Exclusive Interview With Darren Thomas, Head of Dell Storage

 Darren Thomas is VP and GM of Dell storage and services since 2003, when he replaced Russ Holt. Before that, he became in 2001 president and CEO of Zambeel, in high-end NAS, a start-up that shuts down in 2003 after running through about $66 million in funding. Previously Thomas was at Compaq for more than a decade finishing as VP of advanced technology and business development for storage business. He left Compaq four months before the HP acquisition.

DELL AND EMC

StorageNewsletter.com: There are a lot of questions in the industry about your relationship with EMC, and looking at your last quarter, the business of EqualLogic is going up, and EMC is going down, so what is your long term strategy with your partner?
Darren Thomas: To start at the top, we have a very good relationship with EMC, we’ve had it for a long time, and it is continued to be very profitable relationship for both companies. From the onset of the acquisition of EqualLogic, I think there were a lot of questions in the press, and even internally at Dell and EMC, about the positioning of the two products. Where is one positioned, where is the other. EqualLogic is very clearly the Dell iSCSI solution, it’s also the solution that we invest the most amount of our effort on a virtual solution, virtual environment, and there’s a lot of investment in EqualLogic virtualization strategy. EMC delivers many, many values to us that we don’t get anywhere else. They’re our preferred FC partner, we don’t sell anything FC from anybody else, even though we’ve had many offers to sell, we believe that the EMC FC solution set is unparalleled, there’s no even close competitor to that product set, it leads the market in that product set and we’re very, very happy with that relationship. That part of the business, the FC products sold Dell-branded from EMC in the CLARiiON space…

Don’t you sell iSCSI with CLARiiON?
Well, we do, we have many customers who buy it, more so, they’re not picking iSCSI as a bus, they’re picking a solution set and the EMC product was one of the first ones with the fully converged FC and iSCSI on the same system. Many of our customers that buy the FC solution from us also use the iSCSI solution. I think it’s probably less common for someone to buy that product from us strictly iSCSI, that’s the why they buy the EqualLogic solution quite often. That product set, though, has continued to grow. The Dell-branded CLARiiON business continues to grow, we do not break those numbers out. There are many facets of the Dell-EMC relationship, we have a reseller arrangement, we have an OEM arrangement, and we sell many of their products in the reseller arrangement, and we still aggressively pursue those products. Examples of that would be like their replication appliance, also a lot of their software tools are sold there. What you see in the financials, and what I think you’re reacting to is the fact that our total growth number in that space was down. But that’s caused by the fact that we made a very conscious decision to focus our resources on the areas that we are best at. And that’s the mid-range space, where the CLARiiON sits, it’s not the high-end space where the products, VMAX is the term today, we often call it Symmetrix but it’s the VMAX …

Did you stop to sell Symmetrix VMAX?
We didn’t actually stop the sales, we just don’t push it. We’ve focused our sales force on the business that Dell can grow, and can be strategic to us, our focus is on strategic long-term values, not on short-term gains. And so as we made that transition, you’ve seen much less of the Symmetrix go out, and because those systems are so large, and they carry a lot of revenue content with them, quite often and in the transition here, we’ve had a lower revenue number, but as you’ve noticed, and we’ve publicly stated this, our storage margins as a whole have grown dramatically. So we’ve focused on the things that give us the most strategic value to our customers and long-term benefit to the corporation, Dell. So I would suggest to you that we’re in a transition, I can’t predict when we’ll get out of it, because the quarters are very different. But fundamentally, here’s what you can be sure of, the products we care about, the CLARiiON, the Dell-branded CLARiiON, we just added the Data Domain products, and the NS [Celerra. Ed.] products, the NS-120, the NS-480, we just added those Dell-branded for the very first time, we now OEM those, and that demonstrates our commitment to EMC, we’re spending money to OEM products from them, and we will continue to do that.

And do you still manufacture the low-end CLARiiON?
No, we haven’t manufactured the low-end CLARiiON in years, and we never made an announcement about that, but here’s what happened. We introduced EMC to our manufacturing process. We did it for them for a while, but to be quite honest, they began to use the same vendors we did, and they began to deliver the same benefits we deliver, so rather than both of us manufacture products, and make a more complicated delivery mechanism, we went to a more simplified one, and EMC has been delivering those products to us, probably for the last two generations. Delivering in the manufacturing sense. Initially, in the early stages of the relationship, Dell had a much better supply chain, and the reality is that EMC learned that business, and does the supply chain the exact same way we would, and so there’s no sense in us both doing it.

DELL INVENT?

When I look at all of your product line, which is large, in fact you are working with EMC, LSI, you have acquired EqualLogic. But what has Dell really invented in storage? Do you have any patents? Even one? From Dell engineering, not from acquisitions?
We have engineers at Dell who in the last five years, single engineers, who have got more than 15 patents.

So which product do you completely design yourselves?
EqualLogic, we completely design and manufacture that…

That’s it?
No, because it’s varying degrees. The EMC product set we absolutely OEM that product, and have it now manufactured for us by EMC. In the early days of the AX150, we did all of that manufacturing, and we did all the service and support for that product. So what I would suggest to you is that we work together where it benefits us both. The case of the LSI products that you mentioned, we completely designed and manufactured all the hardware…

Not design, manufacture. It’s their LSI design…
No. Wrong. The array controller is designed by us. The software is put on by LSI.

What about the PowerVault? Do you have other products that you’ve designed?
Yes, so the DX6000, completely our design, completely our architecture. The DL2000. Now we’ve partnered for some application software, but I would suggest to you that it’s exactly the same model every other supplier does. If you look at HP, if you look at IBM, two partners who are in our space, they use the exact same model. Here’s what I would suggest – we use our intellectual property when we cannot acquire the technology that we want in the way that we want, either in the cost we want or the functionality we want. So in the case of CLARiiON, it’s an enormous product, it would take us a lot more money to go make one ourselves, to be quite honest the customers don’t want us to go make one ourselves, so we deliver them that technology.

Which means that you look at the market for potential acquisitions.
I can’t comment on our acquisition strategy. We’ve stated publicly that we’re looking at software acquisition more than anything else, and we’re certainly open to those kinds of ideas, but we’re able to deliver unique capability. If you look at the MD3000, we got that from LSI, but go back and look, LSI did not manufacture that product in an iSCSI version. We created the iSCSI version with them, they made a FC version and a DAS version, we made the iSCSI version with them. The iSCSI version has been the big seller. I think you’re painting a picture…

No, I’m just trying to understand…
So we’re not just going to… what’s like a Walmart store over here, we’re not going to Walmart and buying what’s on the shelf and then just dusting it off and reselling it. We’re actually going into our partners, and we’re designing functionality and capability. The MD3000, the storage bridge bays, the SVBs in the back, go look at who owns all those patents. Dell invented that technology. Everybody in the industry uses it, Dell invented it. We put the storage bridge bays in, the hardware is Dell. We added the software from LSI. And then we did all the drive trays, if you look at all the drive trays, the backplanes, the processors, exactly the same way a server is made. So I would argue that we do as much engineering as our server team does, engineering, and then they drop Microsoft or Linux into the system to make the software, we do very similar to that in the MD3000 space. In the DX6000, we did much more than that, and in the DL2000, we actually own the patents, where the operating system communicates with the array controller and configures the system automatically. The main value of that product set is the automation, Dell owns all those patents.

LTO-5

When will you have LTO-5 as both into a drive and into automation?
We’re fully LTO-5 already. We already ship the LTO-5 in the automation products. It comes out first in the drives, and then the drives that come out in automation are slightly different, they have softer springs on the door so the automation can open them…

Is it an HP drive?
No.

IBM?
IBM.

HPC/TERASCALA

Are you in charge of the Terascala agreement for HPC?
No, someone on my team. In charge is too big a word…

Is it the first time Dell is in HPC?
We’ve had a team that specialized in HPC…

Yes, but for the computing part, not storage…
No, we’ve sold storage in HPC. Interestingly enough, the MD3000 and the MD1000 JBOD have been the biggest sellers in HPC.

Yes, but in HPC they need Infiniband or Luster…
Luster software yes, but they don’t all use Infiniband. The ones that use Infiniband, we’ll use a different partner, because we don’t develop Infiniband, every HPC is a custom design, everyone of them is like what we call a snowflake, every one of them is unique, and we have a team that helps the customer define it. Terascala was a specific customer that was our customer prior, and to be honest, I don’t know what storage they had prior to this, but I know that our HPC team, which is really led by a gentleman named Reza Rooholamini, Reza runs that team. My team helped him deliver the Terascala storage solution. So we’ve partnered with them for a long time. I will tell you this: there are a lot of products in that space, some customers use clusters, some customers use iBricks, some customers use Dell servers, some use Dell server blades, some of them use EqualLogic, some of them use MD3000. That market doesn’t have a very common architecture anymore.

FCOE

What’s your strategy for an FCoE-unified network combining Ethenet and FC?
Well we will obviously support FCoE on our EMC products. FCoE is most appealing to customers that are already Fibre. So the number one real usage model, it’s not as sexy, will be for EMC to provide an FCoE front-end to their Fibre business to allow those customers to move to 10Gb Ethernet. We also have publicly announced that we will do an FCoE interface on EqualLogic. We’re working on a product. No dates yet, and to be clear, the FCoE standards committee has pushed out the date where you can do end-to-end FCoE by more than two years.

But your idea is to get FC customers to move to iSCSI?
Well, 10Gb Ethernet will open the iSCSI world up to customers who want to do Fibre on 10GbE, so we will provide that functionality in EqualLogic. The issue right now is that FCoE is not ready for the enterprise class. Today, with FCoE, you can only communicate from the server to a single storage device or to the top of the rack. You cannot use FCoE across the campus, and until you can use it across the campus, it doesn’t have much interest to our customers.