Storage

IDC put out a news release recently about its Q4 External Disk Storage Systems report. The headline was a bit gloomy to say the least and drove some media and blogging coverage here, here and here.

Let me give you my take on it.

Dell’s strategic investments over the last few years have been closely tied to our vision of simplifying IT – making storage simple, capable and affordable for our customers. It’s clear to me from this release that customers are voting with their wallets and that they agree with us.

From the IDC release, let me pull out a few bullet points:

• Among the top five suppliers, Dell was one of only two companies that posted strong year-over-year revenue growth during the fourth quarter of CY2008, with 10.0 percent growth;
• The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momentum, posting 61.6 percent revenue growth compared to the prior year's quarter. Dell led the market with 35.3 percent revenue share, followed by EMC with 16.8 percent;
• From my vantage point it appears that the slowest growing portion of the market is at the high-end of the market – the entry-level space is growing just fine.

Obviously, a lot of this success is tied to our EqualLogic acquisition (Note that IDC began reporting Dell and EqualLogic as a combined entity in the first quarter of CY2008). It’s also tied to the fact that our line of Dell PowerVault products also addresses a lot of the issues that customers are still spending their IT dollars to solve.

However, there’s much more to it than just that. Dell’s storage strategy has been about investing in areas that provide the greatest value for our customers. You’ve seen this with our long-time focus on iSCSI as a technology that lowers acquisition and deployment costs of SANs. The EqualLogic acquisition itself was a strong statement of our belief that enterprise class capabilities should be easy to deploy, but more importantly easy to manage a grow.

I see three factors converging:

First, current economic realities are causing customers to re-evaluate ALL purchases, and storage is no exception. With that, we are seeing an increased migration to iSCSI arrays.  Customers are looking to save money and iSCSI allows them to do that with little or no performance trade-off. In fact with EqualLogic’s unique scaling architecture, we are seeing even higher performance than many competing Fibre Channel arrays!  iSCSI has proven itself from the entry to the higher end of the enterprise. It’s available on all Dell primary storage offerings:  PowerVault, Dell/EMC and EqualLogic.

Second, customers are looking for the highest value products – products that save not just on acquisition cost, but importantly on-going management costs. It’s not all about value, simplicity and capability. With EqualLogic we offer all-inclusive software capabilities that allow us to come in at a fraction of competing solutions when comparing equivalent capabilities (like thin provisioning, asynchronous replication and snapshot integration with many popular applications).  Recently we announced our unique approach to de-duplication, which allows customers to save money by eliminating duplicate copies of data.

Third, customers continue to look to vendors with the broadest possible portfolios.  We recently expanded our agreement with EMC to include Celerra and enhanced our professional services.

So, as dire as the IDC headline initially reads, we think there’s some goodness buried deep in the release that needs to be discussed – one that we think is good for customers.

Scott Hanson, my colleague over at the Dell Tech Center recently did a post highlighting a couple of virtualization demos he performed recently in their lab. Something about rolling up his sleeves and getting his arms covered in virtual 1s and 0s gets @dellservergeek's propeller spinning quite fast (not a pretty sight in my estimation).

The first demo shows a single ESXi host connection to Dell's PowerVault MD3000i, while the second shows two Dell PowerEdge R805 servers connecting to a single virtual disk on the MD3000i.

Good stuff, Scott. Glad you get to "play" once in awhile.

If you asked most people, they would say that Dell is a hardware company. While that is true – yes, we do make servers, storage, laptops and such – there is much more to the story. Dell is actually in the business of selling solutions: hardware + software + services.

This week, we announced an extension of a solution that is critical to many of our customers: business intelligence or BI. Dell announced the release of Phase III of our BI Reference Configurations – this includes capabilities for 10 TB and 20TB solutions running on Microsoft Windows SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.

When business data is properly stored and analyzed, BI can deliver the powerful knowledge to enable business decision-makers to react to marketing and business demands. Just ask CareerBuilder.com.

With more than 23 million unique visitors and over 1.6 million jobs, data volumes at CareerBuilder.com have grown significantly since 2007. By using Dell servers and storage systems to power its data warehouse and business intelligence applications, CareerBuilder.com has reduced the processing time for key business intelligence load jobs up to 50 percent, allowing faster access to important business data and same-day reporting for global operations.

CareerBuilder.com is a model for businesses using data intelligently. BI and data warehousing, unfortunately, are often thought to be overly complex, difficult-to-implement and far too expensive for many companies. Most BI solutions cost over $1 million to deploy. The New York Times reported back in December that HP NeoView, HP’s BI appliance, can cost more than $10 million. Dell powered Microsoft BI solutions run in the ballpark of $300,000 – a much more business-friendly price tag, especially in this economy.

Why is CareerBuilder.com using Dell-Microsoft BI? Our Phase III Dell and Microsoft BI reference architecture takes the complexity out of deploying an enterprise class Business Intelligence solution so they can get it up and running quickly. It is built on industry standard Dell PowerEdge Servers and Microsoft's BI suite of application making it cost effective and easy to integrate with existing infrastructure. They are running it on Dell PowerEdge R900 Servers and Dell | EMC storage. This is a solution that our customers appreciate.

Is your business smarter than that of your competition?

Some industry pundits have voiced doubt about the value of providing new SAN-based software features to customers. While everyone is entitled to their opinion, Dell and others clearly disagree. That’s why Dell bundles all of the EqualLogic software features in the price of an array at no extra cost. Customers only need to have a valid support agreement in place, and then they can download the latest array firmware and even host-integrated software like ESX-aware snapshots in Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition.

A while back, we added thin provisioning to the EqualLogic PS Series. A number of our customers implemented it quickly, retroactively applying it to volumes that they had already created. In effect, they ‘thinned’ volumes and recovered capacity that had already been reserved. The feature is pretty easy to use – literally checking a box and moving some sliders around to decide on where you want to set your alarms.

However, thin provisioning may not be for everyone and definitely not every application. That’s why it’s great that on EqualLogic SANs you can easily turn it off and/or apply it selectively to any volume, all without any extra cost or software license scheme.

So there’s no catch-22 about whether you can afford a feature that you want to try. I won’t get into where and why to use thin provisioning and the valid cautions about its use. There are many other documents available for that, here and here for example. Rather, it’s worth pointing out that in these days of tight or shrinking budgets, thin provisioning is a software feature that can add value to IT administrators trying to get more out of their storage. The one word of caution: with thin provisioning, like a credit card, you will have to pay back the capacity debt one day. It’s easiest to do that with a SAN that you can expand easily, incrementally and online, such as the Dell EqualLogic PS Series.

So, as I’ve commented on others’ blogs on this same topic, I think continuously adding features into our products at no additional charge is a pretty good thing for our customers. What do you think?

Nearly 200 CIOs and IT decision-makers (and Dell customers) arrived in Austin last night to participate in Dell's IT Executive Summit conference that takes place here through Friday.

This morning, Dell's CIO Robin Johnson will open the sessions serving as master of ceremonies for the conference. There are many other main-stage presentations but also break-out sessions that offer a more intimate deep-dive around particular topics.

One such presentation will come from Dell's Gaurav Chawla of Dell's Office of the CTO. Gaurav will discuss networked storage technology protocols, including iSCSI and FCOE. In this video, he gives a brief overview of his presentation but also discusses Dell's role in industry standards bodies and how we bring about industry standards that benefit our customers.

If you're already on twitter, you follow me here (@bruceericatdell) and get updates (140 characters at a time) from the conference. Let's listen to Gaurav.