Vlogs

Hi, I'm John Joseph.  I recently joined Dell during its acquisition of EqualLogic, where I was vice president of marketing for 5 years.  It's been an amazing experience since 2003 when we worked to convince people that iSCSI SAN technology was real, and would cut the cost and complexity of deploying networked storage for IT. Five years later, we're a reference platform for VMware environments, we have nearly 4,000 customers in more than 30 countries and we're on the eve of bringing EqualLogic's products to the world on a massive scale as part of the Dell family. I'm excited, and Dell's reception has had a lot to do with it. The kind words, incredible enthusiasm and support of the Dell employees that I've met so far have been fantastic.

What truly excites me about this opportunity is our ability to share with the world the experience that our customers have had with our products, partners, and employees.  The reason for this is that our customers are best situated to say what makes the EqualLogic PS Series so unique.  And thankfully, they are usually eager to tell their story. 

Be assured we're not satisfied to sit on our laurels and wait for people to come to us.  We are well aware that serving a larger customer base can only be done by making the investments necessary to keep them delighted with Dell EqualLogic storage.  This includes expanding our support team while continuing their exceptional customer care, and making our VAR channel stronger, better trained, and profitably happy. Further, the technology innovation cannot stop. Look for us to enrich our storage management capabilities, broaden our application and third party integration, and build out end-to-end solutions for our customers.

The latest example of our continuing product improvement came today in the new PS5000E array for that packs 16 TB into our standard 3U chassis - that's nearly 50% more capacity per modular array.  EqualLogic engineering, run by my partner in crime Paula Long, worked tirelessly to test, beat, bang on, stress, retest, and QA these cutting edge drives so that the Dell EqualLogic PS Series begins its new life with industry-leading terabyte-drive technology on a unified hardware platform. 

Here's a vlog where I talk a bit more about what customers can expect from Dell and EqualLogic in the future.

The latest example of our continuing product improvement came today in the new PS5000E array for that packs 16 TB into our standard 3U chassis - that's nearly 50% more capacity per modular array.  EqualLogic engineering, run by my partner in crime Paula Long, worked tirelessly to test, beat, bang on, stress, retest, and QA these cutting edge drives so that the Dell EqualLogic PS Series begins its new life with industry-leading terabyte-drive technology on a unified hardware platform. 

Even though the Dallas Cowboys won't be playing, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's game. I'm interested to see the reaction to the commercials tomorrow, and welcome your comments here.

Update, February 3: Here is the Dell (PRODUCT) RED Super Bowl ad. The song that's playing is Mick Jagger's "Charmed Life" from his record, Very Best of Mick Jagger.

Beyond that, I saw that Jeremiah Owyang set up @Superbowlads on Twitter to allow the community to rate Super Bowl commercials in real time. Here's his post for more details. Rather than trying to re-create the steps, here's a screenshot from Jeremiah's post that explains how to do it (I hope you're okay with the screenshot approach, Jeremiah!).

Also, just so you know, the screenshot is hyperlinked to the Terraminds page that Jeremiah links to in step 3.

I'll post the Dell (PRODUCT) RED Super Bowl commercial here in this post once it airs tomorrow. We welcome your comments here, and I'll be watching the overall reactions via @Superbowlads in Twitter and the Terraminds RSS feed.

Update, February 3: Some folks are using this Tweetscan feed to track the overall conversation. It seems to be update faster than Terraminds.

Today we completed the EqualLogic acquisition, a leading provider of high-performance storage area network (SAN) solutions designed for virtualization and ease-of-use. The purchase extends Dell's leadership in simplifying IT for customers. 

Customers face extreme challenges with data growth. Storage solutions that use existing infrastructure, install in minutes not days, manage themselves, can grow easily as needs increase and plug into the virtualized IT ecosystem will help businesses with their storage needs. EqualLogic provides these storage solutions and that's the incredible value that Dell will now be able to deliver to our customers.  With Dell's PartnerDirect channel, we will unleash the power of iSCSI and virtualization to redefine the economics of storing and processing data.

Dell plans to preserve and build on EqualLogic's successful channel program in addition to offering products directly from Dell.  Starting today in the U.S. and ultimately around the world, current EqualLogic partners will be enrolled into PartnerDirect and are eligible for Dell's newest certification—Enterprise Architecture.  Certification requirements and benefits are modeled after EqualLogic's widely-regarded channel program and extend the benefits of Dell's full server and storage product lines.

Here's a vlog where I talk more about this acquisition.

After talking to several folks here at Dell, I can say that we have a lot of folks who are excited to bring the PowerEdge M-Series modular blade servers to market, along with a new 10U enclosure. Building on the PowerEdge 1955 blade system that InfoWorld recently named Best Blade Server System of the Year, Dell focused much attention on energy efficiency, I/O flexibility and usability in designing the new M-Series system.

The 10U PowerEdge M1000e enclosure supports up to 16 PowerEdge M600 or M605 blade servers that offer two quad-core Intel  Xeon or AMD Opteron processors per blade.  We improved power and cooling by starting with our Energy Smart technologies, using high efficient fans and power supplies, and through Dynamic Power Management—which allows customers to use software to dynamically load balance across power supplies, or to even turn off power supplies when they're not needed. Flexibility is also key, and the M-Series has been designed to support snap-in capability all the way down to the switch interconnects. The PowerEdge M1000e also offers all kinds of connectivity options—including the upgradable Dell PowerConnect M6220 Layer 3 switch, three different Cisco switch options, two 4Gb Fibre Chanel switch options from Brocade, Fibre Channel host bus adapters from QLogic and Emulex, and more.

These blade servers are ideal for medium and large size customers who are faced with space constraints, power and cooling challenges, and the need to scale their environment quickly wihout sacrificing ease of deployment.

In this vlog, I talked to Chad Fenner from the PowerEdge server team. He covers quite a bit here... providing insight into the development process, usability enhancements, more details on energy efficiency, ease of use, connectivity and flexibility and more.

Folks on the development team told me that lots of customer feedback they gathered during the 2-year development cycle helped shape this product. Like I mention in the video, there's many different topics to cover with a product like this.

We look forward to your comments—please let us know what areas you want to discuss in more detail and we'll go from there.

As many of you know, we've been developing the Latitude XT for some time. During that time, we've spent a lot of time talking to Tablet PC customers about what they like and don't like about existing products.

Customers told us that existing Tablet PCs are just too clumsy and clunky. We've worked to address this by creating one of the lightest and thinnest 12.1" convertible tablets on the market at about 1" thick and 3.6 pounds. I'm glad to see that some reviewers like Andrew Baxter at Tablet PC Review said it was the smallest power adapter he's seen on any notebook or Tablet PC.

It's clear that displays are important to many customers as well. Many customers use Tablet PCs in outdoor or brightly-lit environments, and many existing products didn't have adequate screen brightness.  That's why we designed an optional daylight viewing panel that is the brightest in its category-at 400 nits, it's almost 2X the competition.  Now, this option does add a little more thickness and a little more weight.  So, for mainstream users more concerned about size and weight, we still recommend the backlit LED panel at 220 nits.

Next, as tablet users are mobile all day, they told us that battery life was becoming increasingly important.  We answered this with a standard six-cell battery that offers about 4 ½ hours of continuous battery life and an optional battery slice that snaps snugly on the underside for up to 9 hours of "all day computing." Regarding the battery slice, I saw that Engadget raised concerns about the battery slice blocking the air intake. Here's the deal: with the battery slice attached, there is  a small gap (1mm or so) between the slice and the bottom of the tablet. This space leaves sufficient room for air to flow from the fan through the sides of the system, allowing the unit to cool. In our tests, the system remains within spec for heat both with and without the slice.

But perhaps the biggest frustration customers told us about with existing offerings was around the use of "resistive" touch technology. This technology needs the user to apply force to the screen in order for the system to recognize interaction, which contributes to poor accuracy and durability issues with the screen itself. Many customers using resistive tablets that support both pen and touch actually wind up turning this feature off because the palm rejection technology is so cumbersome. On this front, I think we're making our biggest impact. The Latitude XT is the first sub-four pound convertible with both pen and "capacitive" touch technology. Capacitive technology senses the touch of a finger with no pressure leading to better accuracy, response times, screen durability, and ultimately, a better user experience. As an example, as far as accuracy and speed, our third-party tests confirmed this against the Lenovo X61T.  Also, the digitizer is rated up to 10 times more durable than competitors resistive touch digitizer technology.

In this vlog, Rick Seger from N-Trig and Bob Sparks from our Engineering team walk you through the capacitive pen and touch capability of the Latitude XT and introduce you to the benefits of freestyle computing. 

With this product, we've really made an effort to address our customers' issues with other Tablet PC offerings. I hope you agree!