For EqualLogic, offering an easy-to-manage storage product is paramount.

“If you look at a typical EqualLogic customer, 50%, 60%, 70% of their applications are virtualized,” said Travis Vigil, Executive Director of Data Management Solutions at EqualLogic. “So it’s pretty common to be highly virtualized in EqualLogic environment. So they need dynamic storage, adaptive storage, flexible storage, but first and foremost they need it to be very easy to manage because by and large EqualLogic customers have very lean IT staffs.”

Just how lean?

“One EqualLogic customers” was talking about having three people on the IT staff managing 60 arrays,” added Pete Korce, EqualLogic’s Vice President and General Manager.

Vigil and Korce went live inside theCube with Wikibon’s John McArthur at the Dell Storage Forum in Orlando. Storage vendor EqualLogic, which was acquired by Dell back in 2007, released a new network-attached storage (NAS)-related product at the event.

Dell EqualLogic FS7500 adds NAS capabilities to the company’s unified storage portfolio, which will increase performance and scalability, according to the company. It uses the Dell Scalable File System and is compatible with all existing EqualLogic iSCSI arrays. It is fully integrated with Group Manager, EqualLogic’s storage management software, and provides up to 10 times more file share scalability than legacy unified storage offerings, according to the company.

The FS7500 comes out of Exanet, the Israeli file system vendor that Dell acquired in 2010. Since then, we’ve ben working on the integration very diligently for the last year plus,” Vigil said. The FS7500 is designed to help organizations store and manage large and increasing volumes of unstructured data, according to Vigil and Korce.

Dell also unveiled EqualLogic software version 5.1, which it says provides a number of enhancements for iSCSI networking via Data Center Bridging (DCB) support.

As for EqualLogic the business unit, Vigil and Korce said they are growing, with multiple locations scattered across the country.

“It’s nice to be hiring,” Vigil said.