I really enjoy talking with customers. Not every conversation is entirely serious, either. Sometimes, things are just plain funny.
Here's my collection of true stories that might give you a laugh. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
How Much Does Information Weigh?
EMC was launching a new Symmetrix, and of course we were emphasizing how big the thing was.
A senior EMC exec was asked by a press representative the usual questions, including "how much does it weigh?". He thought about it a bit, and answered "about two tons fully configured."
The reporter dutifully wrote this down, and then asked "how much does it weigh when it's loaded with information?"
With a straight face, he responded "well, it depends what type of information -- you see, sometimes information is compressed, and it's denser than uncompressed information ..."
I saw the reporter write it all down.
I never saw if that one made it into print.
Which Way Does Your Disk Spin?
I like to toss in the occasional straight-faced joke during my presentations.
Sometimes I say that we actually ship two kinds of disk drives. They need to spin to the right above the equator, and need to spin to the left below the equator, otherwise we'll unbalance the earth's spin, and cause all sorts of problems.
Right after I said this, one customer started furiously scribbling on a pad of paper. I kept going, but he continued to be deeply involved in something.
Finally, about five minutes later, he put his head up and said "no, you're wrong, I've calculated the forces involved, and they're insignificant when compared to the earth's rotation".
I don't think I'll use that joke so much anymore.
It's All About Keeping The Boss Happy
Back in the early days of Symmetrix, they were very large, very expensive and used SCSI to connect to servers -- this was way before FC and SANs. EMC was just getting started putting them into UNIX environments with great success, and I was visiting a new customer to see how it was going.
Part of the process at the time was to follow every SCSI cable and see what kind of server it attached to. We were trying to get a feel for what servers were out there.
I dutifully followed all the cables back, but there was one that ducked under a wall, and headed outside the data center. I asked the system administrator where that one went.
He didn't want to tell me. I made up something on-the-spot about having to know what was plugged in so we could better support them, and he relented.
We walked outside the data center, and into an adjacent office. A very nice office. There was a PC with a SCSI card. He typed a command and showed how the PC was configured for about 20% of the Symmetrix array.
A very fast, replicated and optimized 20% of the array, to be precise.
I guess rank has its privileges.
Who Are You Guys?
Back in the very early days, we had sales guys who were very good in the mainframe world, but couldn't really pass the credibility test with the UNIX guys. Lots of work on pronounciation, e.g. "You-nix", not "Ooo-nix".
We also quickly learned that we should have provided tools to help our sales guys qualify opportunities. Now, understand, most mainframe opportunities are pretty big, but the same can't be said for every UNIX opportunity.
I had flown to Dallas to go on an Important Sales Call. We got in the car and drove and drove. After a while, a terrible smell filled the air. We drove up this dirt road, and walked up to a very agricultural-looking building to have our meeting.
This particular company raised and processed chickens. OK, I thought, maybe I'll learn something.
After introductions, the first question I was asked was "what does EMC stand for?" I patiently explained the story, and he laughed and said "I had hoped it meant Eat More Chicken".
Turned out he had a vintage Altos box that he ran some basic accounting. Maybe 100 MB (that's right, MB) of storage. He thought he might need another 10MB.
We had brought a Symmetrix presentation.
The next day I spent creating qualification tools for our sales force.
Whaddya Mean?
We design our storage products for high availability -- redundancy, no single point of failure, and so on. But, as is true with all things technological, sometimes problems happen.
I was going in to a fairly large IT shop (you'd know the name) to explain why we had a problem to the customer. Fine, I said, tell me what happened.
Turns out that a bad HBA on a server had been writing corrupt data to an Oracle database (there are tools now that protect against that, but this was a while back). The customer was outraged, and thought it was EMC's fault, and we should take the blame.
Fine, I thought, the customer is always right, even when they may not be entirely right. I asked the rep how long it took the customer to restore from backups.
He said -- that's the problem.
Because they had purchased a high-availability array, they thought they didn't need to back it up.
Ever.
For over a year.
For the first time in my career, I didn't really know what to do.
But when I came back from my trip, I made sure that ALL of our documentation had clear labels:
WARNING: BACK UP YOUR DATA. THIS STUFF IS GOOD, BUT IT'S NOT MAGIC.
Low Tech Wins The Day
You don't see them much any more, but back in the days of RFPs, customers would cycle through vendors through presentation marathons. Each vendor has an hour, and so on. It wasn't fun for us, and I can't believe it was fun for customers, either.
It was down to us and our competitor. We were sitting and waiting for the meeting to start, and the other guys come in, carrying (for the time) a brand-new presentation rig: laptop and LCD projector, even a little pair of speakers.
We were sitting there, most uncool, with our stack of transparencies and our overhead projector. They were slicker than us, and they knew it. Heck, they even had nicer suits than us.
Well, that is, until they couldn't get the laptop working -- lots of fiddling -- they start sweating -- the customer gets impatient. Five minutes .... ten minutes.
Finally, one of them starts improvising a presentation without visual aids, and it doesn't go well. It devolves into babbling about how their technology is better, newer, and how EMC is out-of-date. Finally, they sit down. They didn't look quite so smug anymore.
Well, of course, when it was our turn, we plopped our very uncool overhead projector down, flipped the uncool switch, and tossed on the first uncool transparency.
A nice graphic filled the screen.
And, of course, the first thing I say is "cool technology is great, stuff that works is even better".
The customer agreed.
We won the order the next day.
Whatever
We get a lot of customer visits in our briefing center. Some come up every year, so you get to see them over and over again, sometimes to talk about the same things.
Back in 1995, we were introducing 9GB drives, which were replacing 3GB drives. (Don't laugh!). Some customers were very concerned about the performance characteristics of the larger drives, and what it would do to their applications.
We spent over three hours with this one fellow, trying to accurately characterize what would happen, and convince him that it was a manageable situation. Charts, graphs, testimonials, performance engineers, benchmarks, etc. etc.
We didn't succeed in convincing him, but over the next few weeks and months, he was "strongly encouraged" by his management to move forward, and he ended up moving to the new drives. They worked as advertised, but he was not happy about the situation.
Fast forward two years. Same gentleman, but this time we're trying to convince him to move to the new 18GB drive. Not surprisingly, another three hour debate. Another stalemate. And another situation where he was "strongly encouraged" to move forward.
Fast forward another two years. Same customer, same guy, same story, this time it's the new 36GB drives. The following year it was the 73GB drives.
I had lost track of him during this time, but I got another session with them a few years back.
Of course, one of the things I had to do was to convince them to use the new 146GB drives. Let's just say I was a bit tense walking into the room.
About three minutes into my pitch, he stopped me.
Long silence ... he looked at me, and uttered a single word -- "whatever"
The session was over.
Now We're Really Protected
One of the strongest features of Symmetrix has always been SRDF -- remote replication for business continuity.
I had helped a sales team convince a customer that -- because their data center was directly in the flight path very near a major airport, they should seriously consider a second data center should the unthinkable happen.
As we were meeting with the customer, we could hear the roar of jets taking off under full throttle maybe a couple hundred feet over the data center. Every time there was a roar, the walls would vibrate, and we'd wonder -- is this the big one?
Time went by, the deal got done, and the customer built the second data center. I was invited back down partly to provide a product update, and partly to have the customer show off their new data center which we had helped justify.
We met in the original data center, had a short meeting, and then we were going to go see the new recovery facility.
As we were walking out of the building, I asked "who's driving?" I was told that it wasn't far, that we could walk.
Yes, you've guessed it.
The new recovery data center was put up right next to the production data center, in a straight line right under the flight path.
Hard to imagine how a plane could hit one without creaming the other one as well. I really didn't know what to say, other than "that's nice".
After the meeting, I tore into the sales rep -- how could you let a customer do that?
He held up his hands and said that he had tried ... but the recommendation had gone to committee, and management came back and said that they could save serious money on real estate and networking costs by co-locating the disaster recovery center.
The IT guy was given a choice between the co-located data center, or nothing. He took what he could get.
I just hope they sent their tapes off site.
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