Just ask Bruce Biondi, vice president of New York Computer Consulting LLP in Woodbury, N.Y., a short drive from the offices of VARBusiness. Biondi says, "You pitch the client to buy a fast machine. A well-made machine. And then to save a few bucks, you put in slow hard drives. That's a self-defeating sale. You want the hard drives to match the speed of the bus and the chip to give you a truly fast file server. That will keep the client happy and coming back for another sale."
And you do have a choice of hard drives, so don't be fooled by manufacturers' prepackaged server offerings. Even with the prepackaged file servers sold by some of the larger manufacturers, you can pick and choose the hard drives and SCSI cards. As Biondi states, "You may have to buy an additional SCSI card, and purchase the computer without hard drives, but you can configure your machine to do what you want it to do. But this may defeat the manufacturer's on-site warranty, since manufacturers won't cover the third-party hardware."
Knowing that you can add drives you specify to a server, even if it defeats the on-site warranty is something to consider. You can really soup your clients' servers. But how do you sell these new-fangled hard drives to clients who think the cost of the server is too high to begin with? That's not as difficult as it seems. Use and develop some stock analogies. Everyone (well, almost) drives a car. We're a nation of speed freaks. Even if we don't own a fast car, we're impressed by one, and have looked at fast cars with longing in our hearts.
So use our love of fast cars as an analogy. Following this scenario, tell your clients that it would be criminal to buy a Porsche with the same engine as a Justy (those three-cylinder wonders of a few years back). Or better yet, ask how bad it would be to marry that same Porsche with the tires the Justy used. Tires on a performance car need to be wide-and durable-to grip the road so the car handles correctly.
Your hard drive in the file server needs to be able to perform its I/O operations quickly so that the data can be processed by that blazing CPU you just installed. Show the customer our test results. The speed differential between standard SCSI drives and these new, fast SCSI drives means that those database queries will yield results in a fraction of the time they used to.
The selling point is productivity. All clients want to be more productive; that's what got the customer to your door for the new computer in the first place. Harp on that word, and sell your customer the right hardware.
-Wayne Spivak is president of SBA Consulting, an IT consulting firm in Bellmore, N.Y., and SBA.NET.WEB, an Internet and Web consulting firm.