What did I just buy?

When a company looks to build a major new IT system, they have a set of business goals in mind.  Mapping those goals to specific pieces of technology to acquire is not always the easiest thing to do.  This is a discussion of how EMC worked with one customer to take some of the questions out of what they were getting and increase the customer confidence in the final solution at the same time.

The Problem

This customer deals with continuous data feeds, both coming in and going out.  They need to have the data integrated into their overall information framework within very specific time windows.  They know how much data they need to be able to move - after all, they are in the information business.  But how does that translate into a storage solution?

They mapped their performance needs to a set of hardware requirements.  They took these requirements to multiple vendors, and they got very different solutions from each.  They have enough relationship with their vendors to know that all of the solutions would eventually meet the need.  However, it was possible that some were not going to support the full (planned) production workload with only the gear being proposed.  Price was the major factor in the purchase decision between workable solutions, and the vendors were well aware of this.  Might some be planning to fix things later with upgrades, or hoping that the planned workload would never appear?  (Customers have to consider this possibility, even if only causes them to do enough checking to 'trust but verify' - thus the pictured fake news clipping)