Dell/Ocarina – Too Little, Too Late
On October 11, 2011, at Dell World, Dell announced a component to their DX6000G object based storage called an “SCN” or Storage Compression Node. It is interesting that Dell would mention in their that this is “Dell’s first Ocarina based solution…” What makes this interesting is the value proposition behind Ocarina was its ‘content aware’ deduplication, not necessarily compression. That said, this blog post seems to be the ONLY information on Dell’s web site about the product and there is very little in the press about this product and the technology.
While it is nice to see that Dell, who has committed to their own storage technology, understanding that storage optimization is important, the reality is they are a little to late to the game. I say this because the announcement that came from Dell around their 6000 is really bizarre. First, the solution is an object based solution. Didn't they learn anything from EMC? The Centera is not gaining a lot of momentum these days, even if they had a lot of ISV partners. In fact, it is loosing ground. Object based storage was good before the whole 'Big Data' thing was the 'next big thing' but today, people need a big clustered file system, that is optimized, that can server not only unstructured based data, but also some structured data that allows you to find stuff quickly. Also, the DX may be a good solution for data types that are of the media / entertainment only segment, but when it comes to running a business, it takes more than just this object based file structure to be successful.
To me, this solution is too little, too late. Dell, in order to be a true competitor in the space that is highly scale-able, clustered file systems that are optimized, they need to advance their thinking. This will be difficult for Dell. First of all they are not known for technology advancement or integration. Until they announced thier departure from EMC they didn't really have a major focus on storage and now with their acquisitions, the question is, what is their value prop. Couple that with the fact that IBM has 1000's of patents in storage and Dell doesn't where does that leave the direction of Dell storage?
