I have had a bit of a rock’n’roll past, I spent several years driving round with a motley bunch of pirates/musicians (The Klopeks) in my much loved LDV minibus playing in bars and basements up and down the UK. One thing that I’ve noticed with music is that people are easily led, if there is one person in the crowd that openly cheers and gets involved, everyone wants a part of it. Everyone knows that music has a scene, but I think that storage does too.

I find storage vendors and storage technology is very much like live gigs and like a music scene. If they already see someone else using something, they’ll be more likely to jump on that band wagon. If someone is already having a good time with it, surely I will too? Even if it doesn’t actually fit! There is definitely a ‘scene’ to the storage industry.

This can work absolutely fantastically, and this is one reason above most that I try to work above and beyond for my existing customers. If they have an issue, question or problem, doesn’t matter if it’s not my problem, I need to help them out. All too often I hear from other companies “that support expired 2 days ago I’m afraid”, or “technically that would be vendor x and not us I’m afraid”, and so the customer goes unloved. When we built our support infrastructure I said to our call centre “One rule above all others, never decline to take a support call”. Take the bull by the horns and get to the bottom of the issue and resolve them for the customer or they will not purchase again!

This is a very hard working way of keeping my customers happy though, and I find myself with less and less spare time, and more and more time spent answering emails and problem solving. To be honest that’s one of the reasons I’ve started blogging some of the issues and questions I encounter. If I can resolve this for one customer, why not share it with everyone so that everyone can benefit from my hard work?

What if you don’t or can’t manage to keep this customer cheering and singing? On the converse, you can end up with a front row heckler . They’ve had a few Stella’s , they want to get lairy, and they think it’ll be funny to start shouting (naturally it couldn’t be because I’ve snapped my E-string again and my guitar is totally out of tune!). Well we can shut-up the heckler by carefully timing a stage dive, but I like my guitar too much and I’m a bit squeamish of blood. Best face up to the heckler and get them involved. Even if my guitar is horribly out of tune and I can’t hear the drums because the levels are all wrong. A live show is about a stage performance, about getting the most out of it, not necessarily out of it being technically brilliant. I’ve seen technically brilliant bands play live and it can be the most boring thing in the world.

And so with the customer. If I have a customer that is having a particularly bad experience and they want to take it out on me, all good, but I need to work with the customer, I need to get them involved. Forget the shouting, lets cut this back to the basics. I’m not here to sell you as many products as possible, I’m here to make what you’ve got today work, and potentially offer options to improve this. I’m not a sales guy, I have no interest in you buying anything as I am not on commission!

This works pretty well most of the time, and people have to just recognise my T K Maxx suit and thrashed out Alfa to realise I really am not lying! I need to make this work for the customer, that is my job. Even if the solution is not a technically brilliant one, or maybe there are gaping holes in the entire solution, there are always ways to make it work and make it fit. I am often tasked with resolving customer issues when we weren’t involved with the original design, and this is often the case. A solution can always work, it just depends how you are willing to work with it.

Sure, this isn’t ideal or clandestine, but then if everything was, there would only be 1 storage vendor, and only 1 solution. There is choice because there is a million different vendors offering a million different architectures that can be built. Just because I have a personal preference does not make it always right or always fit.

And so I find myself relating back to my rock’n’roll past life with the storage industry. Customers want to have a good time, they want to enjoy it, but they might need someone to get them started, they almost always need a little direction to know what to do. Hecklers are often turned into the driving force of a wild stage show if they are handled correctly, you can’t just use a rough hand. My favourite live shows have always been the ones with a rowdy audience, you don’t get better without a little abuse, it just depend how you use that abuse!

This is why I enjoy working with NetApp technologies. The systems give the flexibility for the solution to change almost full circle and still provide flexibility and functionality. This is why I like working with complimentary technologies like VMware, Riverbed and Acopia to name but a few. These give you the flexibility to do things anyway you want. So long as it works, it is not an incorrect solution.

I have found that solutions are like opinions, none of them are technically incorrect or wrong, it just depends on your point of view and what you are trying to achieve. One way or another, everything can be done, and you can achieve anything, it just depends how flexible you can be.