Demo is Dead – Bake Off is Best

Since Stack launched their Regional Proof of Concept Centre there has been a number of announcements of “Centres of Excellence”. The trouble with these is that they’ve entirely missed the point. Having a centre with a single server vendor a single storage vendor and a single operating system makes it a one trick pony not an independent testing centre. These are no more than demonstration suites where a branded offering can be sold. Customers are not interested in a demonstration proving that something works. It should be a given that a solution offering works – why else offer it? What a customer wants is to know he’s getting best value and best performance and that means competition and independence.

To be realistic a centre must have best of breed technology from all the leading players so that customers can test them side by side. That means not just Microsoft but Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, LINUX, Citrix, Novell as a minimum as well as VMWare. Storage must be Fibre Channel, Network Attached and ISCSI and be provided by different vendors such as HDS, EMC, NetApp, DotHill, and StoreAge as is available at Stack. Switching by Brocade and Cisco, WAAS services by Juniper and Riverbed, servers by HP, Dell, Intel, IBM are a must too. Once you have that kind of environment it has momentum. If a customer wants a bake off against something we don’t already have it speaks volumes about any vendor who won’t drop their kit into our centre for the challenge.

A true Proof of Concept Centre must occupy at least two geographically separate sites linked by high bandwidth connections so that technologies such as synchronous replication and remote backup can be tested. WAN emulation is a good second best but not everybody trusts emulation. So you clearly can’t build a true bake-off environment for a couple of hundred thousand you need to invest serious money.

Stack has more than 40 physical servers of different makes and hundreds of virtualised ones running all major versions of all major operating systems. Their two centres have replicated storage using four different manufacturers systems over high bandwidth connections that also carry Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony. It has taken years to establish the Proof of Concept Centre as a real resource and not just a vendor partner demo centre.