reading for anyone selecting deduplication. Good to know that EMC knocked-down that pesky Firefox 2.0 issue that Quantum seems to be wrangling with.