Looking for virtualization advice
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@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
I had to go searching for it.
Not my job. It is their job to not turn me off. Which they did. fuck that.
Everyone has public pricing if you know how to use Government contract price lists that contractually must be posted
Someone needs to make a quick reference somewhere.
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
snip very good discussion on various points of costing out solutions
VARS are important. But this project is at the very beginning of even trying to figure out which solution to narrow down to. So this is way before a VAR should be involved. This is why simple public pricing is important. The OP does not care at this point about specific deals. The OP needs to know about general costs for each solution type.
I agree, public pricing is pretty important. You can't know what VARs to engage or what approaches make sense when you don't know the relative costs of things.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
I had to go searching for it.
Not my job. It is their job to not turn me off. Which they did. fuck that.
Everyone has public pricing if you know how to use Government contract price lists that contractually must be posted
Someone needs to make a quick reference somewhere.
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
snip very good discussion on various points of costing out solutions
VARS are important. But this project is at the very beginning of even trying to figure out which solution to narrow down to. So this is way before a VAR should be involved. This is why simple public pricing is important. The OP does not care at this point about specific deals. The OP needs to know about general costs for each solution type.
I agree, public pricing is pretty important. You can't know what VARs to engage or what approaches make sense when you don't know the relative costs of things.
Agreed - that 85% off listing from John is only for the guys buying millions or more worth of stuff, rare for an SMB to ever do that.
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@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
I had to go searching for it.
Not my job. It is their job to not turn me off. Which they did. fuck that.
Everyone has public pricing if you know how to use Government contract price lists that contractually must be posted
Someone needs to make a quick reference somewhere.
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
snip very good discussion on various points of costing out solutions
VARS are important. But this project is at the very beginning of even trying to figure out which solution to narrow down to. So this is way before a VAR should be involved. This is why simple public pricing is important. The OP does not care at this point about specific deals. The OP needs to know about general costs for each solution type.
So it's the stage when you need budgetary quotes. You need those to be accurate. All it takes is one damn tiny license, SKU, or miscalculation (RAW vs. real!) and you are off by 100% (or 400%!). I'm sorry that it requires a phone call to a SE/VAR and maybe 30 minutes to an hour of Q&A or emails back and forth, but this is part of your job. If you don't like it hire someone else to deal with it.
Public cloud and SaaS are not any better, because if you don't size workloads properly for every little thing (Bandwidth, CPU, Memory) then costs can get even more fun quickly.
This cult of "Don't talk to the vendor until it's time to pull the trigger" is moronic. Even if you work for a classified site, vendors have sales teams who have the required clearances to openly discuss what you need to do.
I've seen a LOT of IT people be fired for screwing up purchasing because they tried to buy without discussing what was needed. Don't join their ranks.
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@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
This cult of "Don't talk to the vendor until it's time to pull the trigger" is moronic. Even if you work for a classified site, vendors have sales teams who have the required clearances to openly discuss what you need to do.
Not really. The vendor cult of "hide it all and make it unique to every customer" is moronic. It's a drive to make it impossible for customer IT to do real comparisons and to make only large vendors have enough mind share to get enough time taken with them to bother doing quotes. Quotes don't take 30 minutes, no matter what any vendor says. They are costly and time consuming and automatically make a vendor dramatically harder to justify working with because they increase the cost of "friction" with said vendor.
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@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
I've seen a LOT of IT people be fired for screwing up purchasing because they tried to buy without discussing what was needed. Don't join their ranks.
That's the very thing we want to avoid. Costly and pointless sales tactics from vendors withholding basic information about products to know if they are even warranted for investigation.
In SMB IT especially, the cost of getting quotes can end up doubling the cost of the solution! I've seen companies do this, lose months and have to bring in specialists to handle the swarm of vendors providing options that should have been ruled out in five minutes of quick discussion. It was insanely costly and the project could have been completed using publicly known products and pricing quickly and easily had they not made this "get quotes" mistake.
The quoting process took so long and was so over the top (vendors like Dell took weeks to coordinate) that the customer ran out of time and money and just did reckless, terrible things that didn't work because they couldn't get through the quoting.
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@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
Even if you work for a classified site, vendors have sales teams who have the required clearances to openly discuss what you need to do.
Here is the thing, IF they had pricing that was easy to get, they could post it publicly. The argument is self defeating. If a five minute vendor call could get an answer, then publicly posting pricing would be trivial. If the call requires loads of time and effort and likely forces you to sit on the phone being given a sales line in order to get a quote, it's costly and moronic. It can't be both ways. I totally understand that some products are complex to quote, but they are not complex to ballpark. If the product is so complex that there is no way to have pricing on it, chances are it's a problematic product already.
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@dashrender said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
I had to go searching for it.
Not my job. It is their job to not turn me off. Which they did. fuck that.
Everyone has public pricing if you know how to use Government contract price lists that contractually must be posted
Someone needs to make a quick reference somewhere.
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
snip very good discussion on various points of costing out solutions
VARS are important. But this project is at the very beginning of even trying to figure out which solution to narrow down to. So this is way before a VAR should be involved. This is why simple public pricing is important. The OP does not care at this point about specific deals. The OP needs to know about general costs for each solution type.
I agree, public pricing is pretty important. You can't know what VARs to engage or what approaches make sense when you don't know the relative costs of things.
Agreed - that 85% off listing from John is only for the guys buying millions or more worth of stuff, rare for an SMB to ever do that.
Right, I need two servers with these specs. End of discussion, what does that cost? The customer knows way more than the vendor in these cases. All vendor engagement beyond getting the price over as quickly as possible is just wasted customer time and money that has to go against the value of that solution.
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@dashrender said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@jaredbusch said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
I had to go searching for it.
Not my job. It is their job to not turn me off. Which they did. fuck that.
Everyone has public pricing if you know how to use Government contract price lists that contractually must be posted
Someone needs to make a quick reference somewhere.
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
snip very good discussion on various points of costing out solutions
VARS are important. But this project is at the very beginning of even trying to figure out which solution to narrow down to. So this is way before a VAR should be involved. This is why simple public pricing is important. The OP does not care at this point about specific deals. The OP needs to know about general costs for each solution type.
I agree, public pricing is pretty important. You can't know what VARs to engage or what approaches make sense when you don't know the relative costs of things.
Agreed - that 85% off listing from John is only for the guys buying millions or more worth of stuff, rare for an SMB to ever do that.
85%? I've seen 90% on a 2 million dollar purchase.
Realistically if you're not getting 50% off Cisco on an order of more than 1 switch you're likely getting fucked. Dell's discounted web prices? Take another 10% off even if your only buying 2 servers.
You got small volume? No problem. Just find out what the vendor REALLY wants to sell and play let make a deal.
Getting some Cisco 9Ks? Get ready for 50% off normal discount prices if it's your FIRST NXOS/UCS product purchase. Bundle that shit with 1 UCS server, and get them to slap an ACI license on it that you never use and pants start falling!
Need to buy vSphere and thinking about vSAN? There are some strong double digit discounts if your buying both SKU's together. The gap between essentials plus and standard pricing closes really fast.
Brocade, need a VDX but don't have a lot of cash? Port licensing! Only license the first 12 ports for 10GBps speeds! Cisco is the same with MDS' Fibre Channel switches.
Then there are the financing games...
Want to buy a TINY HDS array with 3TB with some servers?
First time purchasing discount 10% off, Dynamic Provisioning license will pretty much be free because it's tied to array purchase and HDS will wrap the VMware licensing, and servers in with the switches and financing as long as the array is like 20% of the deal or something crazy.
Got a project for VDI that you know will end up with 800 users but needs to start with 100, and your not sure if it will get killed in 1 year?
Dell magic cloud hardware pricing time! Get a VxRAIL in on a month to month lease where you can return it in 12 months if the project goes south. The lease allows for returns after that at any time, and you can swap for bigger nodes. Prices go down like 5% every month or something weird and so you get elastic cloud pricing for onsite deployments.
Knowing list is honestly useless when you don't know what discounts will apply in a quarter, or for what products. A lot of vendors have a small handful products every quarter that get an extra 30% off "power play". If you get a quote that's good for the quarter but don't keep in touch with the VAR you might miss the discount (not that you need to buy things you don't need, but it may throw off your budgeting). This is why you gota talk to your VARs!
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@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
Knowing list is honestly useless when you don't know what discounts will apply in a quarter, or for what products. A lot of vendors have a small handful products every quarter that get an extra 30% off "power play". If you get a quote that's good for the quarter but don't keep in touch with the VAR you might miss the discount (not that you need to buy things you don't need, but it may throw off your budgeting). This is why you gota talk to your VARs!
I don't agree. Because all vendors do this. So knowing list really does give you 90% of what you need. And if a vendor throws away business because they do stupid public pricing is their own loss. Most vendors know not to do that, this is basic IT. So while knowing list doesn't tell you what you will pay, it does give you reasonable basis for comparison because everyone will have a sale quarterly that you can account for.
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Example. I need a server. I can call Dell, HPE, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, etc. and get quotes. Or I can just look up what they cost. The final numbers will be close in relative terms as they will all discount similarly. I don't need a VAR for that at the higher levels.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
This cult of "Don't talk to the vendor until it's time to pull the trigger" is moronic. Even if you work for a classified site, vendors have sales teams who have the required clearances to openly discuss what you need to do.
Not really. The vendor cult of "hide it all and make it unique to every customer" is moronic. It's a drive to make it impossible for customer IT to do real comparisons and to make only large vendors have enough mind share to get enough time taken with them to bother doing quotes. Quotes don't take 30 minutes, no matter what any vendor says. They are costly and time consuming and automatically make a vendor dramatically harder to justify working with because they increase the cost of "friction" with said vendor.
The reason it is unique is that the costs are unique to each customer, and vendors compete against each other for discounts for specific groups.
Everyone discounts education (Because they have volume and typically lower capital budgets) but no one discounts their support contracts (because they are understaffed and lean heavily on support). Citibank is more often than not only going to call support because they have found a bug. They, on the other hand, will likely get stiff discounts of support renewals.
If you don't align your costs against your competition or your customer's costs imposed on your support organization you will fail. Anything else is just Soviet pricing strategies.
Some products often have 50 features. Some deployments will need all of those features (and therefore likely get discounted less as there is less competition, as well as incur higher support fee's). Some deployments will need fewer features and have 50 other options. A mixture of tiered products (With sub features) helps solve this elastic price problem, but at a certain point being ala-cart for all features makes it insane to figure out what to buy. Empowering sales managers to on the fly adjust discounts say for more competitive deals with fewer needs enables the SKU Sprawl to be lower, customers to get more for their money and profit to be optimized.
THe ONLY way to achieve what you're asking for is radical reduction in SKU sprawl.
This reminds me of the argument that Microsoft should throw all features into SQL standard and not hold them out for more expensive enterprise or that Windows Server shouldn't need CALs. This is bad a for a huge number of reasons.This wouldn't work as no one could afford SQL or Windows Server anymore (It would get priced optimally for large enterprises) and Microsoft would loose a shed load of profit from smaller shops. The long and the short of it is Stock holder obligations prevent this, it would kill revenue.
Note, these little lovely startups you see that offer simple pricing gradually transition away from it as they get mature offerings (or risk leaving money on the table like Microsoft). Nutanix has gone from 1 to 3 different editions, for now, multiple products. Equallogic didn't add SKU's but they became too expensive vs. alternatives as they gained too many features to serve the low end of the market.
Only products that serve commodity markets can have simple, transparent pricing.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
Example. I need a server. I can call Dell, HPE, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, etc. and get quotes. Or I can just look up what they cost. The final numbers will be close in relative terms as they will all discount similarly. I don't need a VAR for that at the higher levels.
Except it's not that simple in a world of OEM's competing to take over your datacenter.
The discount %'s will vary wildly. Cisco will potentially be negative if bundled with a switch or an ACI license.
Dell will go into crazy eddy mode if you hit the magic "Storage, Software, Server, Switch" (4S's on a quote). A vSAN disk loaded R630 with some switches I swear triggers a party mode for the lights in the round rock call centers.
HPE if you are willing to look at Synergy where they are hungry for Logo's will start throwing hardware at you for free.
Oracle if you will sign an Oracle ELA (MUHAHAHAHA YOU'LL NEVER HAVE YOUR SOUL BACK), will do interesting things with hardware prices.
Tell the vendor it's a competitive deal and say who they are competing against and see if you get an extra 4-10% off...
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
Knowing list is honestly useless when you don't know what discounts will apply in a quarter, or for what products. A lot of vendors have a small handful products every quarter that get an extra 30% off "power play". If you get a quote that's good for the quarter but don't keep in touch with the VAR you might miss the discount (not that you need to buy things you don't need, but it may throw off your budgeting). This is why you gota talk to your VARs!
I don't agree. Because all vendors do this. So knowing list really does give you 90% of what you need. And if a vendor throws away business because they do stupid public pricing is their own loss. Most vendors know not to do that, this is basic IT. So while knowing list doesn't tell you what you will pay, it does give you reasonable basis for comparison because everyone will have a sale quarterly that you can account for.
There are vendors where discount off list is normally 10%, there are ones where it's normally 70% (Meraki, from a MSP who does a lot of volumes). Often those standard discount rates can vary between product lines for the same vendor, especially if they are not fully integrated into the same partner network.
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@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
Knowing list is honestly useless when you don't know what discounts will apply in a quarter, or for what products. A lot of vendors have a small handful products every quarter that get an extra 30% off "power play". If you get a quote that's good for the quarter but don't keep in touch with the VAR you might miss the discount (not that you need to buy things you don't need, but it may throw off your budgeting). This is why you gota talk to your VARs!
I don't agree. Because all vendors do this. So knowing list really does give you 90% of what you need. And if a vendor throws away business because they do stupid public pricing is their own loss. Most vendors know not to do that, this is basic IT. So while knowing list doesn't tell you what you will pay, it does give you reasonable basis for comparison because everyone will have a sale quarterly that you can account for.
There are vendors where discount off list is normally 10%, there are ones where it's normally 70% (Meraki, from a MSP who does a lot of volumes). Often those standard discount rates can vary between product lines for the same vendor, especially if they are not fully integrated into the same partner network.
True, but Meraki is a product you'd never use anyway. Of actual quality products and vendors, do you ever see this happening?
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I must be doing something wrong. How do you all work and have time for such (great!) in depth discussions, here and in other threads. I'm trying to be an active participant in this conversation but I'm not doing a great job at it. For that, I apologize.
We are mostly a Windows shop, but we (and I'm sure this will open up another stream of discussion) also use Avaya, managed by a service provider. We are looking to add SIP and an IVR solution. I just was told Avaya will not support (at this time) anything other than VMware. It looks like this takes Scale out of the running. We have equipment in 5 NA locations and over 500 phones, so management is not looking to move to anything else at this time.
@JaredBusch - I have some questions regarding your earlier comments on our "a bit abnormal" file server size. Should I start a separate thread for this?
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@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@john-nicholson said in Looking for virtualization advice:
This cult of "Don't talk to the vendor until it's time to pull the trigger" is moronic. Even if you work for a classified site, vendors have sales teams who have the required clearances to openly discuss what you need to do.
Not really. The vendor cult of "hide it all and make it unique to every customer" is moronic. It's a drive to make it impossible for customer IT to do real comparisons and to make only large vendors have enough mind share to get enough time taken with them to bother doing quotes. Quotes don't take 30 minutes, no matter what any vendor says. They are costly and time consuming and automatically make a vendor dramatically harder to justify working with because they increase the cost of "friction" with said vendor.
The reason it is unique is that the costs are unique to each customer, and vendors compete against each other for discounts for specific groups.
Everyone discounts education (Because they have volume and typically lower capital budgets) but no one discounts their support contracts (because they are understaffed and lean heavily on support). Citibank is more often than not only going to call support because they have found a bug. They, on the other hand, will likely get stiff discounts of support renewals.
If you don't align your costs against your competition or your customer's costs imposed on your support organization you will fail. Anything else is just Soviet pricing strategies.
Some products often have 50 features. Some deployments will need all of those features (and therefore likely get discounted less as there is less competition, as well as incur higher support fee's). Some deployments will need fewer features and have 50 other options. A mixture of tiered products (With sub features) helps solve this elastic price problem, but at a certain point being ala-cart for all features makes it insane to figure out what to buy. Empowering sales managers to on the fly adjust discounts say for more competitive deals with fewer needs enables the SKU Sprawl to be lower, customers to get more for their money and profit to be optimized.
THe ONLY way to achieve what you're asking for is radical reduction in SKU sprawl.
This reminds me of the argument that Microsoft should throw all features into SQL standard and not hold them out for more expensive enterprise or that Windows Server shouldn't need CALs. This is bad a for a huge number of reasons.This wouldn't work as no one could afford SQL or Windows Server anymore (It would get priced optimally for large enterprises) and Microsoft would loose a shed load of profit from smaller shops. The long and the short of it is Stock holder obligations prevent this, it would kill revenue.
Note, these little lovely startups you see that offer simple pricing gradually transition away from it as they get mature offerings (or risk leaving money on the table like Microsoft). Nutanix has gone from 1 to 3 different editions, for now, multiple products. Equallogic didn't add SKU's but they became too expensive vs. alternatives as they gained too many features to serve the low end of the market.
Only products that serve commodity markets can have simple, transparent pricing.
This just feels like an excuse. How hard is it to make complex pricing transparent? It's not. The issue isn't that it is hard, it is that the Moroccan bazaar is advantageous to large vendors with trained sales people who can keep you from getting the big discounts but make you buy anyway. It's all a push to get you into an emotional position so that you will over pay or not go to a lower cost competitor.
There are exceptional products with really high complexity. But even working in the financial sector, this is extremely rare. It's just vendors that don't value the time of the customers.
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@garyp said in Looking for virtualization advice:
We are looking to add SIP and an IVR solution. I just was told Avaya will not support (at this time) anything other than VMware.
Drop them. Not because of VMware, because this is a ridiculous "we don't support our customers and don't live in the modern world" stance. This suggests that they are running out of support resources and are no longer a trusted, viable vendor. Plus, it's Avaya, this isn't the 1990s, no need to be paying high costs for basic telephony services.
Think about this.... how much is the cost of Avaya, then how much is the cost of needing support for phones because you have the complexity of Avaya, then how much is the cost of VMware because it is all that they support, then how much is the cost of management of VMware because you are forced into it. All of that is part of the cost of your Avaya phones.
Have you looked at something like FreePBX that is free? You can get support more easily, I'd wager, than for the Avaya and it is a modern product that hasn't been abandoned by its vendor (a vendor on the brink of bankruptcy, I believe we've heard.) THen if you choose VMware it will be because it was the right product for you, not because you were (and are) trapped with it because of one bad piece of legacy software.
Think of the Avaya as technical dept to be removed.
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@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
(a vendor on the brink of bankruptcy, I believe we've heard.)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-avaya-bankruptcy-idUSKBN1AN1Y9
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@dashrender said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@scottalanmiller said in Looking for virtualization advice:
(a vendor on the brink of bankruptcy, I believe we've heard.)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-avaya-bankruptcy-idUSKBN1AN1Y9
Ha, so they are coming out of bankruptcy soon? Still, in an appliance vendor, that's the end of the line. Your appliance is 100% dependent on their remaining viable for the lifetime of your device. Avaya isn't a bad company, but their products are priced for another era (which they are from) and don't make very much sense in the modern world.
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@garyp said in Looking for virtualization advice:
@JaredBusch - I have some questions regarding your earlier comments on our "a bit abnormal" file server size. Should I start a separate thread for this?
It is relevant to this discussion so your call.
I used that phrase intentionally, because it is abnormal, but not exceptional based on an assumption of user count. You could have way more users than I am guestimating.
You could also have something more than office documents as I mentioned in the earlier post. A company that deals with video editing will have drastically more needs for drive space than a basic company that sells widgets.
