Dell outlines 'fluid' storage strategy, as EMC is ditched

Dell spelt out its storage strategy at the firm's Storage Forum event in London this week, detailing its vision for enterprise storage going forwards and shedding light on the firm's long-standing partnership with industry giant EMC.

According to Dell, it has been apparent for some time that the landscape of IT is changing in ways that call for storage architectures that are more flexible and adaptable, or what it calls "fluid data".

The firm said that its numerous acquisitions have been to fill in the gaps in its own technology portfolio and that, as a major server vendor, it is well placed to offer an integrated stack for the datacentre.

Bryan Jones, Dell's enterprise marketing director for EMEA, said that just three or four years ago, the focus in datacentres was on compute resources, with virtualisation of servers the hot topic, but now the explosive growth of storage requirements is the key challenge.

"It's not just documents, but unstructured data and social media, too. If all this data doubles every six months, but staff and budgets don't, how do we help customers manage?", he said.

Darren Thomas, vice president of global storage, said Dell had a "strategy within a strategy" for storage during the past decade or more, partnering up with EMC to resell its enterprise kit to Dell customers, while starting a parallel process of picking up new and innovative technologies to build up its own storage portfolio.

"Storage has been done pretty much the same way since the 1960s, with arrays of drives like in Raid. But at the turn of the century, things started to change and some startups began to do interesting things around extrapolating storage away from the physical hardware," Thomas said.