I drive a Honda Odyssey minivan.
Well, actually, it’s my wife’s van. I use it for occasional trips to Home Depot, the landfill…that sort of thing. And I’ll freely admit it…..I like driving the van (which I lovingly refer to as “the bus”). It has tons of room, plenty of power, great visibility, it’s SUPER RELIABLE.
Until it’s not.
There was nothing really wrong with the van. We faithfully have an authorized Honda dealer perform maintenance at the suggested intervals so it keeps delivering the reliability we’ve come to expect. It was simply time for its 110,000 mile checkup, and ironically the “check engine” light came on at 108K. Talk about irony (or at least a reliable reminder!)
In any case, the dealer recommended new spark plugs, timing belt, water pump, oil change and cylinder recalibration. I was suspicious of that last one but after looking into it agreed to the work. It would take all day so I’d need to leave the car overnight and they offered me a rental car to get back to the office.
They called their preferred local car rental agency and requested a vehicle be delivered quickly. I was happy to see the rental agent within 15 minutes, complete the paperwork and walk outside to see my temporary wheels. That’s when my day went downhill.
I was staring at a very compact (is that overly redundant?) rental vehicle. I won’t tell you what brand or model, but I can honestly tell you it was about the same size as my bike. And it wasn’t even in great shape. It had multiple dents and scratches in the bodywork and stains on the seats. For the record my car is a mid-sized sedan and I am meticulous about keeping it clean.
This tiny rental was not at all what I expected. In the past I’ve received rental vehicles of the same type and size of the car being worked on. But, after all, the dealership covered the cost of the rental and I needed to get back to the office.
So away I drove in my miniature clown car. I didn’t feel safe in it, and the visibility was horrible. The experience of driving this little vehicle on the highway among towering tractor trailer trucks in rush hour traffic resulted in sweaty palms and white knuckles. I “safely” made it to my destination but it certainly wasn’t fun.
Luckily not all new experiences require settling for less than we had previously. We often get accustomed to things working a specific way and receiving the same experience time after time. Maybe we simply expect some experiences to be the same.
Take EMC NetWorker for example. For over 25 years, many tens of thousands of users have come to expect enterprise-level capabilities as they protect their business applications and data. And, during that time, NetWorker has adapted to the rapidly changing IT landscape by protecting customers’ mission-critical data with continued investment and commitment.
NetWorker is known for helping organizations control data protection costs by bringing management and control of the entire information environment into one central offering. In a traditional sense this equates to a data protection environment in a physical data center.
But NetWorker’s capabilities extend beyond on-premises environments to the cloud. After all, you need to protect your data wherever it lives. So, whether your data protection strategy focus is on-premises backup, extended to private cloud for backup or long-term retention, or moving to backup of applications and data in the public cloud, NETWORKER PROVIDES THE SAME ENTERPRISE-LEVEL USER EXPERIENCE.
In other words, YOU CAN EXPECT the NetWorker solutions and tools you use to manage on-premises data protection processes ARE THE SAME for your cloud-based data protection processes. Same capabilities. Same expectations. Same experience. No white knuckles or sweaty palms.
