Also XenServer (and soon to be XCP-ng) have a vSAN type of approach as well.

I'd ask @olivier to explain how it all works though.

@wrx7m said in Comparing IT Buyers and IT Pros:

@scottalanmiller said in Comparing IT Buyers and IT Pros:

@wrx7m said in Comparing IT Buyers and IT Pros:

What if you are both? lol

That's a hard aspect of it, there is almost always overlap. Not always, but especially in the SMB there is often quite a bit. Any SMB IT Pro will have to buy regularly. Many buyers do IT work on smaller scales so as not to have to go through the process of buying something simple.

Yeah, I am an IT pro that has to buy.

At some point, all pros have to buy sometimes. Heck even General Motors buys some of their parts from the outside!

This just came up in an IT buyer's community and I think it is really important:

IT Practitioners get their knowledge from IT peers, industry training, logic, math and experience. Same as any other technical pursuit like civil engineering.

IT Buyers should get their knowledge for IT Practitioners

IT Buyers who believe themselves to be IT practitioners use whitepapers - a quasi-technical sales tool that looks like technical advice but is actually vendor sales advice. Whitepaper is an IT industry term for a marketing brochure with technical information used to guide customers to what the vendor wants done - which is not necessarily bad, but is not the same thing as industry advice. The vendor's agenda is not the same as the customer's agenda in all cases. IT works for customers, whitepapers represent vendors.

Similarly, Gartner could be considered the same as whitepapers, without the technical benefits.