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Dell Buys IPO-Bound EqualLogic for $1.4 Billion
alphadogg writes "Dell is stretching further behind PCs and servers and boosting its storage business with a $1.4 billion buyout of EqualLogic, a storage company that filed to go public in August. CEO Michael Dell had hinted just last week that Dell could be on the prowl for some big game."
The whole EMC thing makes me wonder the reason for the purchase. That having been said, we've been using EqualLogic for 2 1/2 years, and at the price point, it's pretty much unbeatable. It's ridiculously easy to configure and grow. We've a small staff with a huge amount of storage (35 TB) due to the image intensive nature of our work (digital imaging). EqualLogic has been a life save for us from both time and performance standpoints. We could not have gotten purchase approval for anything faster.
"Is it for backups of corporate data centers?"
You see it used everywhare. What do you keep user data? A round here every PC has a network drive on it's desktop and that is where peole keep all their files. So when I log into another PC in the plant I get my files on the desktop. That "drive" is really a big disk array. How do they back it up? The company owns three geographically dispersed arrays and they keep them synchronized using high speed data lines. They also use tape.
Basically you would use a storage array any time you own more than a handfull of computers. If just makes sense to get the data off the desktop so it can (1) Be properly secured and backup up and (2) follow the user's login. This is such a good idea that storage companies are doing well.
It is over priced because it is a growing marget and everyone wants to buy in now before it gets even bigger
I love VMWare, but can't stand their parent corp (EMC) and can't wait for the Compaqification of the SAN market with the part of IBM played by EMC. Any company that forces their customers to buy $100 SATA drives for $900 deserves to die at the hands of commoditization.
If you think that EqualLogic's biggest advantage over EMC was in the hardware prices, you're only getting half the story. The FAR more interesting thing to me was that when you bought the iSCSI array it came with all of the software for snaps, replication, etc included in the purchase price, and it's as easy to install as a server. With EMC, you buy a similar capacity SAN for 1.5x-2x the price and then after that they hit you with $1800 in professional services for installation, then charge you $3000-$5000 for each additional piece of software functionality that you need.