Dell extends storage portfolio

Dell unveiled a number of storage products at its European storage forum, in Paris last week.

Darren Thomas, GM of storage at Dell, emphasised performance and management improvements across the company's "fluid data" strategy, as the company continues to acquire storage companies and integrate them into its overall storage portfolio.

At the upper end of Dell's product line, targeting mid- to high-end enterprises, the Compellent Storage Center 3.2 brings major improvements in speed and several new features to the SC8000 storage array. Thomas claimed the new software operates twice as fast as its predecessor, and now enables end-to-end 16Gbps Fibre Channel connections, with 87% lower latency and a 30% decrease in infrastructure costs.

The upgrade is a software update, meaning existing Compellent customers will be able to download and deploy it without additional cost or disruption, Thomas said. The 16Gbps speeds are achieved through hardware IO modules for storage arrays and servers, available from Brocade, a Dell partner. SC3.2 will be available to limited customers from the start of 2013, with general availability expected in March.

Dell's smaller PowerVault MD3 storage arrays also received storage updates, with new software offering dynamic disk pooling, remote replication, and VMware's vStorage API, allowing storage tasks to be offloaded from servers to the storage array.

Two new products debuted in the PowerVault backup line. The DL4000, targeting small businesses and branch office deployments, is the first to integrate the AppAssure technology Dell acquired earlier this year. The DL4000 includes 5.5TB of storage and includes deduplication and compression software capable of achieving up to 80% reduction in storage, Thomas said. The device, deployed through a setup wizard, can be up and running in half an hour, he said. The DL4000 can stand up two temporary virtual machines to continue application availability from a recent snapshot in the event of server failure. The product is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2013.

The second new PowerVault product, the DL2300, targets larger environments with capacity up to 192 TB (compressing to 480TB, under optimal conditions). The DL2300 includes CommVault Simpana software and support for Windows Server 2012 and Novell OES 11.

Dell also unveiled Quest NetVault Backup 9.0 - Dell revealed plans to acquire Quest in July. The new version features a complete overhaul of the user interface, inspired by researching into computer gaming, Thomas said. Beyond the pretty GUI, the new version also includes better support for virtual environments and Windows Server 2012.

Dell has been pushing hard to build out its storage portfolio through acquisitions, after prematurely terminating its decade-long relationship with storage provider EMC in 2011. Dell, facing plunging desktop revenues as PC sales slow, has been filling out its enterprise offering with high-end server solutions, virtualisation, cloud and storage products. The enterprise business has been growing well, but the storage side is lagging (down 16% in the last quarter), and Dell is looking to shore up that business as big data becomes an increasingly hot topic for enterprise customers. There are positive signs: it recently shipped its 100 000th EqualLogic storage array, and Michael Dell noted during the company's recent earnings call that a customer with an exadata of storage had been counted as a server customer, not storage.

To become a storage player, Dell has made a number of rapid-fire acquisitions, and shows no sign of slowing. Many of its other purchases, such as AppAssure for data security and Scalent for management, have also become parts of the Dell enterprise storage story as its data centre technologies become integrated, now a key R&D focus at Dell. In fact, the company's first ever corporate acquisition was a storage player: ConvergeNet in 1999. That went nowhere, and it was nearly a decade before Dell bought another storage player: EqualLogic, now a central part of the Dell storage strategy.

Quest Software was the most recent, acquired for its NetVault backup software. CommVault, whose Simpana software is a key component of Dell's storage line up through a partnership deal, is a likely acquisition target.

At the Dell Storage Forum in Paris, executives were quick to point out that many of the product upgrades have come about from integrating features from related products into other systems. The result is a fully-integrated but widely extended storage portfolio, and some rationalisation across the range may come in time. Quest and AppAssure are likely candidates to merge, for example. But although some product lines may merge, the company will continue to differentiate its hardware for different size businesses, Thomas said. "The entry level is value focused, the midrange wants features but is still focused on value, and the high end spares no expense for the highest possible performance and features. There are dramatically different hardware costs even if they're running the same software."