Dell, EMC Divorce After 10-Year Reseller Relations 51
Lucas123 writes "An extremely profitable relationship between Dell and EMC has come to an end after 10 years. Over the past five years, as Dell has continued to sell more of its own storage products — going further and further upstream in the market — while EMC has continued to sell more products aimed at lower-end customers. As a result, competition between the two vendors has grown. But, the partnership resulted in big revenue for both companies, with Dell reporting as much as 50% of its storage revenue from EMC rebranded products in some years. 'If anything, Dell is making much more money on the bottom line now. So as far as divorces go, this was a pretty easy one,' said industry analyst Steve Duplessie."
Business CAN play nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at that. A successful and profitable cooperative venture coming to an end, and not a lawsuit in sight.
Now if the rest of the business community could only learn from this and stop with the patent lawsuits and market trolling, and get back to selling great competitive products.
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Look at that. A successful and profitable cooperative venture coming to an end, and not a lawsuit in sight.
Now if the rest of the business community could only learn from this and stop with the patent lawsuits and market trolling, and get back to selling great competitive products.
If you continue this line of thinking, you're just asking to be sued
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Skittles are disgusting. Just give me regular shit, please.
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Just wait (Score:2)
When it's finished, EMC will be suing Dell over technology in the Equallogic series of storage devices.
Re:Business CAN play nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of them do. It is boring and doesn't make the news.
We think the world is going down in a ball of flame because how horrible everything seems. But in reality news doesn't cover the good news, it is boring. They cover the exciting bad new where there is conflict and risk.
The news about a law that passes with bipartisan support gets a paragraph on NPR with a senator doing a quick 10 second speech saying, this should show that we can work together on a common goal....
But news about laws that are in gridlock going down the line where it is split and both sides need to stand up to each other... Now that is news.
Old news (Score:4, Interesting)
This was announced to Dell/EMC customers...what, about a year ago if I remember correctly?
Dell has been pushing their (acquired through company merger) Equallogic series of storage servers for long and nobody saw this as an suprise. But I guess the good relations must go on because EMC has VMware and Dell does not definitely want to be known as diy vendor when it comes to VMware.
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Since you can migrate VMs in a few hundred milliseconds, the ability to get lots of OK server generally beats the ability to get less ironclad server if you are going to be VM hosting.
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Yes but what crashes? I've been running ESX on Dell's hardware for four years now. The only crashes we ever had were shortly after we started when there were some Broadcom driver bugs which caused ESX to pink screen. We're not a huge shop but over a dozen ESX servers without a crash in three + years isn't going to make this an issue for us.
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"large scale reboot storm after a host crashes "
Friends don't let friends use Windows hosts.
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I believe this was not referencing the host OS (As in any sane environment, they would be using Vsphere/ESX/ESXi. However, when a host fails, the guests then reboot when they have been assigned new hosts. If you are using large servers that handle 60+ guests, and lose a host, those 60+ guests now have to reread their disks, potentially get DHCP addresses, and pull up network shares, etc.
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High Availability (HA) will simply restart your VMs (whether Linux or Windows) on another ESXi host. They are two different things and FT costs more.
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What I've found is that sometimes when people are buying their first SANs and work directly with the manufacturer's sales people they tend to get under-sized SANs. The sales guys goal, make no mistake about it, is to move product and there is a lot of competition from various manufacturers.
We've had to help replace or upgrade SANs for folks who bought one for their 50+ servers including really heavily hit databases that run on 7.2K RPM drives because the sales guy sold them on cache when quotin
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Maybe it depends on the salesperson. Our Dell guy sold us a pretty decent Equalogics setup, but it may be because we are all highly technical and know what we need too.
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Don't forget about Compellant. That was another great acquisition, IMO a best in class SAN product line.
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I don't think the "divorce" has anything at all to do with Equallogic, as Equallogic is not really an EMC competitor. The divorce has much more to do with Dell's acquisition of Compellent and also Exanet and Ocarina. These three acquisitions put Dell in a position to make a very big splash in the enterprise storage market. A Compellent SAN with Ocarina compression and dedupe and an Exanet NAS head will be a mighty, mighty storage device.
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With EMC introducing VNX they're directly competing with each other in many spaces.
We have several of the products I mentioned and they've perform very well.
Full disclosure: The place I work for is an EMC and Dell (and HP and NetApp) partner/reseller/integrator...
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Out of curiosity, what makes Equallogic expensive to scale?
Because scaling means adding a complete additional member?
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To be fair they are fast, nice, and stable boxes that are probably good for small deployments where there isn't a storage admin. I'm sure the
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They make the argument, though, that this kind of expansion scales performance along with capacity, as the data gets striped over multiple units, increasing IOP capacity and distributing network load over more network ports.
Disk additions would be nice, but from what I've seen, you can quickly overwhelm network capacity, although if you started with 10 gig ethernet it might be less of an issue.
Sounds good, I know, but I've never seen it in action, even though I work for a reseller, as our deployments tend t
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Dell is actually pitching Compellent as their Tier 1 solution. They've had Equallogic for a number of years, but it is iSCSI only and definitely doesn't quite play in the same space as EMC and NetApp.
So this is why... (Score:1)
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I fielded one such call years ago. I calmly replied that their mid-range products cost more than my employer's annual gross, and never heard from them again.
Sure, those fancy multi-tiered EMC boxes do a lot more than my ghetto Linux file servers, but if they cost about 5 years of salary just to acquire, well I can afford to lose up to 5 years of work on my ghetto box before the EMC becomes cost-effective. Especially now that high-end boards come with one or two 40GBE ports built-in, I can deploy some scar
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Actually, you can get an EMC array for under $10k now (which should be well under your employer's annual gross).
Sure you can get some fast ports going on your servers, but when all that IO hits your 5 SATA drive; on board RAID 5 set, with no caching; watch where your performance goes. It might be ok for a file share, but I wouldn't be putting my comany's databases or apps on that if there was a cost effecient choice
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Well okay, I'm a server guy. I've been a server guy since the late 90's, me and Supermicro go waaaay back. I know better than to put business-critical data on low-end hardware. I'm not completely oblivious to EMC and NetApp's offerings, but I do know my money still goes a lot further with DIY.
My first "file server" was an old Linux box with a bunch of hard drives and PCI SATA controllers. Its purpose was to hold all my porn, because back then my job consisted of peddling said porn on the internet. It w
It was always Dell=1 Customers=0 (Score:1)
The partnership helped Dell increased their numbers but customers were always left to sway in the wind. Their sales process was a cluster. Their support for EMC was a cluster. We bought a lot of Dell branded EMC storage. Support came from Dell and their party line was to blame it on EMC but not provide any escalation to EMC engineers who could really help to identify solve problems. Basically all Dell was good for was sending a tech to replace disks that had 'phoned home' that they were failing.
After some m
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Commercial Storage. (Score:3)
Storage is a funny field, it is more expensive then people usually think.
When I got hired my Boss wanted me to research a storage solution, In his mind he was willing to pay $2,000 he didn't tell me that. So I did the research figured out how much we needed called vendors got the information I needed and gave my boss an estimate of $40,000. He wasn't happy with that quote and told me how much they wanted to pay. So I came up with a solution that will fit the price, but then he wasn't happy because it didn't do everything they needed.
Nothing happened.
A year later they hired someone who specializes in storage solutions he did the research and came up with a $50,000 estimate. I told him that they won't like it but he didn't listen to me and the boss was unhappy with the quote they raised their expectation to about $20,000. He trimmed down the solution to be about $30,000 and they weren't happy because it didn't have all the features they wanted.
Nothing happend.
An other year later.
They finally got the storage solution they wanted because they were sick of buying servers just because they needed storage. At this point they Paid $250,000 for the solution, all the bells and whistles. Because they really needed it.
Now the company had been growing during this time so their requirements have grown. But the point is Storage Cost a lot of money, A lot more then we think it should be.
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BTDT. It's common when you've got idiots who don't understand IT, but think they do, holding the purse strings and making decisions.
I've been in this same situation two times now. In one, the "I'm out of storage" situation lasted for the full term of my employment, with multiple proposals, rationales, etc. as to why we needed more. Apparently operating at 90%+ capacity was acceptable enough to them. Their lack of interest (or maybe I should say, disdain) meant I left.
The second time, I had the boss actually
It's been heading this way for years (Score:2)
I'm surprised it took this long, but I guess this is when the contract expired. Once Dell tried to buy 3Par, it was obvious that they viewed EMC as a short-term partner to get their foot in the storage door, not a long-term partner. Considering the amount of money people pay for storage, I'm not surprised. We went through the same thing when HP dropped EMC back in the late 90s.
(Note: I'm an EMC employee, but I have no involvement with contracts. I did notice that we switched PC brands from Compaq to Del