George Crump

Storage efficiency: Go beyond cost savings

You’re feeling it full force -- the impact of the economic downturn -- and so are your customers. For the last two quarters, conversations have turned from “How do I expand?” to “How do I contract and cut costs?” Resellers, in the race to find projects and products that can help their...

The value of focus

Spreading your technical knowledge too thin is a very common mistake that resellers (and manufacturers) make. A great example is the issue of what VMware storage protocol to use. There are three choices: iSCSI, Fibre Channel or NFS. Many solutions support all three.

But whether you...

Disk archiving: How do you know it’s not the next ILM?

Disk-based archiving is a popular topic today, one that you might be bringing up with customers or maybe they’re even asking you about it. As we detailed in our article on archiving basics,...

File virtualization: A reseller’s best friend in tough economic times

Right now, your customers are looking primarily for one thing, to save money. One of the ways to do that is to get old data off of expensive primary storage and onto a disk-based archive like the kind offered by Permabit, Caringo or Nexsan. The question is, How do you get the data to the...

Poking holes in customer plans

“Trusted adviser” is a status that all reseller salespeople should try to achieve with their customers, but sometimes being the trusted adviser means you have to confront customers on decisions they’ve made that may adversely affect their business. Sometimes as a trusted adviser you need...

Selecting a CDP strategy

In a recent article on SearchDataBackup.com, Curtis Preston provides a thorough explanation of continuous data protection (CDP) for end users and how it differs from near-CDP. So what does this technology...

Your organization should be blogging

I am constantly amazed at how many of your customers get the bulk of their IT news from blogs. That’s right, blogs. In fairness, they tend to take the source into consideration when evaluating the quality of the information; corporate blogs may be less trustworthy than an independent source,...

Training: Why you should be offering it

In my last entry, I cited a survey Symantec fielded last fall indicating that IT budgets would either stay the same or go up in the following 12 months....

How will the economic stimulus package help resellers?

Are you really asking yourself that question? Then you are about ready to go out of business. I find that most businesses that are waiting for the winds of Washington to determine their...

Will your suppliers prosper this year?

In my last entry, I asked you to examine your organization. Is your company focused and ready to prosper this year? If not, you still have some work ahead of you on that front. Go back to my last post and...