At a customer "town hall" meeting in San Francisco Monday, Dell Inc. CEO Michael Dell said large storage vendors are, by and large, ignoring the storage requirements for small and medium-size businesses (SMB). With that in mind, he then introduced the company's new iSCSI-based MD3000i storage-area network array.
Dell said that SMBs are not investing in storage products fast enough to keep up with exploding data demands, because of budgetary constraints and a lack of IT expertise in operating storage wares and software that are usually designed for large companies. And he had little trouble deciding who to blame for the SMB storage predicament.
"How did we get here? You can look back and blame [large] storage vendors in the industry, because they haven't met the unique needs of small-to-medium businesses," said Dell. "[As an SMB] either you use rudimentary storage products like CDs, DVDs or tapes intended for consumers, or you go with an expensive solution ... really intended for large enterprises. In other words, it either costs too much or doesn't do what you want it to do."
According to data released by Framingham, Mass.-based IDC last week, Dell is the fastest-growing external disk storage system provider. It posted 23.4 percent year-over-year revenue growth during the second quarter of 2007; the next-closest in terms of revenue growth was EMC Corp., at 10.8 percent.
The MD3000i is based on iSCSI technology, meaning the device runs over existing Ethernet networks and allows smaller businesses to avoid taking on Fibre Channel complexity for advanced storage capabilities. By intentionally marrying the MD3000i with Dell's PowerEdge servers, administrators running the new storage device can turn on the TCP/IP Offload Engine on the servers to accelerate the speed of iSCSI.
Delivered in single- and dual-controller models, the box (which can expand up to three shelves) supports up to 16 redundant servers and up to 18TB of data across 45 drives. Designed for virtualized environments -- virtual certification is expected early next year -- the MD3000i enables snapshot and virtual disk copy for backup operations and provides mirrored cache with 72 hours of battery backup.
Although one customer at Dell's town hall meeting raised concerns that the MD3000i's use of Microsoft iSCSI initiators would cause problems because of its notorious difficulty working with dynamic volumes, Dell executives downplayed those fears.
A key installation component of Dell's new storage device, the iSCSI initiator software updates all hosts in a network to ensure compatibility. If the software isn't loaded, it will ask the administrator for permission to get servers up to speed to work with MD3000i. Dell said a patch to fix those problems should be included with the disks shipped with the MD3000i.
The MD3000i is now available for less than US$10,000.
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