The looming SAN storm in the SMB market part 2; continuation of the roundtable discussion on the emerging SAN market for small to medium-sized businesses sponsored by Computer Associates, Dell, Emulex, Intel and Microsoft

Computer Technology Review, August, 2004

So what we are focused on is delivering families of microprocessors and components that will enable that transition to happen in the marketplace. Our division is working with partners like Emulex to deliver a full system on a chip technology. For example, we're integrating protocol capability--Fibre Channel, SAS, SATA--with high-performance microprocessors based on the latest fab technology that will deliver levels of features and cost performance that have not been ever realized in the marketplace before.

Now, on top of that, we know that the application solutions and the standards must be there as well, so we apply a lot of resources to ensure that the standards continue to make progress throughout the industry. And we are working with the storage applications providers to ensure that they take full advantage of these building blocks so that we can deliver these capabilities.

Marrone-Hurley: Mike, what is Emulex doing?

Smith: I think the most important thing to be recognized when we go after this market--collective "we"--is that it is a big market and there are lots of shades of gray. There's not one target customer. And it's critical to understand who, within this market, the customer opportunity is, and who isn't our customer. Lots of customers I've talked to out there, lots of small business customers out there, are perfectly happy with internal DAS storage, and that'll do a great job for them for years to come. I talked to one guy whose idea of external storage was a USB disk. Probably not a candidate for a Fibre Channel SAN.

[laughter]

And that's okay. So, understanding that is the foundation for building the right products. In this market, one of the things we recognize is DAS and NAS kind of set the bar for ease of use and price points, and we recognize that. If you make it harder to use than plugging it in, you're going to have a problem. If you need to send an engineer with every system, that's a problem. If you have to require specially trained service people, that's a problem. So I think we all understand that at a conceptual level, but the devil's in the details, and understanding what it means for product design, for software design, for support organization design, and getting to the point where you pick the right five features that really nail it for this customer and get the price point right--that's what we're doing. We introduced our first product a couple of months ago. It's the Emulex LP101 HBA. I think it's a great product, but it's the first of, we think, many.

Marrone-Hurley: Marc, how about Dell?

Padovani: At Dell, we're going to continue to offer a broad range of solutions. Just as Mike said, customers have different needs and work from internal, direct attached, external NAS and SAN solutions. We're going to continue to drive and work with our partners to scale the solutions down and make them easier to deploy for our customers.

For the small business, there's a variety of technical knowledge that they have in deploying the solutions. We continue to make improvements in sales and implementation and servicing solutions. We offer a broad range of training programs for small businesses that just want to deploy the solution and not have to worry about it. There are others that are interested in understanding more about how the technology works and how they can get the maximum use out of it. With our training and certification programs, we can really enhance their knowledge and make it easier for them to understand how they can scale up their products over time.