TheInfoPro

Written by Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

From our 1H 2011 storage study, the Dell performance chart shows Dell needing a better answer for enterprise storage requirements. The storage study closed just as Dell announced the acquisition, keeping reviews of Dell separate from those of Compellent. As you can see in the chart, Compellent was a smart acquisition, adding weight in the strategic vision and technical innovation ratings where Dell was deficient. The acquisition of Compellent gives Dell storage the opportunity for a new lease on life, with Dell lending Compellent its brand authority.

Nine months later, how is that strategy playing out? In TheInfoPro’s Vendor Performance report for 1H 2011, the Dell summary was headlined “Dell: Compellent Acquisition Is Just What the Doctor Ordered.” Dell was improving its ratings for technical support and delivery as promised, yet the existing products rated poorly for quality and reliability. None of the Dell reviewers were planning to increase spending on Dell storage in 2011, and investments were peaking at $249,000. Compellent could change all that. “Compellent is moving into the big time and putting pressure on Big Blue and EMC.” – storage pro at a large-enterprise energy/utilities company.

Dell’s second quarter earnings call (Aug. 16) revealed overall storage revenue down by 20%. The challenge is the significant loss of revenue from removing EMC from their sales channel, which put a -62% charge on storage revenue. Dell CFO Brian Gladden said he sees this impact as lasting until the end of the year. “We’re already seeing the double digits, obviously, in the Dell-branded IP. But, we’ve just got to work through the tail with EMC, and continue to be on a path that by the end of the year we should be in positive storage growth overall and continue to be in double-digits for our Dell IP.”

Despite this, the details show the strategy is paying off. The Compellent storage business grew a noteworthy 97% since the acquisition closed in Q1, and Dell-owned storage technology grew 15% in the quarter. These are all healthy growth numbers reflecting a solid strategic choice. Customers are seeing strength in the combination. “Dell/Compellent combine price and functionality. Also, they offer a better management tool than all of their competitors. Our internal people are very impressed with Dell.” – storage pro at a large-enterprise financial services company.

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Written by Daniel Kennedy, Research Director for Networking

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

Dell, a leading x86 server provider that in April purchased storage systems provider Compellent, added to its enterprise stack with the July 20th announcement that they will acquire high speed Ethernet switch maker Force10. This reported $700 million acquisition represents a final strategic piece: the networking capability required to offer a converged stack of server, storage, and networking components.

As solutions such as vBlock (the combined VMware, Cisco, EMC offering) and HP Matrix look to offer the definitive integrated infrastructure solution to enable enterprise private clouds, Dell appears to have taken a further step in the same direction. In our companion Server study, Dell shows up third for Intel blade servers, behind the leader HP and is catching up to number two IBM with a few percentage points of “in pilot” implementation.

Force10’s penetration of the rankings for enterprises’ 10 Gigbit Ethernet backbones, as seen below in the technology roadmap, demonstrate a product that has made it’s way into enterprise deployments. The category itself remains dominated by Cisco.

Force10's Share of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Backbone Market

The previously private company Force10, released it’s initial 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch in 2002, has some 1,300 customers, 750 employees, and a reported $200 million in annual revenue. One of our respondents summarized Force10′s value position as follows:

• “Good pricing, reasonable performance.”

As we conducting are currently conducting Networking Wave 9 interviews, we should see a few reactions in the narratives from our respondent base of end user IT managers, similar to the reactions seen in the Storage Wave 15 study when Dell acquired Compellent:

• “Compellent is interesting but was too small, but now it is Dell, [so we] may have another look.”
• “We like the integration of integration of tiering of the Dell and Compellent products.”

Converged infrastructure continues to be a hot topic across multiple of our sectors, so in the coming months expect to see in depth metrics around your peers’ adoption across the Server, Network, and Storage studies.

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Written by Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

Storage tiers have existed since storage networking allowed shared storage, reducing cost by allowing different price/performance selections for data. Over the last year, the focus for autotiering moved within the array, exploiting the price/performance variations of different drive types: SSD, FC, SAS and SATA. Drive choices have been available for some time; it is the automation of tiering that is generating interest today. Below are a few examples of how your peers talk about the subject:

• “We have some tiering now. [We have] EMC VMAX as tier 1, we have IBM and NetApp rebranded, and VMAX has tiering in the box. Right now the thing our manager is pushing for is to determine whether tiering in a box is cost- effective, because if you have to grow a tier, you may need another engine.”
• “HDS’s VSP device does self-tiering and fits in a 19-inch rack.”

Compellent pioneered block level autotiering within the array as far back as 2005. The major vendors scrambled to include the technology on their roadmaps, with some developing it, while others acquired it like Dell (via Compellent), or HP (via 3PAR).

EMC came to market late, taking several release cycles to develop matching technology. Yet already, they are the leading vendor for this technology. Significantly, EMC has an overwhelming lead among respondents with pilot or other plans for autotiering. Coming from behind, EMC has redefined the segment and taken mindshare ownership.

Interest in autotiering is still experimental with most spending less than $50K. As 73% of current users are planning to spend more on the technology next year, we are clearly just at the beginning of its lifecycle.

Autotiering is not just a block prerogative. F5 Networks appear on short lists as well by delivering such capabilities in NAS environments. Some vendors like BlueArc are not yet appearing in significant numbers in our interviews, but are getting positive feedback like the following statements:

• “F5 for ‘ILM’ auto-tiering.”
• “I like [BlueArc's] multitiered file systems.”

TheInfoPro Recommendation: IT professionals should make sure their preferred vendors are offering this technology for SAN and NAS environments, but verify that the cost savings generated will not be consumed by overheads of the technology and the management that is sometimes required.

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New research from TheInfoPro’s Wave 11 Time Series Storage Study reveals that NetApp and Data Domain have seen the largest jump in mentions by IT pros regarding which technology providers they see as being the most exciting

NEW YORK, NY, October 21, 2008 – TheInfoPro (TIP), www.theinfopro.$ST_net, an independent research network and leading supplier of market intelligence for the Information Technology (IT) industry, today announced that NetApp and Data Domain have seen the largest …

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