The killer application for iSCSI vendors has been virtualization.
The company that has leveraged this the most has been Equallogic; they were the first iSCSI (only) company to get certified for VMware Vi3 and VMware customers have flocked to iSCSI and EQL in particular. There are several technical reasons why iSCSI and virtualization are a great marriage..
At VMworld – nearly every client that spoke about virtualization and DR was an Equallogic customer.
The $1.4 billion acquisition of Equallogic by Dell, validates for all that iSCSI and virtualization are leading the pack.
Also a quick note which I think is pretty interesting regarding high end FC SAN and iSCSI SANs and what VMware (an EMC company) is working on and supporting during the first phase of a new product release ; the word on the “street” is
that early next year when VMware releases VMware Site Recovery Manager (a new product that uses virtualization to provide end-to-end disaster recovery management and automation ) it will initially support two products – high end EMC DMX & SRDF and Equallogic iSCSI PS Series SANs and replication software suite which comes free with their hardware.
Equallogic will also make for an even more interesting VMware-DR bundle when VMware SRM is released – EQL will not charge to add for the SRM plug in software (they include their software suite for free – replication, cloning, etc and dont charge when new software features are added) while other vendors , EMC, etc will charge for this new feature set
Today I was listening in on a “town hall” meeting which involved Equallogic’s CEO Don Bulens and high end channel partner managers from Equallogic and Dell . That’s right I said Dell channel – a lot has changed since Michael Dell came back and found that the market has changed for certain products.
My take away, is that partners should embrace the Dell buyout of Equallogic and more importantly that Equallogic customers will be better served in the future from this new alignment . While it makes sense to be guarded , so far it seems like a win win for clients and partners alike.
