I Promise Not To Quote That Old Annoying Dell PC Slogan

I’ve been buying Dell computers for decades, but not really because I loved them. Sure, my XPS laptop was awesome, but it burned out its motherboard and I never really touched the RMA replacement, having bought a MacBook Pro in the meantime. Enterprise buyers seem to have the same ambivalence about Dell. They buy it, but I’m not sure they really “buy” the company as an IT partner.

I’m sure you’ve heard the same comments as me: “Dell just assembles off-the-shelf components and sells them in volume” or “Dell’s a follower, not an innovator.” There seems to be a great deal of respect for Dell’s ability to produce competitive products and sell them at reasonable cost. Truly, most of their competitors would love to have this kind of reputation. But most of their competitors also have a reputation for partnership, innovation, and solution selling.

Dell Is Making An Effort

It seems clear that Dell would like to change this attitude, and they are investing serious resources to make it happen. While acquisitions like Compellent and Force10 raised eyebrows in storage and networking, it is the activity I see behind the scenes that paints the clearest picture. Dell isn’t just buying into new markets, they’re investing to change the company.

When Dell acquired EqualLogic in 2008, many assumed it was a tactical investment to increase margins over the (resold) EMC storage equipment the company was then pushing. Pundits were similarly dismissive of the acquisition of Perot Systems in 2009, calling it a “me too” effort after HP acquired rival EDS. Regardless of the motivations, however, Dell was becoming more of a serious challenger to HP and IBM every day.

After failing to acquire 3PAR in 2010, then picking up Compllent shortly after, accusations that Dell was “mini me” to HP were rampant. But HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and many in IT quickly lost confidence in that company’s management. All the while, Dell moved forward, increasing in-house IP and expanding enterprise offerings.

What Is The Result?

Today, one sees a very different landscape than just last year. Dell’s acquisitions focused on some of the ripest spots in storage and networking, and no one would disagree that the company has the ability strongly to push these products. Compellent and Force10 went from interesting startups to serious contenders overnight.

Dell really pulled out all the stops to tell us they are "Fluid by Design"

More importantly, Dell has retained much of the innovation these companies offered, from employees to support programs. Last week, I attended the Dell Storage Forum in London, an event initiated by Compellent prior to the acquisition. At the event, I talked to many Dell employees who came to the company through acquisition but had now been given power to challenge the status quo in their respective areas.

If Dell really intended only to push product, why retain marketing personnel? Why invest in the Dell Storage Forum? Why continue Compellent’s beloved Co-Pilot support program?

Then there are the products. Dell leveraged its investment in Ocarina Networks to create a deduplicating backup appliance, the new DR4000. They salvaged file system startup ExaNet and are beginning to bring scale out technology to market. The latest revision of the Compellent software finally brings it to parity in terms of VMware support. And Dell is really working to sell their DX Object Store.

This is the sort of activity one would expect from a contender, not a “box pusher”.

Stephen’s Stance

In the words of Malcolm Reynolds, my days of not taking Dell seriously are certainly coming to a middle. Dell is investing in product IP, innovative marketing and PR events, customer support, and personnel. This does not mean that Dell is instantly a player in the enterprise storage and networking markets, or that all this work will pay off. But I don’t laugh when I hear Dell boast that they intend to be a “top three” enterprise storage company in a few years. It could happen.

Disclaimer: Dell sponsored two Tech Field Day events in 2011, paid me as a speaker at two DX events, and paid for my trip to Dell Storage Forum in London. But no one can buy a post on this site, and I did similar business with IBM, HP, Cisco, and many other companies. This is my opinion.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2012. |
Why Should Anyone Take Dell Seriously in Enterprise Storage?


This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | Why Should Anyone Take Dell Seriously in Enterprise Storage?
Read more posts categorized as Storage

It's not going to be this easy to bridge Fibre Channel and Ethernet!

Before the holidays, I posed a question on Google+ that generated quite a bit of interest and feedback. Now that it has settled down a bit I’d like to summarize the unresolved elements to make FCoE truly a world-class storage interconnect.

Setting the Stage

FCoE has been a controversial topic in both storage and networking, and for good reason. No one would deny that Ethernet is not an ideal transport mechanism for block storage I/O. “Porting” Fibre Channel to run on Ethernet networks has been a supreme technical challenge, and many companies and individuals have labored long and hard to make FCoE a reality.

Now that FCoE is specified in the standard and has been deployed in production environments, the question turns to its future. Will it take off and seize the mantle of dominance currently held by what I like retroactively to call “Fibre Channel over Fibre Channel?” Will they coexist for the next decade, with FCoE mainly deployed in “block” environments such as Cisco UCS? Or will FCoE ultimately fail to catch on, displaced by some other storage protocol like plain FC, iSCSI, NFS, or something entirely different?

The data center needs a flexible new protocol to meet the needs of virtual environments, and convergence of storage and data networking makes a great deal of sense in these environments. This was the root of my question, and I ask it in all earnestness.

My question: What elements remain unresolved to make FCoE truly world-class? What should the vendors be prioritizing? Here are the answers I received.

Technical Considerations

Link Aggregation on CNA’s

Converged network adapters (CNA’s) allow multiple protocols to access a single Ethernet connection, but some also include multiple ports that can be aggregated. In traditional Ethernet networks, link aggregation is a respectable approach for performance and availability. But storage networks have traditionally relied on host-based MPIO software, and these features are mutually exclusive. The zeitgeist seems to be a recommendation to avoid link aggregation on CNA’s that are used for storage networks.

How Do You Handle Virtual Machine Mobility?

As I described recently, virtual machine mobility is a major technical challenge for existing networks. The VMware proposal, the VXLAN, seems to be gaining traction right now. But this is only a solution for data networking. How will FCoE SANs handle virtual machine mobility? This remains unresolved as far as I can tell, though Ethernet switch vendors have come up with their own answers. Brocade demonstrated just such a solution at Networking Field Day 2, and I know that others have answers as well. But will there be an interoperable industry solution?

How Should FCoE Be Implemented Over Longer Distances?

Fibre Channel has traditionally relied on routers and other protocols (FCIP and iFCP) to span distances, but FCoE raises the possibility of native traversal. While it is certainly possible to span distances with FCoE, this is definitely not a recommended or supported idea. Without TCP/IP, or any routing mechanism, it’s just a bad idea. But I imagine that it won’t be long before vendors decide to give it a go anyway.

Implementation Considerations

Is TRILL Required for FCoE Networks?

This has been one of my own questions since the very beginning. Clearly, edge only FCoE works just fine without TRILL. But as networks become more complicated, and virtual machines move, it seems an awfully good idea to have some protocol to alleviate East-West routing concerns. I feel much better with TRILL (or some similar Ethernet fabric technology) in a complicated FCoE network.

Should All Switches Be Full FC Forwarders?

There are number of ways to implement FCoE on Ethernet network, and not all involve building a full Fibre Channel stack in each switch. While many (including myself) assumed that FCoE implied Fibre Channel forwarding in all switches, this is clearly not the direction taken by vendors, at least initially. Perhaps the current “Ethernet forwarding” approach is only a stepping stone, or perhaps it will emerge as the dominant FCoE standard.

How Will OpenFCoE and LoM Be Used?

OpenFCoE is a software solution allowing FCoE to be run without a CNA. If this became popular, it wouldn’t be long before data center architects began looking at LAN on Motherboard (LoM) and even 10GBASE-T as a potential SAN alternative. Will this be used in the long run? It could happen, but it’s certainly not something that’s here at the moment. But OpenFCoE is a real player, especially with Intel’s backing.

How Will Technologies like Zoning Interoperate?

Many networkers are just now beginning to see the true complexity of Fibre Channel SANs. Although interoperability of higher-level Fibre Channel functions between vendors has never been a priority in “FC over FC” SANs, Ethernet could change things. I would not be at all surprised to see a groundswell of customer support demanding greater levels of interoperability from FCoE than from FC, and zoning and VSAN is the likely first beachhead.

The Big Question: When Will We See the “Killer App” For FCoE

Just about everyone agreed that the real challenge for FCoE is market acceptance. Customers aren’t yet demanding FCoE, and vendors are finding it hard to articulate a compelling case to move from “tried-and-true” FC. Convergence, cost savings, and performance have all been put forth, but customers aren’t biting. Perhaps they just need a little time and a little more proof.

This post relies extensively on feedback from a number of people, including Ivan Pepelnjak, Tony Bourke, J Metz, Dmitri Kalintsev, Derick Winkworth, David Hardaker, Juan Lage, and Corey Hines.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2012. |
Eight Unresolved Questions About FCoE


This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you’d like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | Eight Unresolved Questions About FCoE
Read more posts categorized as Storage

Ekahau and MetaGeek are working together to bring Wi-Fi site surveying and spectrum analysis to the masses in a portable format

The most interesting products and companies at Interop Las Vegas 2011 were found around the edges of the show floor. Companies like NEC, Synology, Ciphertex, and Endace may have gone unnoticed in the shadows of towering booths of the industry titans but deserve attention. One such pairing was two Wi-Fi analysis companies, MetaGeek and Ekahau. Both work together to enable spectrum analysis and site surveying on portable devices – smart phones and tablets.

MetaGeek Makes Spectrum Accessible

One of my personal favorite presentations at Wireless Field Day in March was the awesome startup tale told by Ryan Woodings, founder of MetaGeek. While working on a wireless mouse dongle, Ryan and company noticed RF interference and turned lemons into lemonade: They repurposed the USB dongle as a spectrum analyzer and started a company to make this formerly esoteric technology accessible.

Although MetaGeek’s Wi-Spy is nowhere near as full-featured as the big guys, it’s far more accessible at 1/10 the cost. It’s cheap enough that a home hobbyist could pick one up as a way to learn about Wi-Fi and 2.4 and 5 GHz wireless spectrum. And the Windows software is easy enough that even a storage guy like me could figure out that my home Wi-Fi router was on the wrong channel.

At Tech Field Day, Ryan wowed the crowd with an early peek at an iPad app to interact with Wi-Spy captures. I ran into Ryan at Interop, and he showed me a more-polished version of that app, promising it would hit the App Store soon. He also hinted that an iPhone version would follow, and showed off email and Dropbox integration.

Ekahau Site Survey: Laptop to Android

MetaGeek had a guest in their booth from another company I’d heard of from my Wi-Fi engineer friends: Ekahau makes site survey products for laptops and was talking about an Android version as well. Ekahau’s Mobile Survey supports a variety of Android devices, including the popular Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Droid.

Stephen’s Stance

Wireless Field Day exposed me to a whole new world of enterprise IT. The wireless engineers there spend days roaming through corporate facilities doing site surveys, planning Wi-Fi access point installations, and troubleshooting connectivity and interference. Most use Windows laptops, but it’s exciting to think that Apple iPhones and iPads and Android phones and tablets may also be used in the future. These devices are much more portable, with great battery life and interactive screens. And it looks like MetaGeek and Ekahau are leading the way. I can’t wait to get an update from these companies at Wireless Field Day 2 in early 2012!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | MetaGeek and Ekahau: Wi-Fi Analysis To Go
Read more posts categorized as Featured, Networking

Symantec

The first portion of the session covered the NetBackup product. While I agree that the product sounds great, I appreciate the level of detail that the presenters were able to offer. The second portion covered the BackupExec product. I am a little more familiar with this product as my day job fits perfectly in their target market. However, there was much more marketing talk in this presentation for our liking. We like details versus marketing.

Curtis Preston commented that the biggest mistake a backup admin can make is to rip and replace their backup solution. So, while I am not about to jump ship on what we have right now, I am going to consider making a jump to BackupExec or NetBackup when the time comes. I like what Symantec is bringing to the table and I can see why they are a/the major player in their field.

Drobo

Talk about a cool company… Drobo is just that… absolutely cool. Prior to the TFD presentation, Drobo made an announcement that they are presenting a new business oriented product, the 12-bay Drobo for Business. We were allowed to be the first group of people to see the insides of the SAN outside of Drobo employees. How cool is that! Plus, Mario is the next best thing to Billy Mays. Seriously, I think his presentation skills were great. Seeing people so enthused about their products makes the product that much more appealing.

I am concerned, though, about the feature set of the new line, though. I appreciate their identification of their place in the storage world. They are not trying to compete with EMC, NetApp, etc… in the corporate environment. They recognize that and target the smaller markets heavily. However, the functions and design decisions for the new business quality arrays are questionable. Making these decisions for small businesses with little/no IT staff makes some sense. However, trying to move into business areas with IT staff and no enterprise management available makes it difficult to penetrate into the environment. Plus, having single controllers with NICs built in to it makes it a difficult pill to swallow for enterprises.

Drobo is not going away with their existing market. But, I hope they are able to make some more business level changes to appeal to a larger business market.

Druva

Tech Field Day always seems to have surprises… and the introduction of a new company was great. Although, I must say that I question the “new-ness” of Druva seeing as they already have a large amount of customers in 26 countries (or so).

The laptop/mobile backup product they are peddling seems fairly compelling… especially the user empowerment to retrieve their own data without IT intervention. We were unable to see a proper demo of the product features as the limited network connectivity (via the MiFi) was hamstringing the demo. But, what we did see looks to be fairly cool. I really liked the thought they put into the client portion. Not only was the client deduplicating the data and sending the changes to the backup storage, but the ability to have a backup upon startup of the device was great. The startup function includes logic to wait until X amount of time after startup and for the load on the laptop to drop to a usable level. The last thing they wanted was for the backup service to start during startup and make the laptop experience horrible.

The ability to interact with the backup environment via an iPad is nice proof of concept. But, I did not get the sense of true functionality that the iPad provides. Until the iPad can be a backup source, I would stick to laptops.

Where I run into a problem is that this is a secondary tier backup environment and there needs to be a way to backup the backup. While Druva client backups are deduplicated on their server, the server files are such that makes the deduplication into a primary storage environment difficult.

I see the value in laptop backup and a product like Druva. But, I cannot justify the additional backup environment when many existing backup environments can handle laptop backups now. A Druva solution would be added for user convenience, but policies exist to ensure users save their data in locations that are accessible via the primary backup environment. If the Druva server died… meh.

Xangati

I am glad to see that Xangati was able to get involved with TFD! Their product is an amazing addition to the virtual admin utility belt. Seeing statistics with this much detail and history is extremely useful. Plus, being able to identify “events” and having the data available in a DVR style makes it super useful and intuitive. Not only are the events and DVR great, Xangati took the concept further and allow VDI users to create “events” when they feel the VDI environment is not working as expected. Now, the users can alert to performance issues that may become difficult to identify by the VDI admin!

Xangati looks like a great company for another company to pick up. My first reaction to seeing this was VMware’s acquisition of Integrien for monitoring and analysis. So, while this handles VMware well, VMware is not necessarily in the market to pick them up. I can see Citrix or Microsoft loving what they see and picking them up as a way to battle against VMware. If/when this happens, that company will have an amazing tool at their disposal.

NetEx (or HyperIP)

WAN acceleration is always something that intrigued me. Companies like Riverbed and Citrix (with WAN Scaler) make sense because they store copies of data on the device and, essentially, deduplicate the data so it is not sent across the WAN. So, the NetEx approach was interesting. In my network-light world, using UDP and aggregating the data into larger chunks is an interesting method.

NetEx used beer as an analogy for what they do. Normal networks send data in beer bottles. However, rather than send beer bottles around and track all of them, NetEx sends the beer in a keg and pushes the keg around the network. Then, once it reaches the destination network, HyperIP will break the kegs back into bottles. That made perfect sense to me! Plus, they left the beer for those drinkers in our group!

I am not entirely sure where this would fit in my everyday life. But, based on my simpleton reaction to their product and the network guys like of the product, I think there is definitely something to it.

Infoblox

This was the most difficult presentation for me to sit through… reason being that I really felt like they were creating FUD around what is a fairly simple issue… assigning IP addresses and DNS. Plus, it took forever to get to that point. However, once the fluff was pushed aside, the Infoblox product looks great. With a simple demo, the true value of their product really stepped forward and I began to see how it may fit in an environment like my everyday workplace.

HP

The HP presentations were very interesting. The first presentation dealt with HP’s commitment to standards and modularity to ensure convergence in the datacenter. However, that was short lived as the following presentations dealt with their new deduplication product which appeared to become a proprietary solution (not quite in line with their standards in the datacenter) and some proprietary networking.

Coming into Tech Field Day, I was really amped to hear what HP was going to present on… especially with our being on their corporate campus. I was a little let down with what I saw and that most of the speakers were in the Marketing department.

However, the datacenter tour at the end of the day was really valuable. I was able to ask some questions of the datacenter manager about different product lines. I must admit that I am not an active HP customer. So, I was a little naive as to what they offered.

Conclusion

Tech Field Day #5 was amazing. The group of delegates I was surrounded by were amazing and I walked away with so much information from them and because of them. I appreciate all of the presentations and the time/resources that the presenting companies provided to have us onsite. I cannot wait to see what happens to the companies and the products they presented!

© Bill for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Virtual Bill’s Tech Field Day 5 Review
Read more posts categorized as Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage

The Tech Field Day staff have added live streaming from Tech Field Day 5 in San Jose this week.

Tech Field Day always includes innovative companies and sometimes sees launches, but it’s rare to have a company launch itself at an event like this. Nimble Storage was successful in using our 2010 Seattle event as their springboard, and remote data protection newcomer Druva followed their lead this week.

Druva is not as new a company as the “launch” nomenclature indicates. The company has spent years building a data protection product, inSync, for remote enterprise PCs and already boasts hundreds of customers. The company is profitable and successful already, but decided to come to the United States and initiate a growth effort.

The Druva staff felt that the influential delegates invited to Tech Field Day 5 would be key to achieving notice in the crowded enterprise IT market, and their February 10 presentation was the first time the company engaged with this audience.

Following the Druva presentation, W. Curtis Preston and I met with Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and CEO of Druva to discuss the product and the market.

A 30-day trial of inSync is available for download if you would like to try it out.

The entire presentation is embedded below.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Druva Launches at Tech Field Day 5
Read more posts categorized as Desktop, Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story

NetEx was my first surprise when scheduling presenters for Tech Field Day 5. I saw the word “networking” on their trade show booth and mentally lumped them in with companies like Riverbed, F5, and Silver Peak. It has something to do with WAN acceleration, right?

This all changed once I started talking with the folks from NetEx. Their technology does indeed accelerate data transfer over a network, but it’s much more useful than I expected. NetEx is a data movement accelerator – hey, that’s got something to do with storage! Their HyperIP product makes what others do better, including past Field Day presenter, Veeam. They make data replication faster for iSCSI arrays, virtual machines, and enterprise storage devices. They also allow legacy data movers to work over IP. I’m really not sure how I overlooked their capabilities for so long!

Technology like this is a perfect fit for the enterprise datacenter-focused Field Day events like Tech Field Day 5. We’ll have a wide variety of delegates representing servers and virtualization, storage, networking, and more. And all of them will find something to like about NetEx, Symantec, Data Robotics, and the other Field Day presenters.

Bob MacIntyre of NetEx agreed, telling me he was excited to participate and “looking forward to a highly interactive discussion with some of the industry’s independent thought leaders, analysts and bloggers.” MacIntyre sees Tech Field Day 5 as a way to ”increase the awareness of company and our HyperIP WAN Optimization virtual appliance through an intimate and educational environment.” I’d say he’s got a clear picture of what this event is all about.

NetEx will be presenting on Friday, February 11. We’ll be streaming their presentation (and the others as well) live so everyone can tune in online. Check back at the Tech Field Day site to watch on the 10th and 11th!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | NetEx Joins the Roster of Tech Field Day Presenters
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

Tech Field Day has come a long way since the first event back in 2009. The hectic rush to pull together delegates, presenters, and logistics has been replaced by a steady and predictable process. A crew of professionals has been assembled to make everything happen smoothly, from contracts and paperwork to travel planning to streaming video. After selecting over 50 presentations and almost 100 delegates, we’ve gotten good at making this thing happen.

But we didn’t start the Field Day series to become event planners; we wanted to build a community of the new guard of freelance writers, bloggers, and other influential folks that included interesting companies in IT infrastructure. Measuring success can be challenging, but the surest metric is repeat visits: Most of the companies that presented in the past have asked to join us for another event, as have most of the delegates.

The two previous Data Robotics presentations are favorites among the Field Day delegates!

This is why I’m so pleased to announce our first three-time Tech Field Day presenter: Data Robotics was quick to come on board for our very first event, and returned for Tech Field Day 2. Now they will make a third presentation as part of Tech Field Day 5! Data Robotics will host the afternoon presentation at their headquarters in Santa Clara, following Symantec’s morning session on Thursday, February 10.

Data Robotics gave those first Field Day delegates an advance peak at their new Drobo S and DroboElite models, and launched their Drobo FS product at Tech Field Day 2. Will the Drobo product line continue to grow at Tech Field Day 5? I’ll definitely be paying attention! The Field Day presentations, including Data Robotics, will be streamed live on February 10 and 11!

The new Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Data Robotics, Mario Blandini, explained why he wanted to bring the company back a third time. ”Tech Field Day events are a great value for us at Data Robotics,” he told me. “There is never a shortage of productive input among the delegates, and the intimate gathering makes for fantastic technology discussions.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. We’re glad to have you back!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Data Robotics Is First Three-Time Tech Field Day Presenter
Read more posts categorized as Events, Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story

Gestalt IT is pleased to announce our next Tech Field Day event. The Field Day delegates will convene in and around San Jose, CA on February 9 and 10, 2011. There, they will engage some of the most innovative and interesting IT infrastructure companies, with leading enterprise software provider, Symantec, headlining.

Follow the news at our Tech Field Day 5 page!

The unique Field Day℠ concept brings together as equals two groups that rarely meet: Product vendors and independent thought leaders. The event includes a dozen hand-picked delegates and just five speaking slots. Both vendors and delegates are nominated and selected by an independent team of volunteers based on interest, technology and passion. The resulting discussions are packed with technical information, with feedback and questions flowing both ways across the table. To expand access, the event will also be streamed live on the Internet.

Delegates will spend two to four hours with each vendor, learning about their products, technology, and relevance to modern IT practices. The Gestalt IT Tech Field Day events have attracted some of the biggest names in information technology, and this event is no exception. Symantec will headline, bringing the delegates on-site for a half-day session. Other presenting sponsors will be announced in the coming month.

Only about a dozen hand-picked delegates will attend this Tech Field Day event. Our selection process focuses on the unique characteristics of thought leaders: Independence, open-mindedness, technical knowledge, and influence are key criteria. The global team of delegates come from a variety of backgrounds, including server virtualization, enterprise storage, networking, security, and systems administration.

Field Day alumni, Bill Hill, Scott D. Lowe, Devang Panchigar, and W. Curtis Preston will be joined by new delegates, Sean Clark, Eric Siebert, and others. Each has distinguished himself in his community, and each was selected by a team of delegates from past events.

About Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day

Complete delegate and sponsor lists are available at the Gestalt IT web site. We encourage those interested in IT infrastructure topics to follow the delegates on Gestalt IT (gestaltit.com), Twitter (bit.ly/TFD5TL), Facebook (bit.ly/TFDGFB), LinkedIn (bit.ly/TFDLI), Flickr (bit.ly/TFDpics) and Vimeo (bit.ly/TFDvids).

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is the concept behind Gestalt IT – that experts in a variety of disciplines are stronger when they work together. As a group, we formed a media organization focused on promoting community among independent thought leaders in IT infrastructure topics. Our productions include the Gestalt IT web site and the series of Tech Field Day events. Gestalt IT Media LLC community organizer, Stephen Foskett, can be contacted at GestaltIT.com, sfoskett@gestaltit.com, or (508)451-9532.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Announcing Tech Field Day 5: Returning to Silicon Valley in February 2011!
Read more posts categorized as All, Events, Exclusive, Featured, Networking, Security, Server Virtualization, Storage, Top Story

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | What is Application Performance Monitoring?
Read more posts categorized as All, Featured, Server Virtualization

A Compelling Product

At its core, Compellent is a storage software company. Their Storage Center software creates a “virtual storage array” from standard building blocks. The resulting storage product is one of the most flexible and (excuse the pun) compelling midrange storage systems on the market. Consider the following roundtable discussion from our recent Tech Field Day event in Seattle, which includes a discussion of Compellent’s products and technologies by independent voices in the industry:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:59 — 102.7MB)

Compellent’s Storage Center scales up, adding additional storage capacity to existing arrays without disruption and integrating this added bandwidth and capacity seamlessly. Compellent also has an impressive tiered storage and thin provisioning story, since data blocks are virtualized and can be moved between tiers dynamically. Full-featured integrated snapshot technology completes the picture, adding data protection credentials.

Compellent’s scale-out story is impressive as well, but is more about replication and virtualization than the clustering technology used by others, including Dell’s EqualLogic. Compellent’s newly-introduced Live Volume can be thought of as a volume manager for virtual servers, allowing their storage to exist simultaneously on two different storage arrays. Supporting VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer, Compellent claims that Live Volume enables a “grid of Compellent arrays”, but it’s not the sort of scale-out grid one would get from EMC’s recently purchased Isilon, HP’s LeftHand, Dell’s Compellent, or NAS specialist Panasas. It’s more of an active-active mirror of storage than a true cluster. Learn more about Live Volume in the following video by Rodos:

Let’s also take a moment to consider the hardware Compellent currently uses: They deploy and sell this software on SuperMicro servers with Xyratex disk enclosures, and Seagate hard disk drives, and connect everything with QLogic, Emulex, and Brocade storage networking gear. This is all pretty much standard-issue for storage vendors: Most no longer produce their own controllers or disk enclosures, and the standard components Compellent uses can be swapped from other sources if needed.

Compellent’s Mid-Market Strategy

Compellent has not traditionally competed in the stratosphere of enterprise storage dominated by EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max, the HDS/HP USP/VSP, and (to a lesser extend) the HP 3PAR InServ. Instead, the Minneapolis-based company has been happy to sell into the fat middle of the market, and has gained a loyal following in smaller-but-still-impressive enterprises. Nowhere is this more evident than at Compellent’s annual “C-Drive” customer conference: It’s amazing, really, for a smallish storage company to have such a devoted user base!

Although they offer two NAS front-ends, Compellent is a block storage player through and through. Their “Storage Center with NAS” offering is decidedly low-end, employing Windows Storage Server 2008 on a 1U server for SMB and NFS connectivity. The newer and more-impressive zNAS is based on the OpenSolaris operating system, including ZFS a friendly interface “co-developed” with Nexenta. Neither product is an in-house Compellent design, nor are they competitive in the high-end “big data” market touted by NAS leaders EMC, NetApp, and BlueArc.

Compellent’s Fit Within Dell

Assuming the acquisition goes through, attention will turn to the fit for Compellent’s Storage Center technology and marketing within Dell. What will Dell get for three quarters of a billion dollars? What will it mean to the enterprise storage market as a whole?

Dell’s EqualLogic acquisition, though expensive, is now widely seen as a success. The Round Rock management team allowed EqualLogic the freedom to develop and compete, while bolstering their hardware and manufacturing story with commodity components. The combination has become a dominant plater in the mid-market iSCSI storage space, and Dell is likely to attempt a repeat of that strategy here. It was widely rumored that 3PAR management preferred Dell’s to HP’s offering based on a promise of similar autonomy.

We assume Dell would replace the EMC-sourced CLARiiON with Compellent in their midrange storage arsenal, replacing the SuperMicro servers. Although Compellent would likely be allowed to develop and grow within the Dell umbrella, there is substantial overlap with the existing EqualLogic line. One would expect Compellent to focus more on Fibre Channel and FCoE (which they recently delivered), though iSCSI support is unlikely to be dropped. A longer-term strategy would see EqualLogic and Compellent combining their midrange storage IP and management team within Dell.

Considering their success selling CLARiiON block storage, Dell’s acquisition would strap a rocket to Compellent’s sales. Once the Dell hardware is grafted in, profits will grow substantially as well. This is a major win for Dell, which needs the kind of margins that only in-house IP can drive. The price is right, the market is ready, and the fit is solid.

What Comes Next

Some are suggesting that this is the end of the storage acquisition parade, but many holes remain. Dell still lacks enterprise NAS, data deduplication, and cloud storage success, and companies like Oracle have only just begun to bulk up their storage strategies. Dell’s acquisitions of Ocarina and Exanet have yet to pay dividends, likely driven by the immaturity of those products. One would not be at all surprised if they continued shopping in the storage space: Panasas, BlueArc, Sepaton, FalconStor, and Overland all look ripe for purchase. Although Compellent is a win for Dell, it is not likely to be their last acquisition.

Disclosure: Compellent sponsored and presented at Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day 3.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2010. | Thoughts On A Dell Acquisition Of Compellent
Read more posts categorized as Exclusive, Featured, Storage, Top Story