One of the key benefits for Cyso is not the lower latency, which de Winter says is nice, but the ability to deal with micro-burst issues. "It's more important for us because you don't want to have too many depth spikes from the average."
Analyst Randy Kerns, of the Evaluator Group, thinks the most significant aspect of Dell's storage announcements is the signal that 10 GbE is moving down market. "These products are based on their new architecture platforms. They have added 10 GbE to the 6100 series where they only had 10 Gig on the previous-generation hardware [6000]. The 10 Gig for the 4100 is significant in that it brings 10 Gig to a less-expensive system that is targeted down market."
The software enhancements simplify the installation and usage of more sophisticated pathing capabilities from storage systems, he says. "The customers that can use these products typically don't have the storage experts to optimize the usage. Now they can accomplish it with the integration software."
Last month, Carter George, executive director of storage strategy at Dell, told Network Computing that the company is committed to becoming the third largest storage vendor within three years. Dell has morphed from being largely an EMC reseller to the point where more than 80% of its storage revenues come from intellectual property it owns and creates.
At the heart of its storage aspirations are its Fluid Data strategy, he says. The first step is to build a portfolio that brings high-end features/functions down to a price point midmarket customers can afford but that is also easy enough to use. "As you are able to do this, you are able to move upmarket to solve enterprise problems," says George.
Another way of cracking the enterprise market is through expanding the Copilot program acquired with Compellent, says George. "Copilot goes beyond break/fix. With Copilot you get assigned one or two human beings who are your copilots; their job is to make you happy, and that's the only thing they're measured on."
