Q&A: Praveen Asthana, vice president of storage and networking for Dell

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How long do you think that storage virtualisation overall will take to catch up with the server virtualisation numbers?

I think it will be a while. In storage virtualisation there are two different implementations. One is what I call a homogeneous implementation, which is [when] all of the things being virtualised are from the same company and look the same. There is another called heterogeneous virtualisation, which is [where] I will sell you this virtualisation appliance, which will allow four or five boxes to look like one box and the companies have introduced products like that.

The problem is it is very difficult to do. It is easy to do in a lab [and] it is easy to get a product out, but the problem is that because the fibre channel standard is so broad there are always different interpretations.

If you have a SAN with eight different boxes and there is a fault in one of them, you can’t find it and that is what some customers have told me. [They say:] "Yes, it sounded like a good idea, but I can’t find which box broke." A little thing like that is tripping up the technology [adoption].

So there are technological issues like this that companies like Dell need to work on to encourage adoption?

Exactly.

How does Dell feel about the growing public cloud and is it a threat to you?

Well we are definitely getting involved in a lot of public cloud projects and we are probably the leading provider of infrastructure to most of the web 2.0 and public cloud providers. So if you looked at [companies like] Facebook, Google, Amazon and MSN, many of them buy their stuff from Dell. So from a public cloud perspective we are selling a lot of stuff in.

I personally think that most companies and most of the customers I have talked to are not keen on running their stuff on a public cloud. They like the idea of what a cloud gives them so stuff like it is really easy for me to provision resources, I can do that fast, I don’t need to send in a requisition order and trouble ticket and this and that. It is flexible in the sense that tomorrow if I need capacity I can get it, it might be cheaper and there is a self service model that I myself can allocate what I need.

Those are the things it offers [so] customers ask "can I get those things in my own data centre without having to go outside?" Now that infrastructure inside your data centre, some people are calling a private cloud, others are calling that a smart virtualised infrastructure.

There are customers today who have become tired of the word 'cloud', if I said cloud they say "please don’t take to me about cloud." Nobody can define this nebulous thing and they are tired of it. They want practical [solutions].

We are going to make smarter virtualised infrastructures and offer them to our customers. Some will call them private clouds, I will call them virtualised infrastructures. We will continue to provide to the public cloud and provide linkage… so if you have a spike in your needs you can go to the public cloud for your needs.

So what about storage in the cloud?

I think that is the last [element to go to the cloud] in many ways. There is a big trust factor about data. Your data is a really important thing and do you want it in the public cloud? Probably not, no matter how much they assure you it is perfectly safe you don’t know.

With many applications, there is a latency issue. By that I mean you can’t wait for information to go to a cloud and come back… it takes time and many applications will time out. That’s just physics. So those are some practical issues.

If you look at email storage, should that be in the cloud? Well you might put it there. You could use Gmail, for example, that’s a cloud implementation. But do I really feel comfortable sending Dell confidential data to my chief executive using Gmail that anybody could see? Probably not.

So is the public cloud a no go when it comes to storage?

I think it is further out. I think people need to get a lot more psychologically comfortable and that is going to take some time.

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