Dell ditches EMC after 10 years
Will push own storage kit after ending relationship
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Dell has officially stopped reselling EMC kit and will instead push its own storage kit. Let battle be joined.
This means Dell will not sell Dell-branded EMC OEM and resold EMC CLARiiON, Celerra, Data Domain and VNX products. However, Dell will support existing customers with these products. It will resell capacity upgrades (drives and enclosures) and software titles for as long as EMC also sells these upgrades, possibly through 2016.
Customers needing new products will get offered Dell's line of storage hardware.
The EMC reselling deal had been in place for 10 years and served both companies well. However, Dell saw that storage was becoming more and more important and saw the advantages of selling its own storage equipment and keeping all the revenues.
In pursuit of that goal it began buying storage suppliers that were early entrants to growing markets and put together it its own across-the-mainstream-board storage offering. The companies it bought were EqualLogic for iSCSI storage; Exanet for scale-out NAS technology; Compellent for Fibre Channel storage; and Ocarina for data compression and optimisation. It made its own DX6000 object storage hardware and partnered with Caringo for the software.
It lacks a pure filer offering but a combination of NAS heads for EqualLogic and Compellent and the Exanet technology provides NAS functionality. Partnership deals with Symantec and CommVault provide various pieces of storage software functionality such as archiving.
Dell says it has spent more than $2bn (£1.27bn) building up its storage portfolio and it will spend $1bn this financial year to gain technology in the data centre, mobile and cloud environments. It said its own storage properties provide almost 80 per cent of its storage revenues and 90 per cent of its profits in the second quarter of this year.
Dell reckons it has done very well with its storage acquisitions. EqualLogic revenues have grown sevenfold, making EqualLogic the iSCSI market leader, since the acquisition. Compellent revenues and new customer numbers in the first six months of this year are both larger than in the whole of 2010. It has built up the Compellent team from 500 at acquisition time to more than 820 currently.
If these trends continue then Dell could, and should, climb out of the "Others" category in IDC's quarterly Storage Tracker for external disk revenues. It will be a dismal failure if it doesn't. ®
COMMENTS
"Dell will continue to support existing customers"
will they, bollocks! I just got the standard response to a unix-related storage query from Dell regarding an EMC problem, "we don't support [Unix brand]".
Er, turkeys, you support the EMC Arrays which support connectivity to the [Unix Brand] Server; show me its not your crapware Powerpath driver thats messing up my clean [Unix brand] System!
Never get EMC kit from a reseller, you will end up banging your head against a brick wall talking to support staff who would fail the Turing test!
Thanks zark I am out of here in 50 weeks.
NAS offerings are still pretty basic...
...as you can only choose which rigid path you will follow:
1. You get an EqualLogic FS7500 which is very well integrated but data tiering only works within EQL, no tiering to Compellent or any other external box whatsoever
2. You get a more expensive, faster etc Compellent setup which means more of the same: it only manages things inside, does not auto-tier with any EQL or external box although at least they offer Windows Storage Server 2008 R2-based NAS heads so at least you can utilize your existing boxes...
3. You simply get NX3000-series NAS boxes running Windows Storage Server 2008 (Vista-codebase, non-R2!) and hook up whatever you want, you can even get it in clustered HA flavor - but being a generic Windows server there is no tiering whatsoever, nothing, nada, nil.
So if you want the best of both worlds, to leverage EQL for huge capacity, simple-management iSCSI boxes (PS6510E) and Compellent for faster, auto-tiering, live volume and all the other magic they do, you're out of luck, period.
Dell really needs to get their integration efforts going: in January it's going to be a year since they've bought Compellent, they really need to show something. Even if they have nothing to show at least announce a roadmap that comes with dates ie when will all these disparate systems be able to seamlessly push data back and forth, without me logging in and doing it myself...
Posting to say...
I'm quite fond of our EqualLogic kit. Will be interesting to see what happens with Compellent and Force 10 on the high end of the storage offering.
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