back to article My Dell merger wish list

It's merger day, it's merger day! Everyone please crank out a pile of speculation, research, facts, and innuendo about Dell, EMC, VMware and the ever important "what it all means". We will watch and participate as the entire internet completely overloads everyone's signal-to-noise filters by bombarding them with unprecedented …

  1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "I want... a pony"

    Don't we all. What we're more used to getting is a donkey.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Yeah, but if start settling for a donkey, what we'll actually get is...not very useful at all.

  2. Bubba Von Braun

    Living in one of Dell's acquisitions (soon to be divested) Trevor you get what Dell does 100%. Sadly I am not sure it wont be a larger repeat of what has come before, for my remaining friends I hope not.

    It will be interesting to watch.

  3. TaabuTheCat

    And please...

    VMware, get your product quality back up. You may not be able to attract everyone to your technology but you can sure as hell drive them away with crap QC, and over the last 18 months you've been doing a fine job of it.

  4. Roger Greenwood

    "now why did that happen?"

    And when it doesn't work, we apply the WHIP (what haven't I pressed?)

  5. Franco

    More and more I'm seeing people, once staunchly in the camp of "I'll never use Hyper-V cos it's management is crap compared to VMware" being driven away by poor support and poor product quality.

    Just hope EMC don't suffer the way EquaLogic did. I went through months of pain as Dell rebranded the firmware and added new features in the same revisions, none of which worked. One SAN I supported had more firmware flashes in 3 months than the collective total of every other SAN I've ever touched.

  6. Timo

    Dell got where it is by being a fast follower

    The thing that made Dell the powerhouse (in the 1990's this is) was that they followed the major PC companies and then applied their supply chain optimization to produce clones of clones at much lower cost.

    Dell may have had R&D spending, but it was focused on manufacturing and supply chain, not on computer tech and moving the industry forward. So they saved on a lot of R&D and risk, letting the majors invest in tech and take risks with products out in the open for all to see. Dell would come along and take the safest path with their products now that the market had been sorted and/or the trail had been blazed by someone else.

    When IBM veered off into services Dell lost one of their main sources of tech innovation and places to monitor product data. HP eventually caught up with them on cost and so Dell's major advantage was minimized.

    Don't get me wrong - Dell did do some really good things in the market but I posit that it was mainly around the supply chain more than the tech itself.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "please let EMC II experiment. Let them try new things. Above all let them fail"

    Given Compellent, what makes you think Dell won't let bits of EMC II fail?

    The question is, will anyone in Dell Storage know what to do if EMC II succeeds or will the unfamiliar feeling destroy them?

  8. Mark 85

    Excellent article

    I see not just the three that Trevor talks about, but various mixes and matches that apply to almost any corporate tech firm. This is basic stuff that the beancounters and suits either ignore or conveniently forget. Or maybe their MBA never taught them about.

    A different world or a different time and maybe things would be better...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dell are...

    ... large scale commodity IT both their tech and people. They turn out adequate, if uninspiring, tin and sell barely competent IT handle-turning monkeys for outsourced support and development.

    Vision and Innovation from Dell? Not bloody likely.

  10. Nate Amsden

    as a former dell customer

    (Sonicwall customer, not sure if that division is spun out from Dell or not yet), I have no wish list for Dell or EMC myself. I do like Sonicwall though it has worked well for me over the past 5 years. Our usage of it is mainly for site to site VPN but it's been very reliable, fast, very easy to manage, and trouble free for the most part. Their SSL VPN solution wasn't flexible enough to do what I needed it to do, so never got to deploy that.

    My wishlist is fulfilled by HP. (Servers+storage+FC storage networking anyway(HP also provides us with front line vmware support), I haven't bought into any of the converged stuff yet, maybe will get blades some day, I had a fully populated Dell blade chassis 6 years ago at another company for vmware (free ESXi only the cheap bastards), it worked ok, though the lack of integration with the management between the chassis and the iDRACs on the blades was very surprising. I'm sure Dell has improved on it since then.

    As someone else mentioned I do hope Vmware gets their quality back up again, while the problem hasn't impacted any of the systems I run(still run vsphere ent+ 5.5 and vcenter on windows, deploying a new vcenter soon going with windows again there too, even though I am a linux guy). At some point I may upgrade to newer things from vmware and it would be nice to continue the track record I have had with them with good success across ESX/ESXi, vmware workstation(on linux), and before that VMware server, and GSX before it was renamed to vmware server.

    Maybe will be an EMC Isilon customer soon too (one of their smallest boxes, need something highly available and high level of support for maybe 2-4TB of critical data, and HP doesn't have a good enough NAS in that space), been using ZFS to-date(a couple different solutions) and it does the job but is a very hacky solution. Basically set it up and don't touch it afterwards. Tried HP StoreEasy which is HP's answer in this space but it sucked really really badly, even had the failure of a single volume (due to internal file system problem with dedupe on the windows storage server) take out the entire cluster instead of just taking down one volume. Turned off clustering after that.

    I don't use HP for ethernet networking either (Extreme networks is my switching company of choice), though if I do go the HP blade route at some point I'm sure there will be some HP networking in the chassis.

    1. Bubba Von Braun

      Re: as a former dell customer

      "(Sonicwall customer, not sure if that division is spun out from Dell or not yet)"

      Sonicwall is being spun out as part of the Dell Software divestment see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/20/dell_sells_off_software_arm/

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