For Dell Storage, Now It’s Fluid

These last three years, Dell Inc. made several storage acquisitions, and some big ones, for a total of roughly $2.5 billion: EqualLogic (2008, $1.4 billion), Exanet (2010, $12 million), Ocarina (2010, NA) and Compellent (2011, $960 million). The IT manufacturer has begun to unify all these products around what it calls now ‘Fluid Data Architecture’.

Adjective ‘fluid’ comes from Compellent that was using it to define its entire technology. Dell’s definition:" Fluid Data is about having the right capabilities integrated across your entire storage infrastructure making it possible for you to move data to the right place at the right time, and to dynamically deploy storage resources in support of business needs."

What are behind these words? To integrate all its acquired technology within a single management layer (Exanet file system on the top), allowing virtualization, migration and data reduction (Ocarina) between all the hardware platforms including PowerVault, and managing any kind of data (blocks, files and objects – in partnership with Caringo -) from the server to the cloud.

Also Dell is headed towards all-inclusive and simpler licensing for each product that was a key element of successful Compellent.

PowerVault will cover low-end market, EqualLogic mid-range and Compellent will be pushed for high-end, according to Brett Roscoe, Dell’s executive director, products marketing, enterprise storage.

That’s a big strategy and an ambitious program that will take time to finalize.

Officially it’s the first half of this year for the availability of a scalable clustered multi-platform NAS, Dell saying that it will "scale to 64x the nearest NetApp filer".

The Ocarina’s 400 or so algorithms for content-aware compression and de-dupe will apply automatically depending on the data. This process are currently on an appliance and will be embedded into the storage subsystems with the possibility to choose what and when you want to reduce, for primary storage "up to 57x better than NetApp", as well as for local backup and off-site replication. Here the availability is planned for the second half of 2011.

It’s a short time for such huge works. But at the end, Dell will have a complete updated storage offering able to compete head-to-head with excellent chances to win against the major EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, HDS and others.

For Gartner and IDC, Dell recorded in 2010 $1,584 million (+13.4% from 2009, 8.5% of the total market) and $1,647 million (+16.9% from 2009, 9.1% market share) respectively for external disk systems. The company said that total storage sales amounted $2,295 million in last FY ending January 2011, a figure increasing yearly 5%. EqualLogic sales grew 49% and, combined with Dell PowerVault sales,
accounted for almost two-thirds of storage revenues and more than 80% of
the company’s storage gross margin.

Officially, Dell continues to partner with EMC to resell CLARiiON and now latest VNX. These hardware products are not going to be included in its Fluid Data Architecture, but "eventually for migration", said Roscoe … Do you understand what is means? EMC will.