3Par finally get acquired and by Dell; mission accomplished by their bridgehead-man, Pathfinder Farley. Like love and marriage; Farley and Dell go together like a horse an carriage.
But all joking aside, what does this really mean.
It does not mean that Dell have an enterprise storage strategy; just having a bunch of SKUs does not make a strategy. Over the past twelve months or so tho', Dell have acquired some interesting technologies.
1) Exanet – a scalable NAS product.
2) Ocarina – content aware DeDupe technology.
3) 3Par – an Enterprise Storage company.
Some people may raise eye-brows at the last statement but I believe that 3Par were really an Enterprise Storage company; or at least they had aspirations to be so. From pretty much day one, they set their sights on HDS/EMC/IBM/HP's Enterprise market and considering how hard it is to compete in that market, they did remarkably well. To gain any kind of footprint at all was an achievement and from those customers who bought them, I heard only good things. People liked 3Par, both the technology and the company. They took a difficult road and who is to say that they were wrong? The investors have got a pretty exit out of this.
But what have Dell got out of this? They've got some good technology and some great goodwill. Can they make anything out of this?
1) Exanet – forget the NAS, it's all about ExaFS. Massively scalable, clustered file-system.
2) Ocarina – Intelligent DeDupe which can deal with multimedia files.
3) 3Par – Enterprise Array with pretensions to federation, predictable performance and management simplicity.
Throw in Equallogic and you've got a storage cloud; it's not a especially interesting storage cloud in that it doesn't really do anything that new but if Dell can keep it very simple, they may have product as opposed to a bunch of technologies. Does it push the boundaries of what Enterprise Storage is about? No, not at all but this is Dell we are talking about and Dell are not about interesting but commoditising.
All quite boring but maybe in a good way.
Dell has done a great job of acquiring new technology. They are a sales machine and I have no doubt that they will grow the 3Par business. The real question is whether or not they can integrate all of these products so that they have a cohesive solution for their customers??