Dell is putting its cash on the barrelhead in a serious effort to come up with new ideas and strategies for future enterprise storageware.
Founder and CEO Michael Dell told attendees at Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference July 17 that his company is investing $60 million in an early stage investment fund called the Dell Fluid Data Storage Fund.
The new fund becomes part of the company’s investment arm, Dell Ventures, and will handle research into identifying, funding and fueling IT that anticipates storage needs of the future IT systems.
The company’s Fluid Data concept emanates from Dell’s acquisition of Compellent in 2010. The Compellent Fluid Data zNAS storage architecture, launched in April 2010, was the first to use the Sun Microsystems-developed ZFS file system to consolidate file- and block-level storage.
Dell has since designed all of its non-tape storage catalog around this new-generation IT.
Through Dell’s storage investments, the company intends to change the economics of the storage industry by bringing high-end enterprise features to the broad midmarket and solving enterprise problems at a midrange price point, Dell said.
