“He really seems to understand that our storage situation is unique, and his SAN throughput figures were certainly impressive!”“I like the fact that his product is clearly best-in-class, like our other storage. And if we bought it, we could show our corporate management team that we have best-in-class SAN storage to go with our new best-in-class servers and our new best-in-class NAS platform.”“Well maybe... but I’d wait just a bit on sharing that with the CEO if I were you. We actually have a small problem there... we still haven’t quite gotten best-in-class NAS to play nicely with the best-in-class servers.”“Really? But you’ve had three months to do the integration testing. I thought all the products we bought were standards-compliant!”“Yes, of course they were standards-compliant. But it turns out that NAS standards and server standards don’t necessarily care the least bit about one another. And just because this new best-in-class SAN storage is compliant with storage standards, such as SMI-S, doesn’t mean it will play well with the standards-based management framework, or even that it will play well with NAS storage.”