The Cube’s Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante sat down with Travis Vigil Executive Director Equalogic, Dell at this year’s Dell Storage Forum to chat about EqualLogic’s growth and evolution since joining Dell (full video below). The group also took time to discuss the storage market and Dell’s changing role in that market. The complete video is available after the article.ince Dell acquired the company. 

Vigil began by discussing EqualLogic’s growth spanded its customer base from 4,000 to 40,000 in the almost four and half years since joining Dell. Dell has continued to invest in EqualLogic as a key component in Dell storage and its fluid data architecture strategy. Dell has also made a large effort to position EqualLogic as an industry leader in terms of application integration. The platform has deep integration with VMWare, Microsoft applications like SQL and Exchange. They have also added integration with Linux. Ultimately, Vigil explained, the goal is to provide a product with enterprise class features that remains easy to use by lean IT organizations.

Miniman then shifted the discussion of Dell/VMware partnership. Vigil said EqualLogic’s integration with VMware began before the acquisition by Dell and accelerated after the acquisition. EqualLogic began with VMware vCenter integration for virtualization management; the platform also offers support for application consistency and Site Recovery Manager. EqualLogic has developed an ease of use tool for VDI deployment, and has participated in all of VMware’s storage initiatives like VAAI and VASA.

Vellante noted that the VMware has evolved significantly over the last few years. Three or four years ago, it was difficult for customers to deal with storage. He then asked Vigil what everyone can expect from virtualization and storage in the future. Vigil answered, a big part of EqualLogic’s success has been their focus on virtualized environments, VMware in particular. Around 75 to 80 percent of customers are running EqualLogic in some kind of virtualized environment, and they want storage that’s easy to manage and works with their virtualized environment.

Vigil said he believe the industry is on the verge of widespread VDI adoption, but one of the problems the customers often face is storage. He explained that many of the customers he’s spoken to do a proof of concept and virtualize a small number of desktops and VDI works great. However, they experience manageability and performance issues when they attempt to scale the implementation. Vigil believes this problem that can be solved with scale out architectures. EqualLogic allows users to scale performance and capacity linearly, which can eliminate the VDI scaling problem. EqualLogic has made a big effort to resolve these issues, introducing items like the VDI deployment utility and a hybrid that has a solid state drive and spinning media in the same array. The hybrid array also has embedded intelligence to ensure hot, active data is stored on the solid-state drive, which can dramatically improve performance. It is like tiering within the array, and tiering is an area where EqualLogic excels.

Miniman continued the discussion listing three barriers he believes customers face when attempting to move to VDI:

1. Customers don’t do a proper assessment before starting a project. Their implementation exceeds cost and time estimates because they didn’t collect adequate information before doing estimates.
2. They experience trouble moving from pilot to production.
3. Customer have difficulty assigning management responsibility for VDI since it crosses technology boundaries like desktop and virtualization, which are often managed by different groups in many organizations.

Regarding the third barrier, Vigil said in his observation, the server virtualization team frequently owns the deployment for the back end. He agreed that ownership between the backend and frontend is still cloudy. Vellante questioned how mobile is changing the virtualization environment. Vigil said he believes it goes back to sizing and benchmarking, which he admits is still in a very embryonic state.

The conversation returned to Dell storage. Miniman noted Dell wants to unify their storage portfolio so that customers think about Dell storage as a single identity, not as a collection of products like EqualLogic or Compellent. Vigil explained the capabilities of the products like scale out on EqualLogic that will become part of the Dell storage identity instead of individual product lines. Features will start to span across Dell’s portfolio and blur brand boundaries.

Vellante moved the discussion to flash. Vigil said flash will be used widely in Dell solutions, but it will serve different acceleration purposes depending on its location. Dells sees a big opportunity to have flash in the server and has done a lot of work of making flash in the server more useable. Ultimately, Dell wants the storage in the server to be a logical extension of external storage.

The discussion concluded with a discussion of the small and medium business (SMB) segment. Vigil noted there is a big variance in capabilities in the SMB market. EqualLogic has never been a low price leader; they are a total cost of ownership leader. EqualLogic customers may have small storage needs and no dedicated storage staff, but are growing quickly so ease of management is important. Vellante summarized saying that SMBs with small storage needs and no plans for rapid growth are not a target customer for EqualLogic solutions.