Seems like Dell and HP are still trying to figure out what their primary storage optimization story is going to be.  The word is that each of these companies are looking to Ocarina Networks to be that solution.  Good for Ocarina, but not sure what it does for either Dell or HP.

For Ocarina, they are out of money, their sales cycles are too long, their pockets aren’t deep

enough to sustain them and there just isn’t enough rich media content to optimize to justify the purchase given all of the other things that need to change in the environment to make it work.

For the large vendors it looks as if Dell will be the winner because of HP’s NIH mentality when it comes to startup technology and they are very slow to move.  It would be interesting technology for Dell IF they could embed it at the drive level (which would be WAY too difficult with this technology) and deliver it to all of their consumer customers but this doesn’t help them in the direct enterprise world.  It could help them in the cloud space, but from an integration standpoint I am not confident they could implement it.

As I said in my piece last week – primary storage optimization is coming to the masses, all the big vendors are speaking about it and need to have a story.  However vendors need to be thinking about where this technology fits long term and that is in silicon.  Vendors, who are on the acquisition hunt, need to be looking for solutions they can sell today but can get it into silicon soon.