EqualLogic Corp. CEO Don Bulens joined the company in early 2005,
hailing from a background in networking and software, including
stints at AT&T and Lotus Notes. This week, he sat down to talk
with SearchStorage.com about
iSCSI, his company's core business and a hot
topic in the market of late, as well as EqualLogic's outlook on
developing its business and product line.
How many customers does EqualLogic have today?
Don Bulens: Over 2,000 -- 350 in the fourth quarter
alone.
Is the company profitable?
Bulens: Yes, I believe so -- it's been profitable since
at least the second quarter of 2006, and possibly in the first, but
I can't say for sure since we haven't closed our books yet.
Given the success of storage IPOs [initial public offering]
in recent months, is the company planning a public offering? What's
the approximate timeframe?
Bulens: We are preparing for life as a public company. We
have always built our business to prepare for that. We focused on
becoming profitable with the expectation that would become part of
the requirement [for going public], of course, that's not true
anymore as Isilon and Riverbed illustrated recently. But we're
participating in the fastest growing segment of the disk industry,
and depending on whether you use Gartner's data or IDC's, we're
either second or third in market share, and we're profitable. I
can't make an explicit commitment to time frame.
What's EqualLogic's top priority on the product development
side?
Bulens: Our first and foremost priority is always on how
can we make our systems easier to deploy and manage … We have a
number of customers now who are at well over 100 terabytes (TB) in
deployment and the challenges for ease of management for a
deployment of that size are at a new order for our first wave of
customers.
We're looking at enhancements that increase the performance
characteristics of our systems -- there is a
10 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) development
effort under way; we don't see it as central to the market we
are relentlessly focused on, which is the midtier enterprise,
but in the interest of serving our higher capacity customers,
it's certainly part of our plan for the 18-month horizon.
Given all the attention it's getting lately, what doesn't the
market know about iSCSI?
Bulens: It's taken for granted that it's less expensive
and easier to manage, but people think less expensive and easier
means there is a tradeoff on performance, capacity, or reliability,
and the fact is some of the early iSCSI market products reinforced
those fears. A recent customer of ours was suffering incredibly
disruptive problems with another iSCSI product in his Exchange
environment -- basically, the IP SAN would break. It was an earlier
generation iSCSI solution that kept breaking on them and the
performance was terrible … So this customer deployed us, got
Exchange back up and doubled his performance. ISCSI's image is
tarnished by some of the poorer, earlier solutions on the market
like that one; not all iSCSI products are alike.
So do you have insight into whether the legacy Fibre Channel
(FC) storage vendors are really behind iSCSI yet?
Bulens: When your Fibre Channel high-end and midrange
product lines are growing at tremendous rates with fantastic
profits and driving extensive professional services engagements,
you're not going to be anxious for that to go away -- it's just in
their shareholders' interests for them to clutch on to Fibre
Channel as long as possible. When we acquire a new customer, we are
beating Fibre Channel proposals, not iSCSI proposals, from one of
the large systems companies still leading in the market with Fibre
Channel.
What makes your product higher performing?
Bulens: Obviously 4 Gbps is better than 1 [Gbps]. But the
speed of the wire is not a primary factor in storage system
performance -- instead, we use the Internet's law of a large number
of small pipes, rather than a small number of large pipes, as a
fundamental part of our architecture.
We heard one analyst describe EqualLogic as like a mini-EMC
Corp., focused solely on iSCSI: high-end, proprietary and the most
expensive solution on the market. Would EqualLogic agree?
Bulens: I don't think our customers view us that way at
all. We have very small single-system customers who view us as an
indispensable part of their storage infrastructure, moving from
DAS [direct attached storage] to much higher
utilization and an easy to back up and recover platform with
networked storage. And oh, by the way, they have every product
function that the highest end EMC Clariion customer has, bundled
into a much lower cost product that's easy to manage, has great
support and is easy to scale when they wish. We have a frameless
solution. You can buy as you need -- you don't have to project
your storage for three-to-five years and buy a large expensive
frame and then grow into it. You can add capacity online with no
disruption on an as-needed basis.
Really, I think people view us as a tremendous value. No one
wants to go into a car dealership and say, yes, I'd like power
windows, yes, radial tires, yes, disk brakes … if you're buying a
car, you assume all those kinds of features are part of the core
purchase. That's not true buying an EMC array -- customers have to
carefully select each and every feature or pay for it terribly down
the road. I disagree [with the analyst's assessment] and think our
customers would disagree strenuously.
How does EqualLogic plan to overtake the market
leaders?
Bulens: It takes a long time to catch up with
multibillion dollar companies with established brands, but we are
doing it one customer at a time. Fortunately that rate is
accelerating for us rapidly. For every other storage systems
company, the rule book is sell direct to large enterprise and then
go down market with the channel. We're focused on the midmarket,
leveraging expertise from a rapidly growing, enthusiastic
channel.
Who are your channel partners?
Bulens: We have over 450 partners in a growing community
worldwide. Increasingly, our partners are those deploying
virtualized server infrastructures. Our greatest growth from a
channel perspective is in parallel with VMware. Every VMware
deployment is setting up a prerequisite for shared storage, but
when systems integrators are meeting with the IT organizations, all
the enthusiasm is for deploying the new server infrastructure --
they don't want the
SAN [storage area network] deployment to get
in their way.
LeftHand Networks has pursued a different strategy to
EqualLogic, racking up OEM deals with HP, Intel and others. Why
don't you have any OEMs?
Bulens: We are not pursuing an OEM strategy. Our approach
is to deliver [a] fully turnkey appliance-based solution that
eliminates field integration requirements and results in less than
an hour into production time with the majority of our
customers.
So your architecture prohibits you from these kinds of
deals?
Bulens: It's a choice of how to deliver our turnkey
appliance with all the enterprise software functionality bundled
into one system. Our early research in founding this company, and
our experience working with customers says that's what the
midmarket wants. No midsized or small IT department wants to be in
the storage integration business.
Some users we've talked to say they find multiprotocol
network
NAS [network attached storage] and iSCSI
systems the way to go, rather than choosing between the block
and file interface. How does EqualLogic address those
customers?
Bulens: It's a trivial integration for our partners to be
able to deliver unified solutions to our customers, some of them
using a Microsoft-based NAS head with our solution. That said, the
majority of high-performance apps are going to be block all the
way. With high-performance applications, block-level performance is
valued with a premium by companies of all sizes.