Big News Coming Soon from Dell Storage

UPDATED: Look for some big news from the Dell storage shop in September regarding its hot EqualLogic brand and in October involving networking partners that include Cisco Systems.

Did you know that Dell made switches? We didn’t.

Sigh. The Station is sworn to secrecy on these news items until the time is right.

By the way, The Station is asked to hold news items under embargo almost every day of the year, it seems. How about if we just issue a blanket “Your Secret Is Safe with Me” statement now, and let that suffice for the rest of the year? You listening, PR pitchers?

So we had coffee with Dell storage and networking chief Praveen Asthana today. It’s always good to catch up with a company’s top guy in a particular sector of the IT business.

Dell, which wasn’t really even on the data storage map back in 2004 when Asthana joined the company, had simply been serving as a reseller of EMC storageware at that time. But in only four years’ time, Dell has become the No. 4 player in market share in its own right, trailing only EMC, IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the IDC world sales figures.

Dell’s moving up in server sales, too. “We’re actually No. 1 now in market share in the United States, according to Gartner,” Asthana said.

Dell’s flagship storage system line, the MD3000i, has been catching on very well as an entry-level system for midmarket companies as well as enterprises, he said.

“It’s primarily because we made it easy enough for a company with maybe one or two IT guys on staff to configure it and deploy,” Asthana said. “It’s all wizard-driven, and a lot of the work is automated, so to set up LUNs and configure the IP addresses is all pretty easy to do. You wind it up and let it go.”

Wish everything were as easy as that. Anyway, we’ll have the real Dell news when Dell gives us the green light.