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Dell, EMC Said To Be In Merger Talks (itworld.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the two-become-one dept.

itwbennett writes: According to a Wall Street Journal report (paywalled), Dell might buy some or all of storage giant EMC. (The grain of salt here is that the Journal's report cited unnamed sources, and cautioned that the companies might not finalize any agreement.) If the report has it right, though, "a total merger would be one of the biggest deals ever in the technology industry," writes Stephen Lawson for IDG, "with EMC holding a market value of about US$50 billion. It would also bring together two of the most important vendors to enterprise IT departments."

12 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Oh great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Something else for Dell to foul up.

    1. Re:Oh great by AntEater · · Score: 5, Informative

      I don't know if you're joking, or have only dealt with Dell's consumer level stuff. Their "enterprise" level support is excellent and the products generally perform as advertised, if not better.

      I'm not sure what Dell or EMC would gain out of this merger, if it is even true. Dell already owns Equallogic which covers the low to mid-range of the storage market pretty well in Dell's offerings.

      --
      Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
    2. Re:Oh great by swb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Dell own Equallogic (low-to-mid) and Compellent (mid-to-high).

      They already can't quite figure out how to merge the two systems and have been selling both. The inside story is that EQL will go away, but they never seem to go away and Compellent can't quite come up with a product as simple and cheap as EQL. The SC4020, rather than being an EQL with SAS expansion ends up being burdened by Compellent's over-complicated interface system and fiber-channel focused mindset, in addition to being more expensive than EQL (install by a CML certified technician is required, $$$). EQL setup is trivial, I can get one on line in less than an hour.

      I think there's also an open question about the mid-long range future of Compellent's primary sales pitch, its automatic tiering of data between different disk speeds (like SSD, 15k and 7.2k) when the future of data storage looks increasingly like it will be all flash, at least for most of the market volume.

      What does all that tiering overhead mean in a world dominated by flash? Maybe it makes sense for the absolute largest installs where petabytes are in play, but most of the Compellent installs I've seen have been a shelf of tier 1 and maybe 2 shelves of tier 3. And they're increasingly 10G iSCSI focused, passing on FC.

      I can't figure out how they'd blend in EMC to this mix.

      What they're probably after is controlling interest in VMware. This would give them a complete vertical play for virtualization, being able to supply compute, networking, storage and hypervisor. They would probably also be in a position to further a lot of network and storage virtualization with control over both sides of the equation, hardware an software.

      I do wonder if there's a possible anti-trust question here. I also wonder how Microsoft would feel about it as well.

    3. Re: Oh great by martin0641 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's almost 2016, I don't think we can link a 486 anecdote to today. Plus, we are talking enterprise here - I don't upgrade systems after purchase, I buy new ones and excess pallets of "old" ones. Dell's UEFI and iDRAC support are quite nice now, if they buy EMC and start baking that into their products then NetApp and others are going to be in deep trouble.

    4. Re:Oh great by acoustix · · Score: 2

      I bought a Compellent system about 2 years ago and absolutely love it. Had a EMC CX4-120 previously. The Compellent SC8000 is solid.

      --
      "A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
    5. Re:Oh great by Thumper_SVX · · Score: 2

      If you need a smaller array you should check out the SC4020 as well. Runs the same code base as the SC8000 on smaller hardware platform (slower CPU's, less memory) and in some benchmarks (read: not real world typically) can actually outperform the SC8K when fully kitted out due to an internal IPC connection instead of external. You can also happily replicate between the two so the 4020 makes for a great cost-effective DR site replication target when budget is limited. Or a remote datacenter SAN you can replicate to "the mothership".

      Given all this though, I'm surprised to hear that Dell would be even slightly interested in EMC. I've run EMC's and I've run Compellents (and HP's, and NetApps), and quite frankly the SC8K/SC4K family are the best arrays I've ever used.

    6. Re:Oh great by Thumper_SVX · · Score: 2

      They already can't quite figure out how to merge the two systems and have been selling both. The inside story is that EQL will go away, but they never seem to go away and Compellent can't quite come up with a product as simple and cheap as EQL.

      Scuttlebutt is that they're prepping to release firmware for EQL and CML that will allow cross-replication and extend the Enterprise Manager tool to also manage EQL. And the simplicity... well they did just come out with the SCv2000 which is all wizard-driven and about as dead simple to set up as the EQL. I predict we'll see that same level of simplicity making its way into the higher tier products pretty soon.

      I think there's also an open question about the mid-long range future of Compellent's primary sales pitch, its automatic tiering of data between different disk speeds (like SSD, 15k and 7.2k) when the future of data storage looks increasingly like it will be all flash, at least for most of the market volume.

      What does all that tiering overhead mean in a world dominated by flash? Maybe it makes sense for the absolute largest installs where petabytes are in play, but most of the Compellent installs I've seen have been a shelf of tier 1 and maybe 2 shelves of tier 3. And they're increasingly 10G iSCSI focused, passing on FC.

      To me this is interesting. Thing is there's more than one type of SSD technology at play today. There's SLC, (e)MLC and now TLC (3D-NAND). Each of these have different performance stats just like spinning disk. Yeah, even the lowest end of these is 10 times as fast as even a 15K drive but the write performance statistics of each of these drive types in particular is quite different. I remember going from my Samsung SLC 64GB boot drive on my laptop (this is going back several years) to an MLC 128GB drive and despite similar read performance I was always struck by how different the write performance was. Yeah, the MLC was a lot cheaper for the capacity but the write performance suffered greatly. From what I hear, TLC suffers a similar drop in write performance compared to MLC.

      The auto tiering if configured correctly can certainly make for an interesting performance story. Put SLC at the top where you want fast writes and allow it to trickle down to MLC and/or TLC... just like 15K->10K->7K. There's a question mark over whether current controllers can really take advantage of the potential performance in this kind of setup, but we're seeing controller performance increasing over generations anyway.

      The fact that we can now buy TLC drives at enterprise level for about the same price as 15K per GB is incredibly interesting to me and I think will really shake up the industry.

      I can't figure out how they'd blend in EMC to this mix.

      What they're probably after is controlling interest in VMware. This would give them a complete vertical play for virtualization, being able to supply compute, networking, storage and hypervisor. They would probably also be in a position to further a lot of network and storage virtualization with control over both sides of the equation, hardware an software.

      I do wonder if there's a possible anti-trust question here. I also wonder how Microsoft would feel about it as well.

      Ding ding ding! I think we have a winner... even though I have no information here I would guess this is almost certainly the play here. That and RSA would give Dell an even stronger foothold in the Enterprise than they already have. I have to admit they've been making some REALLY interesting changes in their portfolio, support and even sales organizations lately that I think make them a company to watch. Even in networking... they've shit-canned the atrocious Powerconnect line of switches (that some people loved) and replaced with a whole new line of switching from low end to high... and it's really good stuff! I myself just recently replaced my home core switch with an X1018; a low-end half-rack web-managed sw

  2. Re:The Truth About The Clinton years and The CIA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I've decided not to have any children

    The world thanks you.

  3. Evil, Mean and Cruel + Dell by enjar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dude, you got laid off!

    Seriously, though, what a unholy mess that would be. EMC grew by acquiring a lot of other companies, then spinning them off, and not really doing a fantastic job of integrating anything, then laying off tens of thousands only to hire again. Dell has it's own history of being huge, then being private, now seemingly on the roll again. It would be a fitting end for the the execs at EMC that acquired and fired to get acquired and fired themselves, although the big difference will be that they will get some giant golden parachute.

    1. Re:Evil, Mean and Cruel + Dell by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      You know, from what I've been able to see, the M+A culture in tech for the last 20+ years has consistently made the same stupid mistakes ... companies buy other companies who aren't really good matches, screw up the product, lay off a bunch of people, and consolidate into an ever smaller amount of companies.

      And those large entities become worse and worse at even knowing what they have, and making use of them.

      Often to the point that the reasons they spent huge sums of money on the acquisition in the first place get lost, and then they stop selling the product entirely.

      I would argue that acquisitions is more destructive than constructive. All it really does is gut smaller companies, give those executives huge payouts while laying off their staff, and then leaving the new company to ignore/neglect/screw up the product offerings of the company which got bought.

      I'm betting hundreds of companies with good products have essentially been destroyed in the process, largely so some half-wit of a CEO could add another buzzword or two to his portfolio of lies and bullshit.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  4. And it comes around... by Matt_Bennett · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I used to work for Dell- I remember at one of the company meetings, I think it was Michael Dell himself, referring to EMC as "Excess Margin Corporation" - of course this was before they were partnering on projects.

  5. What about VCE and VMWare? by ErichTheRed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    EMC, Cisco and VMWare are tied up in a sort of loose alliance to sell cloudy boxes to large companies (VBlock.) I wonder what would happen with that, and also whether Dell would own VMWare. That would be a pretty huge reversal of fortune for Dell. I guess that trip through privatization let them fix the company without being under the microscope every quarter. It seems to me that this would be a lesson for companies looking to IPO -- unless you need access to billions and billions of dollars in funding, being out of the public eye can be a good thing.

    I honestly haven't looked at Dell hardware for a very long time, since most of the physical stuff we deploy is outside of the US and they have horrible international warranty service. Their low end consumer PCs are garbage and always have been, but I've heard the business lines of desktops, laptops and servers are still halfway decent.