It's not just crap PC sales: Dell's storage revs are also slipping Has the spark has gone out? Despite acquisitions Dell's storage revenues have been declining for over a year. The effort to develop synergies between the products hasn't delivered the sales goods yet. Is it time for a re-think? Dell has just announced second fiscal 2013 quarterly results with revenues 8 per cent down year-on- …
@AndyC "2013 Q2 results? Have I just entered a temporal rift (yes I am a Trekker!) or is it el Reg?"
The wonders of the fiscal calendar. Dell's 4th quarter ends in Jan 2013, so this is their 2013 fiscal year. Whereas HP's 4th quarter ends Nov 2012, so it's still 2012 for them (in case you were equally confused tomorrow).
As a really long-time Equallogic customer (all the way back to the PS100), I can tell you Dell has lost the plot on storage for guys like me. For what they are offering (slow spinning disk) their pricing is ridiculous, and they've stood by and watched as others have innovated, the way they used to.
Went to a Nimble presentation a couple of months ago and all I could think of was "Wow, this reminds me of Equallogic 10 years ago." So sad to see it end like this. Something about big companies buying small, innovative companies and then sucking all the life out of them... What a shame. I know I won't be buying any more of their gear unless something changes radically, which I doubt can happen.
from what I've seen/heard their storage unification stuff isn't done yet, it sounds like it may take another year or so. In the mean time they have parts of it complete, just not the full thing.
As for competing on the high end, I think Dell's answer to that is multiple Compellent arrays with their automatic load balancing(at least at this point in time). If I recall right they can put up to 4 arrays in a group and they'll move volumes around each other to try to balance the load. It may not be the same as a high end 3 letter competitor, but it's probably a better bet for them given the amount of R&D that would be needed to come up with such a high end product & the returns you'd get on it in the current market.
".... they can put up to 4 arrays in a group and they'll move volumes around each other to try to balance the load...." Dell was looking to 3PAR to fill this hole, so losing to hp in that bidding war was a massive mistake and they simply have not found an option to plug the gap. To be honest, I'm amazed Dell haven't kissed and made up with EMC if only to provide a short-term option until another 3PAR-like option comes along.
The high end is not the primary problem. That's a small and modestly growing part of the business, mostly locked down by HItachi, EMC and some of IBM DS8000 series.
The big growth area is the small and mid-sized SAN business - between 4TB up to 500TB, which both Equallogic and Compellent address well. Dell's got to do a better job of telling their story as they have a good one to tell. I have hands-on experience of both these products.
Equallogic is fantastic, simple to deploy and scale, with good integration software for VMware.
Compellent's fast, stable and the virtual provisioning works very well for storage tiering.
500TB's ? lets' be honest here, neither platform (Equalogic or Compellent) can even approach providing that amount of capacity (especially usable) outside of a spec sheet, unless they're providing pure archive on SATA. Fast is not a word I've often heard associated with Compellent, "interesting technology" yes, but fast no.
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