There are 10 major areas covered by storage vendor guarantee programs. For some vendors, there may be several related commitments in one or more of these areas. The value that accrues to customers from these programs comes from ease of use, more efficient resource utilization (leading to lower hardware costs), reduced energy and floorspace consumption, reduced downtime, lowered maintenance costs, increased storage product life cycles, and “free” upgrades that promise improved performance and storage density either without requiring separate hardware purchases or at significant discounts. We’ll examine each one of these in turn.
