The Secrets to Storage Success

It’s hard to believe that it has been five years since Dell acquired EqualLogic. The purchase sent a crystal clear message to the rest of the storage industry that Dell was serious about entering the storage market. Last Week Dell announced the installation of its 100,000th storage system and 45,000th customer. Clearly Dell has exponentially increased the growth rate that EqualLogic was already experiencing, something of a rarity in the storage industry. But the secrets to success were more than just being bought by a big vendor; it included an excellent foundation and a continual focus on improvement.

Secret #1 - Generational Compatibility

Customers really don't like throwing out their storage systems after three years of use. Vendors that can provide systems and storage software than can span generations of hardware will get the attention of potential new customers and just as importantly maintain and increase their presence with current customers.

The EqualLogic storage systems are one of the few storage systems that does not require that old generations be discarded as new ones come out. Using the peer scaling architecture EqualLogic customers can deploy new software across all generations of systems. While the role of older nodes may change the customer can continue to extract value for as long as possible.

Secret #2 - Flat Software Licensing

Not only do IT Managers hate the feeling of getting "nickeled and dimed" by the never ending add-on options of legacy enterprise storage systems, it also makes it extremely difficult to plan an IT budget. With a flat rate, included up front, software delivery method you can lock your budget forecast in. It also means that you can start using new features as soon as you are ready, you don't have to wait until you have the budget.

EqualLogic was one of the first, if not the very first to provide an all inclusive software license that provided the customer with all the core software functions. Dell has kept that approach and even extended it to other products within the Dell family.

Secret #3 - Simple Wins

Performance and scalability are important capabilities but the IT staff is stretched thinner than ever. The concept of administrators focused solely on storage is increasingly rare. The most important feature is ease of use, and ease of use is more than a slick graphical user interface. Simple to use means systems that easily add capacity, that can automatically manage performance and systems that are easy to interact with.

In the five years since Dell purchased EqualLogic, many storage systems have come and gone. Some were higher performing, some claimed to scale to higher capacities and some were cheaper. Despite those potential competitors the Dell solutions continued to gain market share. The primary reason? Dell stayed focused on providing an easy to use solution that offered enterprise class storage with everyday simplicity. In repeated conversations with Dell EqualLogic customers, a common set of themes emerge; sub-hour installation and minutes a day of storage management time. While cool features are important, a storage system that gives administrators more of their most important resource, time, is critical.

Secret #4 - Don't Get Comfortable

In storage we have seen market leaders establish themselves and then become stagnate, living off of past successes and not continue to innovate. Success in storage requires a continual improvement of the product along with an occasional flash of innovation. For larger companies this should mean leveraging other parts of their organization to make the acquired product better and again this is an area where we see big companies fail.

Dell with EqualLogic on the other hand has continually improved the product by adding solid state support and automatic load balancing. Then they have shown integration with external Dell technologies like the recently announced Dell Fluid File System. The EqualLogic FS Series enables customers to unify block and file with a highly scalable, high-performance clustered file system on top of traditional EqualLogic block-based arrays.

Then we saw one of the best evidences of innovation when Dell announced Dell EqualLogic Blade Arrays that have recently become available. These systems give Dell one of the best convergence strategies on the market, allowing customers to simplify their data centers by combining storage, servers and networking into a single blade chassis. Thanks to this innovation customers can reduce their data center footprint and setup time.

Storage Swiss Take

We typically take a skeptical eye when a large system vendor purchases a small storage vendor. The industry is awash in acquisitions that not only didn't pay off, they ended up being the death nail to very intriguing technology. For the system’s vendor there is a lot at stake, they have to do more than "do no harm", they have to increase the success rate of the company they are buying. Clearly by announcing its 100,000th system being implemented Dell has put an exclamation point on the success of its EqualLogic acquisition.