Dell's purchase of EqualLogic will allow it to sell homogeneous virtualization into small businesses and departments of larger businesses. The ease of use of these products is outstanding and matches those from other homogeneous virtualization vendors such as 3PAR and Pillar. Dell is in a strong position to simplify the purchasing of storage by integrating it into their purchasing wizards. They can also integrate the implementation and expansion of server and storage virtualization. The embracing of iSCSI is again is a great fit for Dell installations.
Dell's main storage partner EMC has been slow to embrace virtualization, and has taken an appliance route in order to preserve its traditional revenue streams from its storage array products. Implementing a heterogeneous solution such as Invista or IBM's SVC is too complex and overkill for the majority of Dell installations. It makes much more sense for Dell to have the functionality of virtualization, thin provisioning and copy services bundled into the array. There is little long-term business value to being just an EMC software reseller.
Having Dell give its blessing to storage virtualization is good news for Dell customers, and should enable them to achieve fast returns by adopting this standard. Customers who embrace storage virtualization should find it much easier to manage storage and it should significantly improve the uptime of applications. What's more, Dell's reputation of driving costs (and prices) down means that Dell will pass along a portion of its increased margin to customers to remain competitive.
Action Item: Dell customers who are happy with Dell's service and business model will often find that Dell's EqualLogic products are a better fit than the OEMed CLARiiON products from EMC. They should embrace virtualization and with it achieve ease of use and much better application uptime. It makes sense to take advantage of Dell services that combine server and storage virtualization. Although users should be aware that Dell will have achieved a "soft" lock-in on their storage, this should not dissuade them from committing to Dell EqualLogic products.
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