Q&A: Darren Thomas, vice president of storage at Dell

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Last week Dell announced a range of new storage and server products as it looked to expand its offerings for the enterprise market. At the launch event we took the opportunity to sit down with Darren Thomas, vice president of storage for Dell, to tell us more about the company’s future direction in this area.

For those that may not know where Dell is coming from, how would you describe Dell’s 2010 vision and strategy in the storage and virtualisation space?

We’ve come out with what we refer to as the “Virtual Era” strategy. More and more customers are virtualising and need to virtualise to gain the efficiencies that they are seeking to obtain. That virtual strategy is really the confluence of servers, networking and storage coming together.

Now there are only a few companies that can do that…. some are [say] just a networking company, but Dell is both networking, storage and servers.. we are a strong partner in this virtual era, as we own a piece of the technology in all three spaces.

How does that strategy play out in terms on the actual products that you’ve just launched?

The strategy that we believe in is that each of the components that storage cares about – the capacity, the performance and the scalability - and also the software that controls it, are all key. Products like EqualLogic have a real leadership position in all… of those.

[Often] customers need to change their strategies going forward. Those products that customers bought even before Dell bought EqualLogic, can download the firmware [5.0]. A customer that wants to add thin provisioning, this VMware vSphere technology, and run it today - can download it and run it in on the hardware they bought several years ago. That is unique in our industry. So Dell is delivering the ability for systems to grow and scale even through an evolutionary change like the virtual environment.

What would you say was the key differentiator to strategies of the recent past?

Intelligent data management means that we need to be able to manage the data, not just the device. In the old days, just a few years ago, it was everything you heard people talk about. Today what you heard us talk about is managing the data itself.

We talked about the software that automatically detects when pages get hit harder. Well how do we do that? We have to be aware of the access of the data. It’s not about whether the drives are turning or the fans, this is about what’s happening to the data.

With this emphasis on data rather than hardware - would you say then that we’ve in the virtualisation 2.0 era?

I would say that’s a good answer. I would tongue-in-cheek almost tell you that it’s virtualisation 3.0. Storage devices virtualised in the 60s, the 70s and the 80s, we took away the context of block, then we took the disk away and made volumes, and now with products such as EqualLogic, we’ve taken the volume away, and we just talk about capacity. But that was inside the device. Server virtualisation was able to virtualise within the server, and that impacted on the application, that impacted the deployment, that impacted the total cost of ownership – and the automation involved in doing deployments.

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