On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Luke Mewburn wrote:
Disclaimer: I like NetApp. I worked at NetApp for a while as an SE. I just believe in being honest to the technical people you're selling to, especially those who have to justify to their management why the (not cheap) 500 GB box they bought ran out of space at 300 GB.
I don't blame Netapp for this... they are virtually forced to market their products this way because everyone else does! EMC, Sun, IBM, etc. aren't going to say "Hey, let's all just play nice and advertise *real* numbers in our marketing literature and benchmarks". They will mostly likely use Netapp's honesty against them. ;-)
Any semi-decent technical person will know not to trust the glossy ads, and I *do* hope that every Netapp customer has had technical discussions with a Netapp SE before becoming their customer. The SE can explain how "12TB raw capacity" translates into real-world numbers. If advertising larger raw capacities helps Netapp get into more IT shops, then so be it. If Netapp doesn't do it, you know the likes of EMC will.