Monday, June 6, 2011

George Crump, Senior Analyst

The first question that boiled up was tweeted by @rogerlund. I’ve been a fan of Roger’s blog for a while and I thought his question got right to the heart of the matter; “What is the line between EqualLogic vs. Compellent?” In other words when do you buy a Compellent Storage System and when do you buy a EqualLogic? There were of course the quick responses of a few of Dell’s competitors of “don’t buy either” but I thought the question certainly had merit and I was curious to see the executive teams response.

The response from the Dell Storage executives was what you would have expected, “it depends”, although I expected it to be a little sharper since they had to know that question was coming. Let’s face it, these two products overlap. EqualLogic has some very large installations and Compellent has been successful in the small to medium market. Trying to pigeonhole either product does neither product any good. Different people need to accomplish different things and are going to be attracted to different kinds of solutions.

To me Dell should do two things when answering this question. The first is count on the reseller channel to figure it out. The reseller channel is already adept at selling and integrating solutions that seem to have competing interests and I am willing to bet that many of the resellers at Dell Storage Forum were already selling both solutions prior to either being bought by Dell. In fact I would go so far as to say that the channel is probably more qualified to figure out when to sell which product than the internal Dell team. These teams, at least for now, are made up of people that were very passionate about one of the two products, old passions are sometimes hard to let go off. The channel is more than likely dispassionate about both and could present a more balanced view of the table for the customer.

The second thing is to provide real world testing of the two systems and provide customers and resellers with information about those tests so they can work through the “it depends” scenario. For example how does each system perform under specific workloads, like a heavy server virtualization, desktop virtualization environment or an Oracle environment? What system works better with solid state disk storage? Is there a scenario where the more scale up architecture of Compellent is less latent than the scale out architecture of EqualLogic? Outside of the enterprise which system is more cost effective for the “first SAN” customer or which one is more price effective when integrating into an existing SAN (iSCSI or Fibre) architecture?

Resellers are already able to make the EqualLogic or Compellent decision, what I am suggesting is to arm them and the end customers with specific details about how systems perform. Don’t waste time coming up with a brilliant marketing strategy that has fancy pyramids for product placement. There are a lot of competitive solutions that Dell needs to be focusing on positioning against, worrying about their own product will distract them from what is really important. In the end IT people are very sharp, let the customer and the reseller figure out what is best for them, just arm them with the facts to make that decision.