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Hi. Welcome to DellShares. I'm Frank Molina, and with me today is Darren Thomas, VP of
our storage business. Welcome, Darren.
Thank you.
Thanks for joining us today.
Glad to be here.
We're coming off a great acquisition with Compellent. Can you tell us a little bit more
about what Compellent does for our storage business, where it really plays in kind of
like the storage landscape, and what we're hoping to accomplish?
Sure. So, Compellent is a really exciting solution. It delivers an optimized enterprise-class
experience for the customer that is second to none. And by that what I mean is that the
technologies inside Compellent give you the ability to optimize for capacity, optimize
performance, and constantly balancing that optimization. So, uniquely to this product
set as the system gets bigger and bigger, it gets more and more optimized. So, customers
that buy it for a certain capacity and performance will find as it scales and gets bigger, it
gets more optimized, because the ability to make these optimization decisions over a broader
storage portfolio gives you a much bigger optimization opportunity. So, it's really
-- it's a very unique solution because of its tiering capability.
It's also unique because they built this copilot program, and the copilot program fundamentally
has every machine being monitored by the engineering team. The engineering team, a superset of
our engineering team called the copilots actually look at the data about the device on a pretty
consistent, regular basis, and we quite often will see problems before the customer sees
it, and can address them and make it so seamlessly the machine, if it's going to experience a
problem, we can even anticipate that.
And along with that they have a third unique thing in that as you buy your software licenses,
once you reach a certain set of the license, it becomes perpetual. So, as the machine scales
from one system to the next system, as you grow with the technology, you never have to
buy that license again.
So, the combination of these three things makes it extraordinary -- makes an extraordinary
total cost of ownership package for the customer set that is the enterprise class, which is
what Compellent targets.
So, we have the EqualLogic line, now we're introducing Compellent; how would you say
the two are different, and what are -- you know, from a perspective of a -- from a customer's
point of view how are they addressing different needs, and -- and how would you say -- on
the other side how do the two pieces fit together nicely?
Well, that's actually a great question. It's a question I get asked a lot now. So, EqualLogic
is also a very scalable machine, but not to the same level of scale that Compellent is.
So, Compellent scales to a larger system, and EqualLogic's fundamental core value set
is ease of use. It is a system that's designed so that as you add more systems, add more
capacity to it, it is so easy to manage that installations are typically not done by professional
service, the machine is just that easy to operate. So, it appeals to the SMB class or
to large enterprises that have remote offices or stranded servers and stranded storage somewhere.
It's very, very cost-effective in the management of it and in the actual operations. So, we
like to say it's second to nobody in ease of use, and Compellent is second to nobody
in optimization.
And so they really fit in two separate markets. EqualLogic appeals to the midsized enterprise-class
customer, and a lot of even small customers buy it because of its ease of use. Compellent
tends to appeal to the enterprise-class, no single points of failure, mission critical
where scale can be very large. And in all these cases customers are looking for cost
efficiencies. And anytime it's easy to use or it's automated to the point it optimizes
things, it gets very cost-effective. And that's the common thread they share is this cost-effective
operational total cost of ownership. They solve it differently. Compellent solves it
at a massive scale, getting more efficient. EqualLogic solves it at a midsized scale,
being so easy to use that literally anybody can operate it.
Okay. So, it sounds like to me you have -- you have Compellent for really the enterprise-class
customers, you have EqualLogic for the SMB type customers who really need that ease of
use.
So, both of these technologies really, though, they cover mostly like the side of storage
which we consider kind of the block or the big large database type of storage.
What happens in the future as you think about mass storage and what you need to do on the
unstructured data or file storage? Where do you think we're going from there?
Yeah, the -- so we like to -- the term in the industry is they're both SANs. The Compellent
and EqualLogic both use SAN technology, either iSCSI interfaced or fiber channel interface
in the case of Compellent. And the other technology that people commonly use is the NAS technology.
NAS just simply means the device operates as a complete file system.
So, this has become very popular, because unstructured data is huge, it's growing, everybody
knows that unstructured data is growing very fast, and what that basically means is these
are video files or audio files or PowerPoint slides or any one of these things can be basically
unstructured data, and you just know from everybody's personal usage this is where the
industry is exploding.
Well, file systems do that very well. Blocks do it well also under the management of the
server, but file systems do it well. And when that data needs to be shared by a lot of people,
a file system typically is the choice that a customer will go after.
The file system market has just started growing. It's about 9 percent growth rate.
But what has really caught on is these products that are unified where it's both file and
block. So, you know that Dell bought the company Exanet --
Right.
-- about a year ago, a very interesting acquisition, an extremely capable solution set.
Exanet can do both -- it can do files, large and small, but it scales. It scales like EqualLogic
does. It has a peer scaling architecture that's usually called a clustered file system. And
it has that so it mapped to the EqualLogic system very well.
And then the second opportunity that you have with file systems is file systems allow you
to do things like de-dupe very well. File systems de-dupe very easily, because the de-dupe
operating system knows a lot about a file just by its, you know, starting point, ending
point, and the name of the file. And so as a result, file systems have become very popular.
We acquired Exanet about a year ago. We're going to have a product out early in the springtime
that's going to be a very capable, very scalable file system, and then we're also going to
embed the Exanet file system inside both EqualLogic and Compellent. Obviously we've been working
on the EqualLogic opportunity a lot longer, so that one will come out this summer. And
the Compellent one, we're going to schedule it and get it ready as soon as possible.
So, our NAS portfolio is going to look like this: We're going to have NAS-only products,
very capable, scalable, with this clustered file system that Exanet has, and we're also
going to have these embedded unified file systems in both Compellent and EqualLogic,
so that the customers that use those can manage that. And what unified fundamentally means
is they'll only use one user interface. They'll use the EqualLogic interface or the Compellent
interface, and it's very, very useful for a customer. And remember these things scale
very, very big. So, SANs are kind of known for their scaling. And so they have all that
scaling potential, all the performance potential, but the user interface of a file system. So,
it's the best of both worlds, and we'll have our products out at least in EqualLogic by
the summer.