“He really seems to understand that our storage situation is unique, and his SAN throughput figures were certainly impressive!”“I like the fact that his product is clearly best-in-class, like our other storage. And if we bought it, we could show our corporate management team that we have best-in-class SAN storage to go with our new best-in-class servers and our new best-in-class NAS platform.”“Well maybe... but I’d wait just a bit on sharing that with the CEO if I were you. We actually have a small problem there... we still haven’t quite gotten best-in-class NAS to play nicely with the best-in-class servers.”“Really? But you’ve had three months to do the integration testing. I thought all the products we bought were standards-compliant!”“Yes, of course they were standards-compliant. But it turns out that NAS standards and server standards don’t necessarily care the least bit about one another. And just because this new best-in-class SAN storage is compliant with storage standards, such as SMI-S, doesn’t mean it will play well with the standards-based management framework, or even that it will play well with NAS storage.”“But what about all the money we were going to save by using standards-compliant hardware? Is that at least working out?”“Well, yes and no. The storage budget saves money as long as the storage admins only have to manage storage, and the server budget saves money as long as we only have to manage servers. The problem comes when we have to manage storage and servers together.”“Umm… wasn’t managing servers and storage together fundamental to our whole corporate IT strategy of moving to an on-demand environment? Didn’t we decide that the only way to do that efficiently would be to automate the process, and that standards compliance was fundamental to automating all of our processes? Are you telling me that having multiple “best-in-class products”—if they can’t work together—doesn’t yield a best-in-class data center?”“Well, yeah. Sorta. But at least it’s still best-in-class.”