DrunkenData.com » Blog Archive » Want to get a better deal on storage?:

Ahhh, the time-honoured technique of dropping a competitor's name to get your vendor's sales guy to drop the price a few points - always worth it.

What's also worth while is being well aware of what's happening in the market overall - not just our preferred vendor's offerings, but also what their competitors have got coming up.

While a single vendor strategy is generally worthwhile, you can leverage a lot of benefit from the knowledge that you have of the market as a whole, and help build yourself up a roadmap of sorts for future work.