NEW YORK -- Dell Inc., facing a Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC) investigation, has delayed filing its Form 10-Q and faces
possible delisting on the NASDAQ. But on the bright side, its
partnership with EMC Corp. is going great.
The Round Rock, Texas, computer systems manufacturer announced
at its Technology Day yesterday in New York City that it had inked
a five-year extension of its alliance with EMC through 2011.
The partnership, which will already be five years old next
month, has netted the two companies 34,000 systems and about 10,000
joint customers, said Kevin Rollins, Dell president. While largely
focused on selling cobranded systems Clariion AX and CX disk
arrays, Dell has also recently started selling EMC replication and
management software, as well as virtualization software from EMC
subsidiary VMware Inc.
In a surprise appearance on stage, EMC chairman Joe Tucci gushed
that the partnership was "one of the most successful partnerships
in the IT industry." As proof point, Tucci cited market share
numbers for the two companies then and now. In 2001, IDC estimated
that Dell and EMC together had about 8% of the overall disk market;
today, they have 29%. Over the next five years, Tucci said, his
goal is "to gain another 21 points of share."
The contract itself hasn't changed much since it was originally
drafted in 2001, according to Praveen Asthana, Dell director of
enterprise storage. "From an operational perspective, it's the
same," he said. "The contract calls for us to review our
relationship on an annual evergreen basis," and is automatically
renewed "unless one of us decides we don't want it to be."
Dell will continue to have unfettered access to the full EMC
product portfolio, not just the Clariion line. Asthana revealed
that the company had resold a few Centera systems, but that EMC's
network attached storage (NAS) systems
weren't a fit for most Dell shops. "Most of our customers are
Windows and Linux shops -- not Unix," he said. "It's the
high-end Unix market that is looking for high-end NAS." For NAS,
Dell bundles Microsoft Windows Storage Server with its own
PowerEdge servers.
Nor has Dell been tempted to look elsewhere for disk subsystems.
"In the
Fibre Channel (FC) disk space, the EMC
relationship is satisfying our customers' needs," Asthana
said.
The same can't be said for EMC, which last fall signed an
agreement with Intel Corp. to sell storage to [an even lower end
market]. At the time, pundits suggested that the Dell-EMC
partnership had hit the rocks, but "hopefully today's announcement
will lay those rumors to rest," Asthana said.
In Dell's immediate future, Asthana, sees a lot of
iSCSI. Already, sales of the AX150 are
"predominantly" iSCSI rather than FC, he said, and he expects
"much more pickup next year." Currently, Dell does not sell
iSCSI versions of the CX line, but he indicated that that is
something the company is considering.
That's a significant shift from years prior. "As you know, iSCSI
has always been the technology of tomorrow, and tomorrow just
hasn't come yet," Asthana said. Currently, Dell is selling
substantial amounts of the AX150 not just to the entry-level
market, but to large corporate users that are purchasing it for
branch office deployments.
On the storage software side, Ashtana said Dell customers had
expressed a strong interest in
continuous data protection (CDP) offerings
from Dell partners Symantec Corp. and CommVault Systems Inc.
Further on down the road, Asthana said Dell is looking at how to
provide storage to home users. With the advent of digital
photography, "the birth of a child can exhaust your entire hard
drive," he said.
There are two models for how to provide storage to home users.
On the one hand, Dell could work with a partner like EMC to develop
very easy-to-use external storage devices. The "competing vision"
is hosted storage, like what Google offers. "We're giving
exploratory looks to both," Asthana said.