I’m sorry, but the company who contracted your services is clearly abanding its customers by not offering them the same special deal. Or at least, treating them as second class citizens - “Thank you very much, keep sending us your money - we’ll use the profits to lure in more suckers…”

And thus, the deal is no deal at all - it’s yet another marketing shell game, in the same category (although not nearly as well executed) as NetApp’s “guarantees.”

Guess what? Customers are smart enough to understand that ADDING old equipment in the waning days of its life-cycle with the most complication and time-consuming management interfaces isn’t a solution to their economic challenges. Especially when it is clear that they will be trapped in this equipment because Hitachi offers no way to non-disruptive migrate OUT of it to the inevitable next generation platform…which probably SHOULD be coming out in the fall of 2009, if Hitachi Japan keeps to its historic development cycles (although I heard that the beta was slipped from May out to the Fall of 09 already, so maybe not).

In any event, when you put pencil to paper, most find that the power savings, operational efficiency, state-of-the-art scale-out technology, performance and integration with virtual server technologies offered by Symmetrix V-Max *AND* DMX4 make it far more economically attractive to consolidate their old capacity into new frames than to put a bandaid on it.

Hitachi’s proposal of putting yet another box on the floor is simply a silly way to save money, power and floor space - even if some of the software is (temporarily) free (for only their non-Hitachi storage).

Hitachi Math only works on Hitachi paper (and blogs-for-hire, apparently).