The red hot virtualization market gets hotter by the day.
Today Dell announced that they were going to buy Nashua, NH based Equallogic (leaders in iSCSI enterprise SANs) for a cool $1.4 billion. This probably means that the LSI OEM partnership will come to a hault and so will Dell’s MD3000i at some point. This deal is interesting at many levels:
a) just 4 years ago, when we picked up Equallogic ; many of the naysayers said that iSCSI wouldnt cut it – it is a toy, slow, poor management, security issues – etc , etc – simply just FUD (fear, uncertainty , and doubt) from people who didnt know better or made $ by selling FC SANs
b) Equallogic got themselves a great price it seems – considering that they were on target for around $100 million in sales this year. They were very close to going public on their own. So Dell in effect is trying to do what EMC did a few years ago , when they snagged VMware before they went public. Back then , that price seemed high too. Equallogic and NetApp are the platforms of choice today for VMware ESX farms.
c) Dell is saying that Equallogic’s partner channel will stay in place. It will be interesting to see if this is the case and how long this lasts. Dell will need the channel for awhile – enterprise iSCSI SANs with lots of competition are not going to sell themselves. Buying a $5000 AX150i is a bit different than what we have here.
d) How will the EMC reps in the field feel about this ? EMC and Dell have a great , symbiotic relationship now – however will the EMC reps still feel comfortable about referring business to Dell as a channel partner when the client might find out about the new Dell storage company – called Equallogic?
