Two weeks ago I attended the DELL Storage Forum 2012 in London with some independent bloggers. It was the first time DELL did such an event in EMEA so we were curious if it would be just a small sequel of the US version earlier this year or not. It was not! DELL brought out some “big shots” and they were available. With that I mean that all executive vice-presidents or directors of any level were not only on stage but also in the sessions, in the lounge, at the bar, … and you could talk to them as long as you needed to.
But what did they have to say? Let me start where everything begun: when Michael Dell announced in 2007 that they were coming after the Enterprise Market nobody believed him. Soon DELL started with the acquisition of EqualLogic and many other would follow. Today, with the latest acquisitions of Compellent, Force10 en some storage software solutions such as Ocarina and Exanet, DELL finally has a complete portfolio of Enterprise products.
But a portfolio is not everything. It is what you do with it. With EqualLogic we already had an architecture that could add new generations of products without having to migrate the data. Now with Compellent we see the same. You only buy a Compellent once. All upgrades, even the controllers, are ‘components’ that can be added or removed whenever you want. The result is that this includes also your licenses. Together with the SubLun tiering in Compellent and EqualLogic you can be sure that you data always resides on the disk/enclosure that suites best for its use ($$/TB – $$/IO). And now DELL goes just one step further. On top of the block based storage DELL announced last year the FS7500 NAS-head for Equallogic and the NX3500 NAS-head for PowerVault. Needless to mention that a NAS-head for Compellent will follow shortly. And the next step … integrating these 3 NAS-heads in 1 product off course. That will really bring FLUID in the datacenter.
Besides social interaction and ‘spreading the word’ there were also some product announcements:
• DELL DR4000 backup appliance. Here you can read a nice blog post on the product by @Andrea_Mauro
• Compellent Storage Center 6.0 . Finally on 64-bits and with VAAI capabilities. Storage Center
• Sharepoint Infrastructure Optimisation Solution. DX-hardware intergraded with “Scarepoint” Software. Download whitepaper here
• High density switching with Force10 Z9000 and S60. Announcements blog
For closure I want to show you a nice wrap-up movie on what we had to say about Fluid by Design