Convergence of networking and storage

Praveen Asthana Dell’s vice president – Enterprise Storage & Networking talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News and discusses the company’s business during the economic recession, global changes in economic scenario and IT demands, etc. Read on...

Over the last one and a half year, globally there was a considerable cut in the IT budgets across enterprises. However, from Dell perspective, how has been the market in terms of enterprise storage and networking business?

I think that during the last two years, generally speaking, we saw a reduction in the IT spent all over the world, but in storage I would say that reduction was less pronounced because the thing about storage is that data is always being produced. It doesn’t matter if it is recession or whatever, you still are producing, sending as many emails as before, producing as much data and so you have to store them somewhere.

And so customers may put off buying a new server, upgrading their desktops for one or two years but storage doesn’t have choice as once you fill it up, you need to buy more. Hence for storage, even though there was recession, we saw pretty good spending on it.

However the past two quarters have shown gradual improvements across businesses and market sentiments are a little bit positive. So do you think that IT demands will slowly pick up again and will boost Dell’s business?

It’s very hard to predict as to how companies would emerge out of recession and there are many economists who will give you lots of ideas that it will be the ‘U’ or ‘V’ or ‘W’ recession – who knows.

But as I mentioned before, the amount of storage reduction compared to other IT areas is not so pronounced so I don’t know how much it will increase. But I know that most customers were affected by the recession and they changed their practices.

So in the past if they may have bought more and more disk drives, nowadays they are looking at technologies like de-duplication and others to reduce the amount of data. And I think they will continue even if we come out of recession as people have learnt lessons for long time how to be careful with the money.

During the recession there was high demand for IT solutions, outsourced and cloud-based services to increase efficiency and reduce cost. So in your view what are the trends in the enterprise storage space in terms of technology?

We have talked about cloud storage for long time, but I don’t see that trend heavily because, for customers, their data is the most important thing they have in their company and are very nervous putting the data in the public clouds because of security risks. So I think eventually there will be some movement towards cloud, but it will be slower than we expect in terms of storage.

The one thing happening more and more is the concept of convergence of storage, networking and computing. In the past, there were separate product offerings - storage, networking and computing, which were rolled and boxed separately by companies and managed separately.

But virtualization has changed all of that completely, so because of the mobility in virtualization, you cannot manage these separate things but you need to manage them as a common pool of resource. So I think with more and more convergence you need to orchestrate between storage, network and compute and Dell introduced a product infrastructure manager last year which orchestrates this kind of process.

Where is Dell placed in the emerging big picture of cloud computing?

Dell is probably one of the largest providers of infrastructure to many cloud service providers in the US; in fact all over the world. Lots of Web2.0 companies, some of the largest ones, buy hardware from Dell to power their cloud in the US and in China.

We have learnt from our experience with cloud and we are providing hardware products that are optimized for cloud application and certainly you will see Dell an active participant in cloud.

What is the global strategy that Dell has framed for its enterprise storage and networking business?

I think what we see in terms of networking and storage is a convergence of the fabric of storage and networking.

In the past, fiber channels were used for storage and Ethernets for networking. Now we see a convergence where the same fabric is used for both storage and networking. And what drives that convergence is the 10-gigabyte Ethernets.

Also what is driving this convergence is the cost saving, as I mentioned earlier that during the recession, companies look for ways to save money and one of that ways to save money is to start using Ethernets-based storage as it is much cheaper than fiber channel-based storage.

And some of these trends, which we see this year, are centered around the use of iSCSI as storage protocol and 10-gigabyte Ethernet. And so Dell has introduced some really good 10-gigabyte switches, which are much better value proposition than competitive products from other companies.

So you see us driving more and more on Ethernet and it’s the second anniversary of our acquisition of EqualLogic, which is an iSCSI based storage product. And it has done very well for us and it's being growing much faster than the market and twice of the iSCSI market.

We are now continuing to see more momentum in iSCSI even in India. In fact over the last two years we have been selling EqualLogic in India as customers see benefits from that products.

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