Analysis

posted on 11 July 2008 05:35

Dell is intent on building out its iSCSI storage beachhead and becoming a substantial force in enterprise and mid-range storage markets, and adding new products to its storage line-up.

Praveen Asthana is Dell's global director of storage and networking and recently presented on Dell's storage strategy. This is a summary of what he said.

Storage is a pretty lucrative business for many vendors. Dell's goal is to deliver the Dell Effect to storage, to simplify, to be capable and to be affordable. The company started out in storage in 2003 believing that storage is too complex and expensive: "We are changing that."

Dell has a four-member family of storage products, he said: PowerVault for small organisations; Dell EqualLogic for the mid-range and optimized for virtualization; and Dell EMC SAN with the AX4 and CX3. (The Dell EMC relationship now encompasses the CLARiiON CX3 as well as the AX boxes.) Lastly there is a Customer Solutions group building products for those with special needs.

The customers find that they are seeing a disaggregation in the storage infrastructure with infrastructure sprawl and increased management complexity. There is too much distance between a data source and the physical storage medium it resides on; too many hands-on layers of server and storage and networking hardware and software and virtualization and so forth.

Storage needs are growing, more scalability is needed for unstructured information growth, for the need to retain data longer on nearline storage.

What is Dell going to do about this?

1. It's going to push the idea of a unified data center fabric based on Data Center Ethernet (DCE) and 10GbE.
2. It's going to promote hardware consolidation through virtualization of storage, servers and clients.
3. It's going to promote the concept of intelligent data management.

DCE will make Ethernet loss-less and provide congestion management through flow control. Dell's 10GbE products will have cost parity with 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC8) within six months and be haf the price of FC8 within three years. The FC industry is pushing FCOE as a way to extend the life of Fibre Channel. Only Brocade, QLogic and Emulex have significant invstments in Fibre Channel.

There are many more companies with Ethernet investments. Ethernet is at 10gig today; 40gig is planned with 100gig after that. Ethernet economics will win out. There won't be a mass move out of FC by customers but iSCSI is where the growth is and DCE will help that. Cisco's ideas rule, okay!

DCE will give you InfiniBand levels of latency. Dell is talking to Intel and Broadcom to get the right 10GbE infrastructure in place and costs down. Dell already has a 1GbE TOE (TCP/IP offload engine) on the motherboard. It's working to do the same with 10GbE.

EqualLogic has absolutely the best storage products from the architectural point of view to integrate with virtualized servers.

Dell aims to do to intelligent data management what it did to SANs. There will be more integration between servers, storage and software. There will be data protection from the desktop to the data center using the same hardware and policies throughout. EMC, Symantec and others only offer slices of what customers need.

This is a key strategy moving forward. Hint: products are coming.

Deduplication

Dell is going to promote storage capacity optimization, meaning deduplication. The dedupe concept is playing into all parts of the ecosystem - eg, backup HW and SW, in the arrayas well as appliances - and Dell is looking at it in a number of areas. Dell will partner with dedupe suppliers and offer product, different products, in more than one area.

The migration of dedupe technology into backup software was mentioned; Commvault and Symantec Pure Disk being identified; "It does a pretty good job". Asthana said sorting out where dedupe can be applied is a necessity; "We don't want it to be a short-term thing and then have to change it."

Cloud Storage

Dell is putting effort into cloud storage. Cloud storage is starting with backup but will expand to other areas. Dell will definitely offer cloud storage products and may, may, offer cloud storage as a service. The presentation slides mentioned a 'storage-dense server platform' with scalable storage software and metadata richness needed. A new approach was needed.

Dell has its Data Center Solutions division focussed on this. "Reflect that the perfect cloud node is a server and Dell is a server company."

Hint: I took this to imply that new products were coming, possbly in the Sun Thumper (X4500) mould.

EqualLogic

The future is virtual. According to John Joseph, VP for Dell Equalogic Solutions, "In the future we'll be able to move a virtual machine to get a better quality of service."

Dell will introduce new levels of load balancing capacity. "If a volume is getting hit in one pool we'll move it to another pool." Customers will manage a logical pool of storage and not storage devices. There will be an elastic pool of data with separate scaling of capacity, processing power and I/O.

Dell will introduce higher capacity 15,000rpm drives. (This means that higher capacity drives are coming from its suppliers.) It is looking at solid state disk (SSD). Hint: Dell may well introduce SSD tiers for its PS5000 arrays shortly.

Asthana indicated that Dell would first introduc SSD at a server level - the Sun approach again - and then in storage arrays. Technology development is needed in areas such as wear levelling. It's as if a second generation SSD technology is needed before it can be seriously used in storage. Asthana said Dell would introduce SSD tiers in both the EqualLogic PS5000 storage arrays and in the CX3 arrays - which means that EMC will introduce it in the CX3s surely since EMC supplies these to Dell.

Comment

Dell is pulling enterprise SAN features into its offering. It looks as if it is going to offer a Thumper-like storage-dense server for massive scale-out storage needs. It will supply cloud storage products and such a storage-dense server looks a good fit for that.

The company is going to offer its own deduplication products, supplied from partners, with different products (and de-dupe technologies) offered for deduping different parts of the server-storage spectrum.

It is convinced that the two main drivers on its storage strategy should be server (and storage) virtualization, which will simplify the infrastructure and reduce infrastructure sprawl, and DCE, the unified DCE-based data centre fabric which will also reduce infrastructure sprawl.

Fibre Channel will not go away but Dell will not produce its own FC product, that being a heavy, heavy development burden. DCE will be an iSCSI driver.

The company is turning itself into a serious and convincing end-to-end server and storage supplier. Neither virtual tape libraries (VTL) nor network-attached storage (NAS) were mentioned. It seems to this writer that, for a rounded end-to-end storage and server strategy both types of product are needed.

So far Dell's storage logic has been impeccable; the gaining of first place in iSCSI storage is testament to that. Now the company is embarking on a phase two of its storage attack and the logic looks pretty compelling. Watch out; there's a Dell about.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}