SANity Prevails: Page 2 of 2

We received quite a few emails from "SAN in a Can" vendors, those that will build you a SAN out of spare parts they work together. While I am sure that some of those solutions work just fine we didn't want to incur that much risk at ACME and so our RFP was really strict with requirements. Most lower-end bidders were promptly scared off once they read the RFP.

Bids were received from just a few vendors, trusted names mostly. Some of the bidders were large vendors you would typically associate with PC sales that are now getting into SANs although reselling the MCsquared product. We looked closely at who was actually to provide support for the SAN since we didn't want a vendor to install some solution only to toss the support to another totally different firm.

The review of the bids had us settle on a good firm we knew from other purchases. We are now in the midst of receiving the equipment onsite for the install to take place. With the work we put into this purchase I think we have properly mitigated much of the risk and guesswork. Keep us in your thoughts that this all works out just fine.

Wow, that was a long blog entry. Bet many of you have "been there and done that" in terms of a similar procurement. See you next time, Hunter.