On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Dave Hitz wrote:
About the only way to sell low-end products is through resellers, and resellers -- for the most part -- just aren't very good at evangelizing new technologies, like WAFL, snapshots, and appliances.
Agreed. It's hard enough to sell direct customers on technology...
Business and marketing types have a whole discipline called "channel marketing" that focuses on this area. The theory is that it's very difficult to sell low end products until there is "market pull", which means that people already know about the product and know that they want it. (Don't ask me how Apple survived. Maybe the rules are different for end-user products than for servers?)
Did Apple really survive? I think it's only now that Apple are "surviving" in the main market arena with the consumer pull on the iMac. The biggest USPs are the looks, the price and the all-in-one packaging. These are traditional channel forces.
To open a real can-of-worms, what would people on this list like to see in a low-end product offering? (Sub-$10k chassis).
This hypothetical discussion would be of great interest to me. :-)
~US$5k for a "lite" NetApp style unit...either something about the size of a Cisco 2501 (i.e. 1U high) or something big enough to hold hot-swap disks internally. Traditional NetApp features like WAFL and snapshots. Must share CIFs and NFS. Must have a keypad and LCD on the front for setup and troubleshooting. Unit need not be expandable. :-)
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