A reader writes:

I found your blog after searching for storage alternatives. I have to say, its really impressive and has helped me a lot so far. I was wondering if you could offer some advice.

We run an online version control service. Currently we are hosted on a VMware environment using FC SAN (SAS and SATA).

We’re growing into the 3 TB+ range and looking for alternatives, since we’re paying $2.50/GB for FC SAN (crazy). We looked at NetApp, but with all the stuff going on these days I have to think there is something less expensive and more creative.

Basically, our needs are:

• Fast read and write performance (500+ r/w iops – we have over 13,000 commits per day)
• Shared across many machines. We are currently using NFS.
• Something that won’t require a team to manage. Although, we already manage our entire Linux environment.

I noticed a post about Gluster, ParaScale, and Nexenta. They look promising, but my fear is that they will require too much maintenance. SAN and NFS are pretty simple and if we get NetApp from our hosting provider they manage it for us. Although, they want to charge us $8,000/mo for it (two shelf, 28 450 GB 15k SAS).

As I dive into storage I think I get more confused Any advice is greatly appreciated.

When I asked if I could publish the note – which has been edited for clarity and anonymity – I had my own questions:

Why do you think that Gluster, ParaScale & Nexenta will require too much maintenance? Also, when you say SAN, are you referring to Fibre Channel or simply a dedicated Ethernet storage network?

The reply illustrated a facet of the marketing problem that new technologies face: uncertainty.

Not sure really, I just have not had experience with any of those solutions yet. Nexenta looks pretty impressive. I’ve also heard some great results from DRBD.

We have Fiber Channel with HBA cards. It’s still shared storage, but really fast.

BTW, DRBD is the name of an open-source software product:

DRBD® refers to block devices designed as a building block to form high availability (HA) clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via an assigned network. DRBD can be understood as network based raid-1.

The StorageMojo take
My first thought is that anyone who manages a technical hosted service that costs several $K per month should be able to manage a fairly modest scale-out cluster whose capital cost may be only 2-3 months of rental. And 28 15k drives seems like overkill on both the IOPS and the capacity.

But I don’t know much about version control I/O profiles. Maybe the problem is harder than that.

Readers, what say you?

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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I noticed this morning that co-founder Geoff Barrall is out as Data Robotics CEO. The VCs installed their own guy, who previously was head of sales and marketing at on-the-ropes Brocade.

Given Geoff’s banishment from the executive team and the lack of a “time to take DR to the next level” quote from him, it looks like he didn’t go willingly. Update: Geoff’s name is back on the executive team web page as of Thursday the 18th. I hope he and the company can figure out a role for him. Of course, if they don’t we may get an even more innovative company. End update.

I’ve asked a couple of those involved to comment and I’ll update this post if and when I hear anything more. My impression could be wrong.

The StorageMojo take
Founders can be an irreplaceable asset in building a company for the long term. But not all of them can be a Ken Olsen, taking a company from a $70k investment to over $14B in sales in 30 years of growth.

Yet even if they aren’t executive timber for the long haul, they can be valuable for a fast growing company, giving newcomers a cultural template and old-timers a touchstone in the midst of often mind-numbing change.

Like Dave Hitz at NetApp, Geoff seemed to be a great ambassador for the company and might have been a continuing asset – if the VCs wanted to build a major company. But given the sad state of the IPO market it appears DR is being groomed for acquisition – a decision Geoff might not have agreed with.

But when you take VC money you also, usually, give up control of your fate. It’s the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. On an unrelated note the RSS feed should be working. Safari’s View Source option doesn’t show every character that Firefox does. Huh?

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Geoff Barrall founded BlueArc at the high end of NAS performance. He then founded Data Robotics, maker of the Drobo low end arrays. A group of bloggers visited DR last month and a lucky few – not including me – took brand new Drobo2 units home.

The idea
For those who haven’t been following Drobo, the idea was to build a simple-as-possible-but-no-simpler storage array for data intensive civilians. Folks like photographers, videographers, musicians, scientists and designers who munge a lot of data.

Drobo users can put any size drive in the box and the capacity will be added automagically. The usable capacity for protected data is roughly the sum of the 3 smallest drives in the box.

The key point though is that civilians don’t have to know about volume sizes, drive capacities or configuring RAID. Stick a couple of drives in the box and Drobo tells you what you’ve got.

Need more, add another drive. Once the slots are filled, pull the smallest drive out and add a larger drive. Don’t get too frisky though: with large drives the data movement takes many hours.

The instruction manual is printed on the inside of the faceplate that covers the drives. Big green and red lights give drive status.

Product line
Data access and performance are 2 sides of the same coin. If the performance is too slow for the application, the data is essentially not available – at least until you can move it to something faster.

The gen1 Drobo was USB only and crippled by anemic performance. Fine for photographs, but any decent-sized video file would choke it.

The second Drobo – now the low end model – added FireWire 800 to the mix. You could archive video on it, but not edit it in situ. About a year ago they introduced a 8 drive version with GigE and single-server iSCSI support and a dual-drive failure protection.

Last month Drobo added 2 new models: the Drobo S with 5 drives and eSATA; and the Drobo Elite, an 8 drive unit with dual GigE and multi-server iSCSI support. The latter is spec’d at 255 virtual LUNs, but ~100 is more realistic.

Performance
Now fellow blogger Devang Panchigar over at StorageNerve has published performance test results (pdf) of the current low-end model.

The net/net: USB tops out at about 32 MB/sec; while FW800 manages 52 MB/sec. Neither is fast enough for HD video, but FW800 will handle standard def video just fine.

I’m planning to buy a 5 slot Drobo S later this month with the help of a gift discount coupon from DR. After I’ve played with it I’ll let you know what I think. One problem already: getting a decent Mac eSATA driver for a PCIe card.

The StorageMojo take
DR is moving up market. They plan to stay with a self-imposed $15k price ceiling. With 3 TB drives right around the corner, a raw 24 TB iSCSI SAN array could come in at $8k or less.

$300/TB for a capacity large enough for many SMBs is disruptive – especially when the easy-enough-for-mom management is factored in. If they go public next year I suspect there will be a bidding war for them in ‘11.

At $400 for an empty 4 slot box they aren’t competing on price either. They are showing the industry what can be done with a premium price – compared to the Buffalos and Iomegas – array that offers much greater ease of use. Their growth rate proves that is a popular message.

The bigger issue for old-line vendors is that the SMB market is about to get a lot tougher – as if it wasn’t tough enough. The enterprise ROBO market is also in play.

DR is the one to beat in the prosumer storage market.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. DR was a sponsor of the tech blogger excursion that flew me to Silicon Valley. And just for the record, Drobo doesn’t use ZFS.

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These requests came in over the transom in the last couple of days. Maybe some StorageMojo readers have wisdom to share.

I have a question I hope you can help me with. My boss asked me . . . to research HP Left-hand SANs and Dell Equallogic SANs. Do you have any special knowledge of these products and, if so, would you make an informal recommendation?

What say you, StorageMojo readers? If you evaluated both, why did you make the choice you did? Vendors welcome to comment, but please identify yourself as such.

The StorageMojo take
AFAIK, both products are good iSCSI systems. Both are backed by major corporations. EqualLogic may be stronger in the channel today, but HP has channel chops as well. HP’s blade servers may be a more expandable platform, but EqualLogic’s software portfolio may be more affordable.

Translation: you could do worse than either of these.

Part II
Another customer perplexity: service.

We have a pair of HP disk arrays, EVA 8000 and 6000 and I am looking for a consultant to help up with storage planning. Do you do such work or could you recommend someone to me. I am looking for someone who goes beyond just being a seller, I have plenty of potential sellers already.

The writer is in a small city in the Mountain West, so you should be used to working remotely with clients. No, not in Arizona.

The StorageMojo take
HP folks may be wondering: why doesn’t he call HP? My guess: not big enough for a direct engagement.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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With all the kerfluffle, one might think that Data Domain is the only dedup appliance company out there.

They aren’t.

The big guys are admitting they don’t have a product
Bill Andrews, CEO of ExaGrid, weighed in with some pertinent comments today:

What does it mean to ExaGrid if EMC buys Data Domain?

First, it validates what we have been saying — that NTAP and EMC did not have a product for the mid market to small enterprise. If they had a competitive product why would they pay this much? They certainly don’t need the brand, customers, market or sales force. It proves they had a hole in their product lines.

ExaGrid is out there competing every day and we see what customers are doing at the street level.

ExaGrid
- Wins against Data Domain over 70% of the time in head to head battles
- ExaGrid has over 350 customers
- In Q1 Data Domain brought on 218 new customers and ExaGrid brought on 51 . . . not bad considering their sales force is 4 times the size of our entire company
- ExaGrid has over 110 customer success stories on its web site where the company is named and the IT person is named and quoted
o This is more than all the de-dupe vendors combined . . .

Bill goes on to point out that there is a market for both backup software with dedup and for target appliances. The latter appeals to the SMB, who is just coming to grips with the growing requirements for e-discovery and the advantages of D2D backup.

The StorageMojo take
There’s little doubt that if the IPO market were stronger ExaGrid would have gone public and used the money to turbocharge their sales and marketing. Then they’d be commanding a billion dollar offer as well.

Bill’s point about the hole in EMC’s and NetApp’s product lines is well taken. Everybody talks about SMB, but unless you focus on them it is very hard to get it right. Enterprise margins and engineering challenges are just too appealing. SMB customers want a strong relationship and that takes time.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I just ripped Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon to my iPhone. Hence the post’s title. Update: I did some work for ExaGrid a couple of years ago. End update.

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Direct attached storage may catch on
PCI-e DAS is getting traction in the media world. At least a dozen vendors – all smaller – were showing it, and customers were responding.

JMR’s BlueStor is promising over 4 GB/sec with PCI-e attach. In a world where a single 4k frame is almost 50 MB, that is speed production companies need.

More on NAB later.

The StorageMojo take
Beth Pariseau noted the DAS movement at SNW earlier this month. This isn’t just a Hollywood moment. There’s more to this nascent DAS resurgence than the need for speed.

• Multi-core systems. Multi-core, multi-thread systems are like a cluster in a box – only cheaper. DAS looks like a SAN to an 8 core system.
• Management. When you can easily attach several dozen TB of cheap SATA to a physical machine, who needs a SAN? Not to mention the optical PCI-e extension cables.
• Cost. There’s something that looks a lot like worldwide depression going down. DAS is cheap(er) and as long as systems scale inside the box a SAN offers few advantages.

A DAS resurgence. Will wonders never cease.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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A few weeks after NetApp shut down their low-end StoreVault product, Data Robotics introduces a low-end box that will be very popular with small and some medium sized businesses: the DroboPro. Hey, it’s even got a rack mount kit.

Supporting USB, FireWire and now GigE iSCSI, the almost management-free DroboPro is a product that direct enterprise sales forces can’t sell: it doesn’t cost enough. And neither, evidently, did the StoreVault.

Here’s a one minute video of the product showing a 3 drive configuration handling a 2 drive failure:

The StorageMojo take
That sucking sound you hear is the under $25k array market draining into Drobo’s coffers. They won’t be missed.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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Continuing an occasional feature
This just came over the transom. Vendors, take your best shot at configuring a good solution.

Non-vendors are welcome too. I’ll email him a customized StorageMojo take after the bulk of the comments come in.

Welcome to the real world, Neo.
Vendors often wax eloquent about the SMB market when enterprise IT dollars dry up. But this note is a good example of the problems vendors face – mostly resellers – in servicing this level of customer.

• Budget. $20k won’t pay for a direct sales visit.
• Mission. Backup, archive or both? Would you recommend a RAID system for either?
• Education. How likely is it that the Major’s requirements can be met with a disk-based solution?
• Integration. The writer is a busy guy who does sys admin work as a sideline to his real work. My sense is that most non-tech organizations with fewer than 300 employees don’t have full time sys admins. So it either needs to virtually install itself or come with someone to install it.
• Service. This is a self-serve client. Hardware repair and upgrades must be simple. Software updates ditto.

Also, he doesn’t mention data retention and chain-of-evidence issues, but sometimes cases come back year later for judicial review or on appeal. Keep that in mind as well.

Here’s email in (mostly) his own words
I edited a bit for clarity.

We are a Sheriff’s Office with two-hundred sworn members. I run the CSI unit full time and supervise the Evidence Custoodian and Forensic Services Tech. I also process CCTV video and digital imaging for the county.

I have a digital photo room and a video processing room. The digital photo room has a stand-alone agency PC that is not plugged in to the internet/intranet. It is plugged in to the power outlet, that’s it. I have a 130 GB external hard drive for that system. I download digital images to the software on that PC and download the monthly folders to gold plated DVD’s. One DVD stays here at HQ, the second goes to the office at the courthouse.

The video processing room has a stand-alone Avid Adrenaline PC from Ocean Systems [ed. note: a leading vendor of forensic video analysis systems]. [The Avid] is also not on the intranet and the memory is all internal on it’s own drives.

My Major met with me this morning asking me about getting a RAID backup system. He has about 20k from a grant and wants us to get the best bang for the buck. He also does not want to get nickeled and dimes to death several years down the road when we ask him for more money to upgrade the RAID. He is worried about support for the RAID beyond the typical five year warranty/support period.

What advice can you provide me about using a back-up system for both PC’s? I told him that we are currently playing Russian roulette with the systems and that I do not want to be the person that has to tell the Sheriff that the system has failed and we do not have it backed up.

I can ask for more information if deemed essential, but I think there’s enough there to make informed estimates. This is why good resellers are worth their margin points, when our corporate overlords permit them.

The StorageMojo take
The only difference between this scenario and the issues I see here in Smallville is that the budget is larger and the writer is more sophisticated about storage than most small business owners. But as the generation and use of digital data becomes pervasive we have to have solutions that reach this level of problem for even lower cost.

After all, is this so different from where the average family will be in 5 years?

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of the LeftHand Networks shows how cluster storage is going mainstream – and how HP plans to be right in the middle of it. First PolyServe and now LeftHand.

This is about commodity-based clusters
Not iSCSI or GigE or 10 GigE as a storage interconnect. Fibre Channel’s failure to move downmarket – and Infiniband’s similar problem – means GigE is the only game in town.

Reaching the huge, not currently imploding, SMB market requires meeting people where they live. SMBs don’t live in Fibre Channel glass houses. GigE isn’t ideal, but it’s cheap and it works.

Did HP overpay?
$360 million isn’t pocket change, but it is only about 4x the $86 million investors put in. The investors get some nice coin, but it isn’t the 10-bagger they were hoping for.

Once the Lefties go through the interminable internal HP meat grinder, sales will grow rapidly. I suspect they weren’t up to Isilon’s $100M in sales – maybe $70M – but LeftHand was much closer to profitability. Net net: the price looks fair for a market leader in a high-growth market.

HP vs EMC
Battle of the competing cluster storage visions. Polyserve handles files; LeftHand blocks. EMC’s Maui is aimed at large-scale distributed file storage, a utility that ISP’s might resell to SMBs, but nothing an SMB would implement on their own.

Which will win – and there’s room for both – rests on the answer to the question Are there economies of scale in storage?. If there are, small-scale clusters sales will suffer and Maui should win.

The StorageMojo take
This is cluster storage market skirmishing, not a pitched battle. That will come but right now everyone is feeling their way, coming into the market from different directions, waiting to see what clicks.

Right now though, HP seems to have the strongest position. XIV is too new; Maui even newer; Lustre too complex; Isilon is digging out of a big hole. HP has the pole position with implementable products today and the services to back them up. Should be a powerful combination.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Disclosure: I’ve done some work for HP, Isilon and Sun.

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Consumerization is the ultimate scale-out application
I spoke to EMC’s CTO, Jeff Nick, at EMC world and video’d his comments. I didn’t know what to expect, as some past EMC CTO’s have been lightweights whose insight wasn’t up to Silicon Valley standards.

But Nick is different: a former IBM distinguished engineer Fellow – their highest technical level; holder of many patents; leader of IBM’s grid initiatives. He swims in the deep end of the pool. Once he realized I’d done some homework he proved voluble and insightful.

We discussed several topics, including why Maui is late (short answer: productizing advanced technology is hard). The best part was describing what Paul Maritz’ Pi Corp brings to the table.

Here’s the video:

The StorageMojo take
EMC is taking Dell’s purchase of EqualLogic seriously. They are intent on building EMC into a trusted consumer brand for personal information storage in the cloud.

That is easier said than done. Yet Google – the obvious 1st choice for this market – has hurt their brand by dithering on privacy issues. Why trust your most private data to a company that makes its money selling your information? 

EMC is unleashing a triple whammy on its traditional competitors

• Leading edge technology in Maui
• Consumer-focused services with Mozy and Iomega
• A next-gen software infrastructure in Pi that – if it delivers – will change how consumers manage their data forever

These are all game-changers. Together they bring on the consumerization of IT – storage industry division – at a fast pace. While cloud storage must still overcome the Internet’s 3 9s availability, EMC’s added-value approach is promising.

Comments welcome, of course.

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Moving to a small town in northern Arizona from Silicon Valley has enriched my perspective on many things, including how the industry develops products. The consensus is that if we take datacenter technology and put in enough defaults it will be “simple” enough for consumers. Wrong.

Memo to developers: it is ALL consumer IT
The consumerization of IT is usually means the adoption by IT of high volume consumer technologies. The PCI bus, Microsoft Windows, USB, x86, SATA disks and Wi-Fi all started in the consumer space and displaced more sophisticated and expensive IT.

But consumerization also means taking tech first developed for IT and making it easy enough for consumers. Ethernet LANs, symmetric multi-processing, external disk systems (well, really only Drobo) and what we used to call “office automation” software are now usable by non-geeks.

Pro vs amateur
Amateurs like GUIs. Pro’s like CLIs. Why do we have both on “enterprise” products? Because we are all amateurs – at something.

The third shift guys are all amateurs. They may want to be “professional” but they aren’t now.

Backup: the highest failure rate in IT?
Who knows how good the numbers are. A 40% enterprise backup failure rate is frequently bandied about. Whatever the “real” number is, it isn’t good enough.

If “professionals” with “industrial strength” backup hardware and software can only achieve a 60% completion rate – a failing grade anywhere – why does it surprise us that only a tiny percentage of small office/home office people backup regularly?

And further, why do we assume that SOHOs will never backup? “Americans will never wear seatbelts.” “People will never recycle.” “SOHOs will never backup.”

Yet the record is clear. If you take an education and ease of use approach, people will change their behavior. They will wear seatbelts. They will recycle. They will even learn to deal with PITA child seats. And they will backup.

But not if it is presented as a “junior” enterprise backup. Make it easy and affordable. Mostly easy. And people will do it.

A couple of backup products that work
On ZDnet I reviewed a Windows backup product that I could recommend to any small business here in the red rock-strewn desert, Backupkey. Plug it in, hit “enter” twice, and all your valuable Windows data gets copied.

Did this simple, useful product come from Boston? Silicon Valley? Redmond? Denver? Nope. Charleston, South Carolina? Bingo!

I suspect Backupkey got built there because the developer actually knows small business people. Knows their frustration and their intolerance for stuff that doesn’t work as they think it should.

Most Windows backup software is simply dumbed-down “real” backup. Backup sets. Incrementals. Images. Bootable. Whatever. But non-IT folks don’t know those words or concepts. Why can’t it just work?

On a Mac both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper work great and are almost easy enough for complete idiots to use. Partial idiots only, please. Apple’s Time Machine, which I finally set up last night on a new 500 GB USB/eSATA drive, is totally easy. Mindless bliss.

The StorageMojo take
I cringe every time I hear the big companies proclaim a new focus on the SMB market. Usually it is some shrunk-down enterprise product with incentives for the channel.

But what doesn’t change is the thinking behind the product. The assumptions about the consumer – “like us, only dumber” – and how the problem they are trying to solve rarely get the kind of re-think that went into Time Machine.

But the logic is inescapable: the more pervasive IT becomes, the more the technology must adapt to people. Backupkey does that for low-end Windows backup. Time Machine does that for Mac OS X. Who, and what, is next?

Comments welcome, as always.

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Darn! It looks like I screwed up. I’m sorry. While Microsoft did disable a number of early Word and other file formats, it wasn’t as long a list as I thought.

Textual analysis
I take a text-heavy approach to the content on StorageMojo. I prefer to go to original source material, unpack the meaning and the context, and then give my take on it.

That usually works pretty well. But in this case it didn’t.

What happened?
I read a lot of technical documents. Most never get written about. But the Microsoft knowledge base article was an exception. Since Microsoft was the topic it also got a lot of attention from me and others

There is a lot of emotion around Microsoft. They are a big, powerful, immensely profitable and sometimes clueless corporation whose desktop monopoly is a fact of life for computer users and IT professionals.

I try to stay with the facts as best I can determine them. In this case I got confused by the KB article. That other people made the same mistake is small comfort and no excuse (see a Microsoft take here).

Lessons learned
Other than resolving to analyze content from Microsoft more carefully, I’m not sure what else I would do differently. I didn’t question their motives for the change, only the way it was handled.

However, I do have some suggestions for Microsoft.

• Reducing functionality on an already purchased product is a problem. You should notify users that you are limiting product functionality and give them the opportunity to decline the update. Even if it is for their own good.
• Suggesting that editing the registry or using esoteric admin tools to solve the problem is OK for the tech savvy. But what about my 85 year old neighbor Dorothy, whose computer is a lifeline to her great-grandchildren? Her late husband was an engineer, so she has files that go back quite a few years. Microsoft, you are both an enterprise and a consumer company. Own it.
• Communication is worth spending money on. Tech writers tell me that Microsoft doesn’t pay very well and, as a result, it doesn’t get very good tech writing. Maybe MCSEs are used to the style, but it sure didn’t work for this reasonably tech-savvy consumer.

The StorageMojo take
Tech is complicated and sometimes people – like I just did – get it wrong. Listening to criticism and learning from mistakes is how we all get better, even Microsoft. I hope you’ll keep coming back to StorageMojo and I’ll keep doing my level best to make it worth your time.

Comments welcome, as always.

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“They trusted us with their data? Will the fools never learn?”
The Service Pack 3 update to Office 2003 blocks over a dozen old file formats, effectively rendering the data inaccessible. Unless you are adept at the registry editing Microsoft cautions you against.

And they don’t warn you that you won’t be able to access the old files. Whee!

Check out my ZDnet article for the gory details. It isn’t pretty.

Update: While the SP3 does block opening a number of old file formats, the formats in question are older: all Word pre-6.0; PowerPoint pre-97; Excel 4.0 charts; dBASE II .dbf; Lotus and Quattro files; Corel Draw .cdr. See my mea culpa. End update.

Clueless droids?
How does the world’s largest software company make this kind of wrong-on-so-many-levels decision? Is there ANY adult supervision in Redmond?

The decision bespeaks a corporate culture that is painfully clueless about its customers. Gee, why would anyone want to access 5 year old Word documents?

Medical products marketing
Redmond’s blindness echoes that of Detroit’s for the last 50 years. “Safety doesn’t sell.” “Bigger is better.” “Good enough quality is good enough.” “Americans will never buy Japanese cars.”

Microsoft clearly doesn’t get the fact that their products are an intimate part of consumer’s lives, much as medicines are. When 8 bottles of Tylenol capsules were poisoned with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly recalled 31 million bottles and spent on the order of $100 million dollars to restore consumer confidence in the Tylenol brand.

Would Microsoft spend a nickel to protect and reassure consumers? I give it a qualified “maybe.”

The StorageMojo take
In case anyone thought that archiving documents in proprietary formats was acceptable, this is your wake-up call. ASCII text and probably PDFs are OK. Everything else, including RTF – which Microsoft controls – is suspect.

With the growing focus on e-discovery, there should be a market for a high-speed “any format to .txt or .pdf” appliance. Producing unreadable softcopies won’t cut much ice in Federal courts.

Comments welcome, as always.

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The most famous computer ad that never ran was created for Data General. As told in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (still a great story of the inside of a major product development cycle) after IBM announced the Series/1, a 16-bit minicomputer designed to compete with DEC’s PDP-11 and the DG Nova, DG marketing came up with a rough draft of a 2-page ad:

They Say IBM’s Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market.

The Bastards Say, Welcome.

EqualLogic resellers should say welcome, too.

Is Dell sincere about the keeping the channel strong?
The life of a reseller is rarely easy. If you are too successful, the vendor may decide to serve your market directly. If you aren’t successful enough the vendor may cut you off.

Dell’s press release stresses the importance of EqualLogic’s channel to Dell. I think Michael Dell is sincere. He’s got bad judgement in picking Presidents – Rollins and Bush – but very good judgement when it comes to dead Presidents.

Michael Dell sincerely, with all his heart, wants to be richer. He also wants to stick it to Steve Jobs in the worst way. He knows that the direct sales model he pioneered won’t do it.

EqualLogic as an independent Dell brand?
As I read the press release, yes. And that is another smart move. Rollins polluted the Dell brand with crummy support. Good resellers help turn that perception around.

I was talking to the IT director of a 300-person company a few weeks ago. He is also the company’s only IT employee. He hires consultants for everything he doesn’t do himself. A long time techie, he knows what he wants.

Telephone support doesn’t work for that guy. He’s got a business to run and results to deliver. He’s more interested in sleeping well than in shaving every nickel off his costs. That’s where resellers get margins, if they’re good.

The StorageMojo take
Dell did more than legitimize the surviving crop of dot bomb era storage startups. He legitimized EqualLogic, too. EqualLogic resellers should start getting a lot more calls from people had heard of them but were too nervous to deal with a startup.

If you are still a nervous EqualLogic reseller, there are other vendors out there who are hungry and offer good products. Life could be worse.

Comments please, especially from EqualLogic resellers. Or EqualLogic competitors.

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