Storage @ Work

I spoke to a customer earlier this week who had a small problem with an online capacity upgrade. He told me that while their new system and capacity were being integrated into their existing storage resources, performance dropped approximately 20%. I brought this up at the Atlanta Customer Advisory Board meeting today to see if the customers that were there had seen anything similar or had any comments. As it turned out, our local SE Wade O'Harrow had been there and gave us an overview. He said the customer's network was designed where the EqualLogic storage systems are connected to multiple edge switches in an core-edge network with relatively thin ISL uplinks between the edge and core switches. These links were not able to keep up with the combination of the customer's normal high-throughput I/O load and the additional load incurred when a new system is added to an existing group and the load is balanced among systems.

The comments from our customers on the advisory board were interesting. They said that core-edge topologies are part of commonly accepted best practices for Ethernet/TCP/IP networks, but that the assumptions used in forming those best practices did not necessarily apply to SANs - especially heavily loaded iSCSI SANs. Storage systems involve much higher traffic levels and I/O loads than most other end nodes connected to edge switches. Instead they offered that best practices for iSCSI SANs would connect storage at the core of the network as a centralized resource or that a different, beefed up edge design including fatter pipes were needed. They thought people would get a lot of value from better documentation of best practices for iSCSI SANs.

I agree. So, I'll try to revisit this topic regularly in this blog and let you know what I find out what's working for other customers.

This story speaks for itself: The Mysteries of SANS part ii

Thanks for posting, Trevor.

Deni Connor at Network World published a column yesterday, capturing the thoughts of technologist Joel Snyder. Here's the link to the Network World article: Network World Column: Is Fibre Channel Dead? I actually saw the story first on Hartmut Wiehr's blog here where there is a permalink: Hartmut Wiehr's posting on "Is Fibre Channel Dead?"

Joel is not a storage guy per se, but a technology guy with a long career who has seen a lot. Here is his profile at Network World: Joel Snyder bio

I'm not sure that I agree with Joel altogether. I do feel that iSCSI will eclipse Fibre Channel relatively soon, but I think Fibre Channel is going to have a longer tail and slower decline than other dinosaur technologies like FDDI and Token Ring- only because the market for storage tends to be extremely risk averse and the process of swapping infrastructures is both risky and expensive. Still I talk to customers every week that have jettisoned Fibre Channel in favor of iSCSI because of the flexibility shortcomings and the relative high cost of owning Fibre Channel.

Two guys, Eric Waters and Ron Whitling running the data center operations for E-Chx, an Internet payroll processing service provider, talking about how EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage solved their performance problems on SQL Server and the overall ease of use and operations that you get with an EqualLogic SAN.

This is my first YouTube video and therefore also the first time linking a video directly into my blog. It didn't exactly work perfectly and there are several rough edges that I expect to make better in the future. The video ends at the 6 minute mark, but extends into blackness for over an additional minute. I'm not sure why that happened..... Don't be surprised if I re-post this one with a better quality video later this week.

You might need to click twice to make it play.

Solimar Systems is one of EqualLogic's longest standing customers, having purchased their first iSCSI storage system from the company over 3 years ago. I was down in San Diego yesterday and Leo Kameya, our sales manager there took me in to visit Tom Lytle at Solimar on our way to consume mass quantities of sushi together. Solimar provides large scale electronic printing services for companies who need to have PDF versions of traditional print output, such as financial statements, available on demand for their customers. If you have accessed a PDF statement for your bank or credit card, there is a good chace that this data was produced by Solimar.

Tom is a great guy, easygoing and very likable. He showed us around his data center and I took some footage of EqualLogic products at work in Solimar's data center. Maybe I'll put up some of that video, but are few things as dull as watching lights blinking on storage arrays.

What IS interesting, however, is the way that Tom upgraded his first EqualLogic storage system by refreshing (or replacing) its original 250 GB drives with new, high capacity 750GB drives. Usually EqualLogic customers are told that they can add new systems to an existing EqualLogic SAN and that the existing system's data will be spread (load balanced) across the combined volume spaces of the existing and new systems in the group. Tom explained to me how they tweaked this process by creating a two-system group, and then removing the original system from the group. This forced all the data to be migrated over to the new EqualLogic system. After that process completed, the original system was taken offline and the original disk drives were removed and replaced with new drives. With three times its original capacity, the original system was added back to the group and an inverse process was run to restore (remigrate) the data completely back to the original EqualLogic system. Essentially, this is an automated way to perform dump-and-fill storage operations between an existing disk system and its temporary replacement. The kicker in all this according to Tom was that there was never any downtime. The data was online and available the entire time.

Its really quite a cool thing, but it does make it difficult to set meaningful expectations for the lifespan of the product. What is it? - 6 years, 7 years, 8 years, 9 years or more? I really don't know and I suppose its going to be one of those "it depends" things. We're just going to have to wait to find out.

Previously I blogged about Solimar Systems and how they've been a customer for a long time and upgraded the disk drives on an early EqualLogic storage system to new 750 GB drives. So, I made a short video that - well - is somewhat self explanatory. Solimar Systems is a terrific customer with an interesting business and the story is pretty good, the sushi was fresh, but this video leaves a bit to be desired. Here goes:

There is a post on the VMWare forum today where an administrator is having problems getting VMotion to work with their iSCSI SAN.

Further down the thread is a post from an EqualLogic customer who has had a much better and more positive experience.

Thanks to VMWare forum member, acr, who posted his comment on this thread in the VMWare forum. Please look at his expertise level on this forum. (Virtuoso, with over 2600 posts). He says iSCSI is "quickest and easiest when we use VMotion."

EqualLogic's frameless, virtual storage architecture works very well with VMWare. Similar to the way the VMotion feature provides complete transparency for systems, EqualLogic storage systems provide transparency for storage where volumes can be transparently spanned and migrated across storage systems.

I just posted on VMotion and iSCSI (and EqualLogic). That got me thinking about this other thread that started before I was writing this blog. People wondering if EqualLogic iSCSI storage could work for their VMware environments might be encouraged by what was witten there.

Lucas Mearian at Computerworld published an interview yesterday with Greg Scherer, formerly the Chief Technical Officer at Emulex. Greg saw a lot of changes in the storage industry in the course of his 24 years career at Emulex and has the catbird's view of the Fibre Channel industry. Now he is putting his experience into a startup, Neterion, which is working on high speed iSCSI technology. Lucas did a great job in this interview and asked a number of intriguing questions. Definitely worth a read:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9015082

If you still haven't linked over, here's a quote from the interview to whet your whistle:

If you think about where Fibre Channel is deployed, it's really mainly in tier three of the data center. And it never jumped into being a real channel product. It's really an OEM-driven product. The OEM channel is an expensive channel. The channel [vendors] will make maybe 15 points. It's a pretty slim margin, but there's also very little support. The channel [market] is really just a facilitator to get the product from point A to point B. In the Fibre Channel market, which is OEM driven, there is anywhere from a 40-to-65-point margin. It's very lucrative.

I know there were times when some of the OEMs where making more money off the sales of Fibre Channel adapters and switches than they were off the system sales. It's one of those protected ecosystems where people were willing the pay it and they [the vendors] were willing to take it.

This thread in the VMWare foums has customers discussing their SAN implementations for ESX servers. The discussion is practically a group endorsement for using iSCSI storage with VMWare. If you are thinking about iSCSI but are unsure if the performance will be adequate, this thread (and others) on the VMWare forum may help build your confidence.

Don't believe the FUD about iSCSI. It's far better than Fibre Channel vendors want you to know. It's a lot better than what a lot of the analysts say it is. The best yardstick for a technology are the opinions of the people who use it.

Today's ANSI news: .......... FC vendors propose FCoE. Fibre Channel Protocol over Ethernet or something like that. Serial SCSI running over Ethernet without TCP or IP. Let's see, that has been tried before with Nishan's SOIP, Adaptec's EtherSCSI and other less well known technologies - and killed off by whom? Most of the companies proposing FCoE. Ironic.

So, if you are a FC vendor and it looks like 10Gb Ethernet is going to be part of the tiger (along with iSCSI) that eats your lunch, what do you do? You resurrect old ideas that you hung five years ago, dust off the corpses, insert zombie brains and call it the new shiny FCoE (Frankenstein Convergence over Ethernet?). The only difference between what you killed yesterday and your unholy experiment today is that this bad boy saves your business. It doesn't really have that much to do with customers, except that you get to squeeze them a little longer.

Here is a link to a TechTarget blog that I agree with.

And in honor of this abomination, here is a link to Tim Burton's Frankenweenie on YouTube .

I was in Los Angeles today talking to customers here, asking them about their storage applications. One of the themes that came up repeatedly was the use of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for file services connected to EqualLogic Storage Systems.

Our customers tend to appreciate administrative efficiency and low cost of ownership. Not surprisingly, they also know they can wring a huge amount of functionality out of plain, vanilla Windows file servers. Similar to the way iSCSI helps them leverage their organization's networking skills, Windows file servers help them leverage their entire organization's Windows admin skills, including system and network management, not to mention the licensing agreements they have with Microsoft. For most of them, setting up a Windows file server is a snap and takes almost no time whatsoever. Microsoft has made the iSCSI SAN components very easy to deal with and setup with an EqualLogic storage system is amazingly simple as most of our customers will testify. In most cases, setting up a Windows File server with EqualLogic storage takes less time and effort than installing an industry leading NAS system.

Some in the industry are trying to make a big deal out of the concept of unified storage. The idea of unified storage is that specialized multi-protocol, multi-network NAS/SAN systems will connect to virtually any type of client system using virtually any network or protocol they might want to use. The extension is that if you have a single technology to work with, it is more efficient own. Hmmm. Sounds a bit like a vendor trap to me.

Even if you don't believe that unified storage is another in a long line of storage vendor traps, the weakness with any one-size-fits-all product is the impossibility of fitting all the requirements equally well. Some functions tend to work well, while others tend to be stuck in perpetual mediocrity.

We have customers that believe unified storage is an unnecessary luxury and waste of their resources. Instead, they have made the shrewd observation that all the standards they need already exist and that their best practices begin by enforcing conformity with those standards. For many, Ethernet, TCP/IP and Windows servers are their core infrastructure standards. They have also come to the realization that EqualLogic iSCSI SANs are an extremely good fit for these standards.

Dave Hitz and I are going back and forth in our blogs, explaining our views on language - specifically the lexicon of storage. Dave's most recent post reiterates the explanation given in his previous post. Apparently he didn't like the fact that I awarded him the wagging finger of shame for willingly blurring the definitions of SAN and NAS.

My take on it still the same. The terms we use stand for something and provide a way for us to communicate complex concepts quickly. When we start polluting the definitions of accepted terms like SAN, for instance, we create confusion about things that are already complex - and this wastes a lot of time. A room full of people discussing storage can make a lot of progress if everybody clearly understands the terms. That same group without a shared lexicon will have a very difficult time succeeding. You can use the word "hammer" to refer to a hammer, a pair of pliers, or a screwdriver; or you could use the word "tool" to generically refer to these things. I think the problem you are having Dave is the lack of a generic term for a network that does "storage stuff". I use the term "storage network".

It has always been a problem in storage networking and I've always thought the term "SAN" was flawed. Let's face it - it was a term adopted by the Fibre Channel industry a decade ago to get the market to identify the technology with a new storage architecture. Your customers will use whatever terms they want to use and I don't particularly care what terms you use with them. However, I think you understand the difference between your role as a thought leader in this industry and your role as a sales support dude at Netapp. If you had written about the need for a better generic term for networks with storage traffic, that would have been a good topic, but instead you wrote about how it doesn't really matter what you call it and suggested we kidnap the term SAN for that purpose. This just creates confusion, which leads to wasted time, arguments, blame and all the other unfortunate things that go on when people don't communicate effectively. The finger wags because you are contributing to the confusion.

Storage-zilla has a post where he points to an EMC White Paper that explains how Netapp Filers make their SAN (block I/O) storage work through their WAFL-based filers.

The same argument the Zilla man lays out here works for EqualLogic of course too. If you are looking for iSCSI performance, make sure you check out EqualLogic iSCSI SAN solutions as well as those EMC and Netapp boxes.

Oracle is certainly one of the most important applications for many customers and there are a lot of misconceptions about its performance as Kevin Closson points out in this somewhat humorous MANLY MAN post on his blog. FWIW, EqualLogic has a number of customers running Oracle databases and applications on iSCSI storage networks - both with SATA and SAS drives.

Considering the nature of EMC Zilla-man's post earlier today and referenced in my posting immediately below - here is an interesting report from Network Appliance showing the relative performance of Oracle over FC, NFS and iSCSI. The fact that EqualLogic doesn't have the same bottleneck built into its iSCSI products, you can see how Oracle performance on EqualLogic storage arrays can be very good - and it explains why we have so many customers that are perfectly happy running Oracle on EqualLogic iSCSI storage networks.

Stephen Foskett, one of the sharpest storage thinkers I know has a data management practice with Contoural - and he just started a blog called 'Stephen Fosekett, Pack Rat', with a subtitle of "Understanding the Accumulation of Data'. One of his first posts discusses his opinion of Microsoft's Simple SAN initiative, which he feels is one of the best kept secrets in the storage world. I would agree with him, Microsoft has done a number of things very well to create "Microsoft Standards" for storage interoperability. In a nutshell, Microsoft has made it easy for their operating and application systems to work with storage vendor products through a common set of APIs across their server software products. Is simple SAN a "true" standard? - no. Is it a workable standard for Microsoft shops? - definitely.

Without any preparation, Stephen got a chance to see how simple an iSCSI SAN configuration can be, although he did say that the Microsoft iSCSI software initiator config slowed him up a bit. I would agree with that too, because I had the same experience the first time I set one up (I seldom RTFM). But the fact is, the time it took was almost nothing. It only seemed noticeable because the rest of the configuration process was so freaking easy. Here is a 2-page "Coffee Break" (PDF file) from EqualLogic that discusses how simple it is.

Microsoft just released a document written by Dennis Martin of Demartek showing a variety of iSCSI storage configurations. Here is a link to the PDF from Microsoft's web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? FamilyID=da150335-2d76-4cc7-9e3b-a95ed688fd2a&DisplayLang=en

Here is a link to a page on Demartek's website where you can download it as a Word file or as a PDF:
http://www.demartek.com/Demarte k_Deploying_iSCSI_Storage_Solutions_2007-06.html

An EqualLogic solution is featured in this document along with solutions from other vendors. I may have some comments about this document in the days to come after I get a chance to look it over.

I'm extremely happy to see Microsoft getting behind all of us, helping to grow the entire iSCSI industry.

Thanks Claude, SW, Suzanne, and all the rest of you in Redmond that are supporting iSCSI!

This story says most of it:
http://www.crn.com/storage/199905754

Once upon a time Netapp was an Ankle Biter too. How does the saying go, "If you can't beat 'em...."?

So all you Netapp resellers out there wondering how to keep us at bay, I've got this to say - Doing business with a growing ankle biter might be the best decision you make this year.

The employees of Brocade are really tired of the shadow Greg Reyes' trial is casting. I think they deserve a break.

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They always do things a bit differently in the UK. This page from the UK's Storage Magazine web site shows storage people carrying on as if they were "normal people". I think Storage Magazine UK deserves an award for pulling that off. EqualLogic was awarded the Storage Virtualization Product of the Year for the PS3900XV. Its not clear to me why this particular product was singled out because all our storage systems have the exact same storage virtualization software. But that's OK, we're happy for the recognition.

We also recently won the top prize in e-Week's Excellence Awards for Enterprise Storage Hardware. for our PS-3800VX . I don't know how long the link will be good, but here is the page on eWeek's site. Again, we appreciate the recognition. Thanks to the customers, readers, writers and publishers who contribute to our success.

In this podcast Farley talks about the problem of managing changes to storage infrastructures.

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?"

Hey Elfshadow, Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day to you too! A co-worker brought Elfshadow's blog - "Life in the Digital Matrix" - to my attention. He had attended the VMWare Users Group meeting near Sandusky Ohio and talked about the various sessions he attended.

In his blog he talks about how Dave Siles from Kane County Illinois presented on their extensive use of EqualLogic iSCSI SANs and how impressed he was with it all. The thing that impressed me was that Dave had been invited to speak to the group about VMWare and VM Users groups (I guess he grew up in Sandusky too - small world syndrome!) and he saw that one of our guys, Tim Sherbak, was going to present and asked Tim if he could present his EqualLogic storage perspective to the audience. Tim's no fool and Dave made a great impression.

That's what's amazing about this company: our customers. I say it over and over again, but we really do have the best customers in the world. Thanks Dave for being such an enthusiastic supporter!

Craig Randall wrote yesterday about an experience he had at a Starbucks recently and made a point of how controlling your destiny is such a valuable thing. The topic is aligned with a video I made yesterday and I like what he says:

" when you “outsource your experience” to someone else (e.g. to grocery stores such as Safeway or Albertsons), you run the risk of damaging your brand. The people running the Starbucks kiosk are employees of the grocery chain, not Starbucks. They don’t buy into the brand from an experience stand point, and apparently are not encouraged (e.g. via incentives) to do so by their employer (or indirectly by Starbucks)."

Managing storage products is a core competency that most IT aministrators should have. There are definite risks similar to those Craig mentioned above when you turn the "storage keys" over to somebody else. It's a no-brainer to buy technologies and products that allow you to control your own destiny.

Of course, that's why iSCSI is taking off the way it is - because people feel they can understand and control the networks better than they can with Fibre Channel. It's also the design goal of all our products at EqualLogic - making administration easier and faster so that IT professionals can take charge of their own storage infrastructures and move onto other tasks.

Jerome Wendt is a pretty sharp guy and an amazing writer. The guy can crank like there is no tomorrow and keeps the quality up. Here is an article he wrote for Compterworld today that mentions EqualLogic. The point of the article is simple - the cost of business continutity is going down all the time - sometimes in big leaps and bounds due to increased integration of advanced software features such as snapshot and replication and through integration with Microsoft-enabled data protection services.

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.

Storage veteran Nik Simpson at the Burton Group writes thought provoking articles for their Data Center Strategies blog. Today he wrote about SSPs (storage service providers) – and why they didn’t succeed several years ago and what his thoughts are about how they could become more successful in the future. He concludes that the best application for SSPs is archiving and I agree with him, perhaps for slightly different reasons.

To me outsourced archiving makes sense as a corporate governance practice. If a company (and their IT organization in particular) wants to remove any implication of tampering with archived data, the best way to do it is through an SSP that provides the functionality. The idea is that once the data is sent to the SSP, the SSP more or less “owns it”, along with the responsibility of keeping it available for legal, audit and corporate reasons. Like WORM, but as a service. No writes, no updates.

It follows that the missing link for this is encryption of the data at the SSP site, which brings into play all sorts of thorny issues surrounding key management. The SSP needs to be able to share its storage resources among its customer base AND guarantee complete privacy of data. It is economically backwards to fence data on along physical storage boundaries, but customers are not keen on trusting logical fencing methods, such as partitioning, for fear of hacking and operator errors. Encryption with logical storage partitions would probably be acceptable and affordable.

Tony Pearson wrote a post recalling IBM's role in the development of iSCSI. There is no question that IBM has served the industry well over the years as an R&D innovator of new technologies. EqualLogic owes a debt of gratitude to IBM and Cisco and many other companies who worked on the iSCSI standard, paving the way for today's iSCSI opportunities.

FWIW, as a little bit of history, I was very keen on exploring storage over Ethernet (less so about using IP) in the late 90's. The first person I knew who was serious about it was Larry Boucher, the CEO of EqualLogic's technology partner Alacritech, who was running Adaptec at the time. The discussions I had with Larry led to my writing about the potential of using Ethernet for storage in the first edition of my book, Building Storage Networks, which was written during 1999. It is truly gratifying to be here in 2007 seeing the amazing progress that has been made over the last 7 years in storage networking.

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 caught up with Chris Fricke, from Clackamas County Oregon and we were talking. I like to say we have the greatest customers in the world and in this video, Chris shows why I say that. Thanks Chris!

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Chris Sims from the Clayton County Water Authority in Georgia was a panelist at VMworld today and he talks about their DR setup, VMware implementation and their EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. Like I always say, we have the best customers and it is a joy to work with customers like Chris.

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Here is a little tech highlight from the Birds of a Feather session at VMworld. In this video, Eric Schott, our director of Product Management discusses how remote replication works using EqualLogic iSCSI storage arrays.

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Carmine Iannace is the IT director at the Brattle Group , an economics consulting firm in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was an early implementer of VMware technology at Welch's before bringing his virtualization vision to the Brattle Group, where he has almost completely converted their IT infrastructure to virtual systems and storage. I interviewed Carmine last week when I was in Boston and he spoke about his use of virtualization and the role that EqualLogic iSCSI storage has in it, including its deployment in their European lights-out data centers and its DR role, performing remote data replication.

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We recently published new data on Exchange 2007 I/O performance. Here is a link to the PDF file showing all the results and details.

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