Storage @ Work

I thought people would be interested in meeting some of the folks who work at EqualLogic. Who better to start with than Jennifer, who runs our web-marketing events. Take it away, Jen....

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Here's an interesting and strange article about EqualLogic's first iSCSI SAN customer in Australia. I really don't know much more about the customer, Ranjeet Rustogi or his company Link Communications Group than anybody who follows the link and reads it. In fact, others usually read things more closely and carefully than I do, so by now, they know more than I do about how an EqualLogic disk array made its way down under. Hey Ranjeet, if you see, this, Thanks a lot! Drop me a line sometime.

The thing that interested me most in this article was which one of our incredibly talented and strange SEs made the trip (it was before I started here). I first thought it was the one who consumes mass quantities like there is no tomorrow, then I figured it was the one who believes sleep is an over-rated luxury because there is so much to do while awake. Hmmmm, now I'm not so sure. Whoever, it is, you need to frame that quote from Mr. Rustogi: "The most knowledgeable person I have ever met". I can only hope for everybody's sake that the knowledge transfer he was thinking of when he said this was limited to network storage because I'm sure many other topics may have been - "embellished?"

Todd Barton stopped by EqualLogic's San Jose office this week. He's a great guy and I thought I'd introduce him to the blogosphere. After helping customers for the last couple years as one of our superb systems engineering team, Todd is now starting a new role as our Worldwide Director of Sales Training. Road Warriors R us.

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I just peaked over at the Lone Sys Admin's site today and saw his blog posting about System Administrators Appreciation Day.

So, all of our customers have system administrators that I want to send out a happy greeting to and I want to say that I hope we are making your hellish workloads easier to manage!

But I also want to send a BIG THANK YOU to our own system admins here at EqualLogic - most of whom I probably don't even know (egad!) Randy and Ian and the rest of you - thanks for putting in all the horrendous work you do supporting us.

Here is our schedule for VMworld. Many have asked me about the BOF (birds of a feather) meeting. It's going to be at Terra on Wednesday the 12th from 4:00 to 5:00 followed by a customer appreciation party from 5:00 - 7:00. For those that recall last year's party it was a pretty good time. Definitely a lot of energy and excitement around VMware, consolidation and virtualization. I know - it sounds geeky, but if you are into it, there is nothing better. See You there.

I'm pretty stoked about VMworld this week in San Francisco. Going to see lots of interesting stuff and meet with customers and friends from around the industry. I thought VMworld was one of the big highlights of 2006 and expect it will be even bigger this year.

EqualLogic fans might be interested in a few things of note we are doing at the show. The main thing that a lot of people will be interested in is that we are giving away a Harley. Not a stuffed doll of a Harley or a Spinal Tap version of a Harley, but an actual Harley Davidson motorcycle. Next year, you can be in Sturgis in August too!

I am actually a bit torn about this kind of give away. I mean, lot's of our customers tell us that they think our iSCSI SAN products are pretty terrific and I think we should just try to have an event for them (which we are doing - a Birds of Feather and a customer appreciation cocktail party on Wednesday). But I guess if you are going to go beyond the basic feelgood stuff at a major trade show, giving away a Harley isn't so bad. OK, the real problem - truth be told - is that I'm not eligible. Farley on a Harley? The Farley Harley? Farley's gnarly Harley? Videos from the Hogmeister? All these sound pretty good to me, but its not going to come to pass unless I shell out my own money for them. Maybe I'll turn in expense reports for the last year and go get one.

There are a couple Webinars going on this week. I'm doing one tomorrow (Tuesday) AM at 9:00 PDT with VMware and a customer using both technologies. We'll be talking about the synergy of VMware and EqualLogic iSCSI SANs in SMB accounts. Its very powerful stuff with important cost and uptime benefits. Then on Wednesday (also at 9:00 PDT), Eric Schott, our Director of Product management is doing another live webcast with VMware discussing some of the newest technology for Disaster Recovery in VMware environments. This is incredibly important technology that is going to change the IT landscape for many customers so you will want to check it out if you get a chance.

There are a number of breakout sessions with EqualLogic employees or customers participating: There is a listing of them here:

Come see what all the excitement is about at the EqualLogic booth this year, here is where we are in Moscone Center. On this map look for the blue rectangle (#1021) to the right of VMware's booth, which is the big one in the middle.

I finally got around to mixing up some of the video from our customer appreciation party at VMworld. Like I always say, we have the greatest customers - it's nice to be able to kick back with them.

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We had special guests from VMware for this event too. Preceding the party was a birds of a feather session where we explored VMware's newly announced Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Very cool.

I've been out and about for a couple weeks and am back now.

I want to say thanks to Lori Widmer for giving us a mention at On-Storage.com on October 2nd. She picked up on the Eric Schott video where he gives an overview of EqualLogic replication.

The big news this morning is that Dell has struck an agreement to acquire EqualLogic. This is certainly a surprise as we have been hunkering down in preparation for an initial public offering, so it gives the future a much different look than it had over the weekend. The deal will probably complete in three to four months. Let’s get on with it, I say – full speed ahead.

Acquisitions raise lots of questions – most of them I don’t have answers to, such as how will this impact EqualLogic’s business and its customers. People that know me, know that I tend to be skeptical because there are many more ways for things to go wrong than right, but I am fairly bullish on this acquisition. Michael Dell has been making bold moves at Dell since his return to the helm last January and seems to have changed his primary focus from streamlining internal operations to improving the customer experience with Dell products. His vision to Simplify IT is right on course, but difficult to accomplish. The decision to spend $1.4 Billion on EqualLogic shows a very real commitment to executing on that vision. As far as I can tell, Dell has entered this agreement with a vision of building upon EqualLogic’s early successes and plans to grow EqualLogic both as a storage provider and as a channel business entity. If so, that will be a very good thing for EqualLogic’s business, its customers and its channel partners. In doing so, Dell will be making a large number of customers’ IT experiences much simpler.

I’ve received a couple emails already from customers and friends. Most were congratulatory, but one was from one of my favorite customers who suggested that Dell will “now ruin an otherwise good product.” I really don’t think so. I think Dell understands the talent and creativity we have and believes that supporting EqualLogic will be better than extracting the technology and dumping the talent, as sometimes happens with storage acquisitions. Among other things that were discussed in a conference call this morning, Dell representatives told us that nobody will be asked to move to Texas. That's probably a bit premature, but it's also a very good sign of their intentions to increase EqualLogic's capabilities.

There's been so much written in the last couple days, its been crazy keeping up. Good crazy though.

Infoworld's Mario Apicella had an article today about the Dell acquisition. Mario likes to dig beneath the surface - in this case he sees well past iSCSI and virtualization to several key benefits our customers enjoy with our technology.

Dan Primack writes a column for Private Equity Hub, a site covering the world of private equity investments and deals. There is an interesting bit of history in his article today on Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic.

Steve Duplessie referred to EqualLogic employees this week as "flannel clad folks", Say that 5 times in a row. The funny thing is, its not that far off. He has a previously unseen photo of our dignified founders on his site here.

There has been a lot of speculation about the future of our channel business when the acquisition completes in a few months and I thought I'd post links to what I'm reading in the bloglands.

Robin Harris, Storagemojo: The Bastards Say Welcome
Barbara Darrow, Tech Target's Channel Market: Dell Seeks Partner Progress in EqualLogic Buy
The Var Guy, TechIQ: Will Dell Push Storage Through Partners?
Joseph Kovar, CMP: VARs say Dell's EqualLogic Acquisition Could Backfire
Edward F. Moltzen, CMP: Dell Bags EqualLogic for $1.4 Billion, Says Deal Will be Channel 'Catalyst'
Dan Bricklin, Theirway.net: Congratulations Don Bulens and Equallogic
Sharon Lisenbach, Eweek: Dell: EqualLogic Buy Validates Channel Commitment
Brad Anderson, Direct2Dell: Dell to Acquire EqualLogic

Tony Pearson, storage blogger for IBM, wrote about the impact on the rest of the industry from the Dell EqualLogic aquisition. As Tony likes to do (and what he's paid to do), he turned it into a platform for talking about IBM's storage products.

I want to correct him on his EqualLogic history. Apparently after surfing or talking to IBM market researchers he came across news that we had signed an agreement with Sun several years ago. Figuring that such a deal must have been an important part of our rapid growth he pieced together an odd collection of Jabberwocky on the topic. What he didn't surmise was that the Sun EqualLogic agreement turned out to be one of those worthless pieces of paper that mostly wasted human and natural resources.

The real story is that we have been 100% focussed on selling through our VAR channel for a couple years now since our fearless leader, Don Bulens, came aboard. FWIW, Don doesn't really care for the spotlight much but he needs to be given credit for making this business transition - without our committed channel business model, I don't think Dell would have paid $1.4B in cash for us. These types of transitions sound easy when you read about them, but they aren't that easy when you are the one steering the boat through the rapids.

Here we go again on a new transition - one that will be much more visible to industry observers than our apparently mysterious past.

There's been some babble about storage clustering lately. Its a great opportunity to get confused so I thought take a stab at clarifying a couple things.

Clustering is a way to take two or more computers that are not inherently fault tolerant and turn them into a high availability system. Its also great for making certain applications run faster. Clustering has inherent complexity with figuring out which system is in control of the work. If everything works as expected its great, but when things go wrong, its a serious problem. Clustering overcomes the problems of a single motherboard, memory, memory bus, I/O bus and all the other things that are part of an industry standard server. Running storage on an industry standard server pretty much requires some type of clustering because there are so many points of failure. In other words, if you figure your boat is going to spring a leak sometime on the trip, just tow a spare along.

Business class storage systems have the HA (high availability) built in through redundant components. There is no need to connect them in clusters because they are already hardened against component failure.

The question is then, what is EqualLogic doing and what is EMC planning on doing to make multiple storage system storage work together? Is it a cluster or something else?

Storagezilla indicates that EMC's new Maui isn't clustered storage. Made sense to me when I read it because there isn't a need for clustering in storage. Instead, storage systems need to give administrators the ability to expand and move storage resources as needed. Systems and applications change all the time. That's one of the reasons VMWare became an overnight sensation. Storage needs to be able to respond to those dynamics.

Of course, EqualLogic already did it. Our iSCSI SAN storage systems are designed for HA and for amazing administrative flexibility and ease of use. We just never figured out what to call them because they aren't clustered and they aren't a grid. We just don't have a marketing-ID for the technology. Yes - for shame, but at least we didn't create something stupid (something 2.0). Maybe someday we'll succumb to calling them one of those things but for now I'd suggest that they be called the best value in storage today.

One of our SE's yesterday asked me; "When have you ever seen a product you could just leave at a customer's without setting it up for them, knowing that everything would be OK and that the support department wouldn't kill you for it? We do it all the time.

Jason Kwiatkowski, our SE manager on the west coast is talking about how to demonstrate our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN products. It was created for our channel team it occurs to me that others might be interested in seeing what our product's interface looks like, so I'm posting it here on the blog.

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Jason Powell at Granger Community Church in Northern Indiana is hosting a lunch and demo/seminar at his site on Feb 22nd. Jason and GCC are excellent customers of ours and Jason is an active blogger about all the technology they use at GCC. I encourage you to check out their website at the link above.

Alan Hunt from VR6 Systems will be there too. Alan is an excellent resource having been a customer of ours for a couple years prior to joining VR6, an EqualLogic and Data Domain business partner. Alan and Jason both have extensive experience with our products and our company and will give you the straight scoop on what it is like to be an EqualLogic customer. Better to hear it directly from people who actually use our iSCSI SAN storage, than to take our word for it.

Thanks a ton Jason! and Thanks to you too Alan, you guys are the greatest.

Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic has completed. This is a real big deal for a lot of obvious reasons: Dell is a powerful company and they (we) now own one of the most dynamic storage technologies to come along in years. I joined EqualLogic back in October 2006 because I couldn't stand to be on the sidelines watching this new iSCSI storage company that I know was going to make a big play in the industry. I suppose I could jack myself up and say I had the talent to see it coming, but the fact is, the talent was and still is inside EqualLogic - and now Dell too. The thing I didn't know before joining the company was how talented it was. Yeah, so I think Dell got themselves a real jewel.

And what of the price paid? $1.4 Billion is a lot and I think it was an excellent mutual decision. I had my greedy IPO-bound doubts for a while, but it was definitely the right thing to do - just look at the tight rope wire new companies have to walk ( how can VMware's stock price get hammered so badly yesterday for posting great growth - just not enough to meet investment expectations?)

The dynamics of the storage industry are going to start changing much faster over the next year as Dell figures out how to make the most of their EqualLogic purchase. This is as clear to me as EqualLogic's success was to me two years ago. The biggest splashes are yet to come.

A big thanks to everybody who made this happen - especially the EqualLogic SAN customers who helped us every step of the way, by taking risks on purchasing mission critical infrastructure equipment from a startup. As of yesterday, Dell is selling superb EqualLogic iSCSI SAN products without the new company risks. That is very cool for our new customers. We look forward to working together with all of our customers.

Intensity isn't always pleasant, but it can be real effective. Just ask the New England Patriots who found their heartache Sunday at the hands of the incredibly intense NY Giants.

There something amazingly powerful about having something to prove and putting the bit between your teeth. That's what's still going on with the EqualLogic people who are now working for Dell. I don't know why, but I didn't expect the Dell team to have the same level of intensity, but they do. How else could they have put together a product roll out of new Dell EqualLogic products mere a week after the acquisition closed?

To net it out, all of EqualLogic's existing SATA products are being superceded by the new Dell EqualLogic PS5000 series products, which have a new form factor and expanded capacity. All old and new products can be used together in an interoperable iSCSI SAN. The same world beating ease of installation and scalability. The same no-charge, fully-featured software model. The same super-competent support organization. The same underdog intensity with something to prove to the world. Just a lot more people with the affliction sharing a common goal.

Here's a link to a transcript of yesterday's chat that followed the PS5000 webcast. It seemed like a reasonable way to open up the discussion to lots of people. Please don't hesitate to ask more - either through comments here or you can send me an email too.

My new email at Dell is Marc_Farley@Dell.com.

John Joseph, all around good guy and friend of mine was interviewed for a Dell Video Blog on the Direct2Dell website. I thought I would just glom onto his visage and post it here.

FWIW, I probably wouldn't have decided to stay on with Dell if it weren't for John's lobbying and support. I'm not much of a big company person and there were other things I was looking at doing. John really helped me understand how committed Dell was to making the future of EqualLogic as spectacular as the last couple years have been. John speaks quietly but not lightly.

Thought I'd post links to comments on yesterday's announcement.

ComputerWorld
Network World
SearchStorage
ITPro (UK)
Infostor
Internetnews
Techtaxi
Informationweek
The Register (UK)
eWeek
scaledatacom blog
bmighty.com blog
Computer Cosmos blog
infiniteadmin blog
itbusiness (Canada)

One of the biggest challenges people see in the integration of EqualLogic's business inside Dell is how the EqualLogic VAR channel and business model is handled. In a nutshell, there is a solid commitment to our channel and it is a primary concern in many internal discussions and plans.

There will continue to be discussions and doubts for a long time, I'm sure. Here is a link to a recent post discussing the matter on SearchITChannel.com.

Diane Krakora, President and CEO of Amazon Consulting in Mountain View, CA posted a blog entry titled The Dish on Dell on the progress that Dell is making in developing its channel business.

Thanks Diane for shedding some light on this. The points you raised about compensation neutrality and bringing external channel expertise on board will help others understand that the changes at Dell are more than just lip service.

We've been working hard to get our channel programs off the ground at Dell and we'll continue to expand Dell's channel business with the Dell Equallogic brand of iSCSI storage products.

Ever since our acquisition was announced I've been told by others that it would be difficult to compete for channel mind share against HP. They are certainly a great competitor and its always good to have competition to spur you on.

But like all companies, they aren't perfect, as this article written by Joe Kovar at CRN indicates.

To quote from Joe's article:

That solution provider said that changes at HP are causing many of its solution providers to look at whether or not to expand relationships with other vendors, including IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y., Network Appliance Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., and even Dell Inc., Round Rock, Texas, which recently closed a deal to acquire storage vendor EqualLogic.

"Dell (NSDQ:Dell) at least is saying the right things," the solution provider said.

We have terrific products that "walk the walk" for ease of use and value. If you are a solution provider looking to expand your product and service offerings, we want to hear from you.

Lots of people have questions about the networking elements needed for iSCSI SANs. We are hosting a webinar on Tuesdsay Feb 26th at 12 noon Eastern to discuss network issues surrounding iSCSI.

Covered topics include:

• Key criteria in selecting an appropriate network switch
  
• Flow control, a definition and the benefits for iSCSI networks
  
• Pros and cons of jumbo frames
  
• Application of trunking and stacking of multiple switches
  
• Connection of servers and arrays for maximum network fault tolerance
  

Click here to register.

Marc Farley is working on some new things and some old things in a new environment. He shares a little of his experience with blog viewers here.

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Tim Sherbak has always been one of my faves at EqualLogic. A true beast of burden in the marketing department and our VMware champion.

Here he is commenting from VMworld Europe 2008 with John "Homey" Joseph on server and storage virtualization.

The camera angle adds interest. Tim's right hand gets gigantic in a couple places. Yo!, Tim! We always knew you had it in you!

One of the things that has stoked EqualLogic's rapid rise was it's business model of embedding all software with the hardware as part of the product. I like to think of it as "priceless", because there is no separate price for software - even if it sounds a little silly to say "priceless" out loud. The "catch", if there is one, is that customers must be on maintenance in order to get priceless software updates when they become available.

People don't like paying for upgrades to storage software and some see the line-item software pricing that some of our competitors have as an exercise in nickeling and diming. Nonetheless, line-item software pricing has its fans, who perceive it as a way to get tighter control of the IT budget and to avoid paying for functionality they don't need.

But the notion of bundled software shouldn't imply that everything in the bundle has a determined, embedded price. Sure, there are costs associated with every software project, but that doesn't mean there is line-item accounting for each development project in the system price. Our products get cheaper over time, even though the software feature set is expanded significantly. At the end of the day, we make our money selling integrated iSCSI SAN storage arrays, not their various hardware and software components.

It's easier developing core functionality without the byzantine distractions that come with software for serialization, stratification, licensing, packaging, distribution and promotion. If you throw out the licensing-related crap, software development is a lot more efficient, and that is a very good thing. I'm not 100% sure, but I think EqualLogic came to its priceless software model because its engineering founders didn't want to screw around with any code that didn't deliver core functionality.

An unexpected outcome of a priceless software model is the difficulty in drawing attention to new functionality when it is delivered. As a no-charge upgrade, our priceless software tends to be devalued. One of those strange but true things - people want the best - and "the best" usually means paying more, not less.

At this point the die is set at EqualLogic. We're not going to start adding licensing "features" to call attention to our software's capabilities. But for people to take advantage of it, they first need to realize that it can solve their problems and that it is extremely competitive and fully-featured. Maybe we should rename our maintenance programs to something like "the annual fee paid to get priceless software and great support".

Dan Kusnetzky, in his VIRTUALLY SPEAKING blog wrote about EqualLogic's approach to storage virtualization.

He was talking to JJ and they had a senior moment discussing the technology legacy that started many years ago at Digital Equipment Corporation. FWIW, that really is the mojo of the development team and it's nice to see a nod in that direction, so thanks Dan.

But it reminds me, I think it's time to make a short video on how the storage paging works.

One of my upper level managers at Dell is Mark Jarvis, Chief Marketing Officer. He blogs some of the time sends emails about cutting expenses some of the time and probably wishes I would write about something else most of the time.

Then there's his day job, which recently included some guerrilla channel partner recruitment activities.

Here's what VAR GUY thought of the whole thing Hey VAR GUY, did anybody tell you you look like Chris Mullin?

Things change. Change brings growth, for Dell it means that we are growing our business by creating a real VAR channel and programs to support them.

Like Acumen I T from Greenville, South Carolina. Here's a link to their web site. I hope to get to Greenville to meet you sometime David and thanks for coming on board to sell Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN arrays.

John Joseph, our fearless marketing leader at Dell EqualLogic, was interviewed by Carryl Roy at Virtual Strategy Magazine. They talk about the history of the company, its acquisition and integration by Dell, product architecture and features of the PS5000 product line, the customer experience, pooled storage, business plans and a glimpse into our technology futures.

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Jerome Wendt posted an interview with Randy DeMeno, chief evangelist at Commvault about their relationship with Microsoft.

I'll never forget a meeting I had with Bob Hammer, Commvault CEO at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the same time frame. I questioned him on his sanity for going to Commvault - a 2nd or 3rd tier company in the backup industry at that time when there were big gorillas wandering the forest (Veritas, Legato, CA and Seagate Software). He explained that he thought there was an opening for his company to work very closely with Microsoft and to grow their business along with Microsoft's business. I asked how this decision went over at a company that had been mostly a Unix shop and he replied that there was simply no looking back. People that weren't with the program weren't with the company. He flatly stated that good business decisions needed to be backed up with unanimous conviction. It's interesting to read about how DeMeno and his team engaged Microsoft with the kind of single purpose conviction at a time when many other storage software companies viewed Microsoft as a potential threat - just as some might view VMware today with Storage Vmotion

Anyway, Commvault was on its way to being a very successful turnaround when Don Bulens asked me for help landing the job as CEO at EqualLogic. Some of the board at EqualLogic thought that they needed a storage industry insider and Don definitely wasn't one. I told him he needed to lean very heavily on the example of Hammer at Commvault, another "outsider" who knew how to make good business decisions and left the technology work to people like DeMeno. What Don and I didn't know was how good Paula Long was at the technology end of things. In retrospect, it should have been clear to the board - Paula was brilliant and she just needed somebody who was her equal working on the business end. But its not clear to me that the board would have hired Don had Bob Hammer not been such an obvious standout as a non-storage person running a successful storage company.

Greg Davis, VP of Dells' Americas Channel Group was interviewed recently. In short, Dell continues to add VARs to sell its products. The lead technology we are using to build the channel is EqualLogic's and the channel programs are based on EqualLogic's. EqualLogic lives on! (inside Dell). Maybe we should have a graphic or something at Dell that says: "EqualLogic Inside"

One of the cool things about being at Dell is the number of ways they have to reach out and engage customers. Next week Darren Miller (EQ product manager) and I are going to be on Dell's TechCenter online chat. The general topic is going to be data protection with EqualLogic iSCSI SAN arrays.

Heres the link for the chat page. If you want to chat or lurk, I don't care. If you have a question about something, please feel free to bring it up in this informal environment.

One of our VARs, Scale Datacom just posted on the transition to becoming a Dell Channel partner after establishing a successful storage practice as an EqualLogic channel partner.

Here's a quote from their post - something they didn't anticipate writing a couple months ago:
Turns out they are doing exactly what they said they would. We have been welcomed with open arms and are actively engaged with the Dell Sales folks at all levels working as a united team to make sure all our customers are taken care of and prospective customers get the technical information and great pricing they deserve.

So, it's not just us saying it. It's not just the press saying it. It's also our VARs. We are looking forward to a long prosperous partnership with our channel selling Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage products and other Dell products too.

If you are curious about what makes our Dell EqualLogic PS series storage products so popular, you might want to check out one of our online demos. If you have time on Tuesday this week, we have one scheduled for 12:00 noon (Eastern).

Darren Miller our data protection software product manager is going to join me for an online chat on Dell's TechCenter site in a couple hours.

It starts at 4:00 Eastern. Here's the link to join the chat today.