A few days ago I wrote about the FUD that is the HP/Cisco Tolly Group report. From the post, it might seem I’m anti-HP. This is not the case at all. I am anti-FUD.

Back in the day (by that I mean 24 months or so ago), Data Centre FUD was pretty easy to weed out and could generally be taken with a pinch of salt.

Servers were a capex based commodity to run workloads, network for a lot of people began and ended with Cisco, people had began to clamber towards VMware for their hypervisor and generally the only pre-sales with a bit of bite came from the storage industry due to products actually having fundamental differences.

Life was simple.

Skip forward to today and the proven performance and reliability of the type 1 hypervisor has enamoured many a business. Only your rarer, super low latency apps tend to cause of sharp intake of breath from your virtualisation admin. To many, this means that the dream of a 100% virtualised Data Centre is a real possibility.

Gone are the days of disparate components. The talk now is about the full stack and the additional integration and simplified management that it can bring. No longer is the stack just a sum of it’s parts, it has to be more (think Power Rangers and Megazords!).

Sounds good doesn’t it? It is. However for customers, it’s a double edged sword.

There must be a far greater understanding of how each piece fits together that some smaller (and larger) organisations simply won’t have. Without this, unscrupulous salesmen can potentially spread FUD and influence decisions that may stop customers receiving the full benefits that their investment should bring. This isn’t necessarily from a technical standpoint – most vendors are good for this – it’s operational and should not be underestimated when it comes to the TCO of the system.

Ultimately, this FUD may stop a good investment from being a great investment. And that annoys me.