2012

S. Sridhar, Director of Marketing at for Dell India, is quoted in this article analyzing the market situation with leading NAS vendors. “With powerful, unified storage from Dell, enterprises can now consolidate file and block-based data onto a single, shared storage system that's affordable, easy to deploy, and straightforward to manage. Dell Unified Storage solutions enable customers to drive down costs, meet demanding service levels and simplify management with an easy-to-use, multi-protocol solution that supports CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, FC and FCoE.”

Michael Vizard of IT Business Edge touches on the acquisitions Dell has made, its Fluid Data architecture and how the automation of data movement has the potential for improving information management across organizations of all sizes. “In terms of storage, Dell has come a long way since serving as a reseller of EMC products. There’s obviously no shortage of competition in the storage space. But Dell’s Fluid Data architecture at least shows the company does understand the magnitude the challenge ahead.”

“They [Mazda] were on this treadmill of having to buy a new array every three to five years. The way a lot of storage vendors sell their products, after three years, the chassis isn’t supported. They raise support costs. They force you to buy new arrays every three to five years. Compellent doesn’t do that,” said Michael Back, senior solutions consultant at Sidepath.

Travis Vigil, executive director at Dell Storage, covers the popularity of virtualization and contends that a truly virtualized data center includes storage that is not only optimized for virtual server integration but also employs innovative virtualization technology itself.

Kathy Schneider, executive director of channel programs and marketing at Dell, highlights the need for storage resellers to adapt their sales models to move away from rip and replace strategies and make way for scalable offerings. “For resellers to remain competitive there needs to be a shift away from sales models that demand customers make these wholesale, forklift upgrades. Instead, there needs to be a recognition that data growth is gradual but consistent and, therefore, making IT upgrades to handle new capacity demands ought to be equally gradual, as well.”

“Aligning its storage products more closely will go far in helping solution providers improve their Dell business,” said Patrick Mulvee, vice president of sales and marketing at Sidepath, an Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider who also became a Dell partner with the Compellent acquisition. "Customers can buy more than one Dell storage platform. They can buy Compellent, EqualLogic, or PowerVault. They can also buy Dell servers, and Dell networking. So when Dell partners with us on the deal, we don't lose.”

Bryan Jones, Dell's enterprise marketing director for EMEA, said that just three or four years ago, the focus in datacentres was on compute resources, with virtualisation of servers the hot topic, but now the explosive growth of storage requirements is the key challenge. "It's not just documents, but unstructured data and social media, too. If all this data doubles every six months, but staff and budgets don't, how do we help customers manage?" he said.

Overall it [Dell] has a convincing story, having created enough consistency between its acquired assets to begin to demonstrate a common architecture and some genuine ability to reduce its customers’ storage costs through virtualisation and in-built de-duplication and compression.

“With Dell's new primary, archive and backup storage solutions, the Dell Fluid Data architecture delivers the storage intelligence customers need to deal with a sea of constant IT change without driving up costs, wasting time or continually replacing infrastructure,” said Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell storage.

“[This is] a lot of technology, a lot of integration brought together," Darren Thomas, general manager of Dell's storage unit, said at the event in London. “We're going to continue delivering on this fluid data promise.”

Dell made a number of announcements at the Dell Storage Forum in London yesterday that prove the growing importance of software to hardware offerings and the complexities companies are facing in dealing with growing amounts of data.

Dell on Wednesday unveiled a new disk-based backup appliance that can perform data deduplication and replication tasks … The DR4000, Dell's first deduplication appliance, is based on technology gained with the company's acquisition of data compression vendor Ocarina in 2010.

Bob Fine, director of product marketing for Dell’s storage unit, said that the company’s software is designed to tie together acquired systems and provide the right foundation to add in other technology.

It's taken a little while for Dell to integrate a rather large amount of new IP from several companies it has acquired in the last few years, but it appears to be moving right along. All this interaction should be good news to a number of Dell storage shops. The whole Fluid Data concept is about the architecture being able to adapt quickly to changing workload demands through automation. This includes management of all enterprise's storage: primary, backup and archive.

Storage analyst Deni Conor discusses the DR4000 functionality and notes that it “will compete with appliances from EMC Data Domain, Quantum and Exagrid, but is differentiated by built-in replication.” She also discusses the enhancements to the Dell Compellent Storage Center and calls out the new 64-bit operating system, ability to scale to large storage capacities, and expanded VMware support for virtualization.

“These announcements really fit Dell's view that data moves in an enterprise and real value comes from addressing both the movement and improving the different "locations" where data will reside,” says analyst Randy Kerns, Evaluator Group. The announcement part on Compellent Storage Center is about advancing it with the 64-bit architecture and in the VMware support. "What's significant there is that the Storage Center is really a storage application that the customer buys and then the hardware can be upgraded [to the next greatest Intel platform] underneath. That is a leveraged investment for the customer.”

The Dell DR4000 promises to be a contender in the rapidly growing purpose built backup appliance market... Dell is quickly showing the market as well as its customers and prospects that it can acquire technologies and integrate those technologies in a way that solves real-world problems that the data center is facing.

George Crump from Storage Switzerland outlines the Storage Center 6.0 enhancements. In this blog, he comments on the tighter VMware integration and states that “The upgrade should also deliver a better total cost of ownership due to capability gains like higher disk densities, better power and cooling and other quality enhancements.”

Dell also used the Forum to look back on a successful 2011, during which it claims its storage business registered 60,000 deals and booked sales of €2bn (£1.65bn) in Europe, up 27% year-on-year.