Dell computer driver

Marrone-Hurley: At this time, we'd like to open up the discussion and hear some questions from the audience.

Questioner 1: I'm from Gartner. I like this idea of ease of use. I'm still a little puzzled as to where is the central coordination of this effort to make these SANs easier to use? I hear from Dell, I hear from CA, I hear from Microsoft. Where's the nerve center of that activity? How is this coordinated?

Lofgren: Do you mean organizationally? Do you mean between the vendors?

Q1: Well, there's something that needs to be accomplished. And, by the way, I like my external USB drive ...

[laughter]

I think we know that one of the things that needs to be done is make SANs easier to install, and easier to use. And everybody's saying Dell's doing something, CA's doing something. We know Microsoft's doing something. But is there any coordinated center where all these people are working together effectively to get that done, if everybody has to contribute?

Padovani: At the end of the day, providers like Dell and other solution providers, our competitors out in the market, we have to coordinate and present that solution to the customer. We do a lot of testing with customers to see what solutions work. All of our suppliers also have done a lot of ease of use testing, and we work together to say what have we found--

Q1: So you're the center of this?

[laughter]

Padovani: There are a lot of centers. Claude said he uses the channel. And Mike has said that Dell is a channel. We own the customer and drive the solution to the customer. So ultimately we're liable for how that solution's presented to the customer. As far as ease of use, if we want to improve the experience of the customer, to lower the support cost, we have to make that ease of use and drive that ease of use across our partners. So it's Dell and it's all of our competition out there that are trying to use that as a means of differentiation in the marketplace. We want the best experience for our customers compared to our competition.

Q1: I understand that. But there's nothing like a solutions forum, or something that brings together people, who would otherwise compete, to work together.

Padovani: That would be SNIA, SMI-S, the whole platform interoperability effort.

Q1: But does SNIA have something directed towards this activity? I'm talking about the improved installation and operation feature.

Marrone-Hurley: Do we think that SNIA actually should have a SMB focus group, like a design guide, that determines what feature set they need. Do you do it in a coordinated fashion?

Smith: I don't think we would defer to a standards organization to define the market needs and specific features. Standards are needed--they're the frameworks that we need to communicate--and SMI-S is a great example. It's the first example we have of providing a management framework where host bus adapters, switches and arrays can all talk collectively through the same language, if you will. But defining specific features is another area all together.

Lorenson: That question is a very good question. The reason it may be hard to answer is because there are many pieces to the puzzle. From our point of view, that means we have to create partnerships with companies like Emulex, like Brocade, Cisco--that, traditionally, we did not really partner with. We have to open our roadmap with these people; we have to share what we're doing in terms of strategy. We have a partner group at Microsoft, specifically dedicated to storage, that didn't exist two years ago. Now, at least we can share where we are going and what our philosophies are to make these products easier to use. That's on the Fibre Channel side. On the iSCSI side, we took a bit more of a leadership position, and we are actually working with our partners on deployment and best practices for how iSCSI should be deployed. So it becomes a much more white-paper canvas to deploy iSCSI SANs because we worked from the get-go with all these iSCSI partners. So when you talk about the "central room" or "operation room" where it is being done, I want to say that we are trying very hard to have all these storage partners in line--as far as the Windows Server platform is concerned. It's a hard question to answer because there are many pieces of the puzzles, and some of us--Dell and Microsoft--often have to assemble more of the pieces.

Padovani: I think it's a competitive advantage. That's why we may not get to some type of central collaborative area. But I don't think it's necessarily important, because as long as you get the underlying technologies interoperating together, then somebody's always going to improve the GUI, somebody's always going to improve the look and the deployment characteristics of it. That, just like cost, is a competitive advantage.

Performance is a competitive advantage. Ease of use for the small business. Those three are all selection criteria for small business. So I almost don't think you want to get a group of companies together and say, let's come up with a standard.

Wall: Historically, setting the standards enabled this cycle of innovation. Standards are the key, the trigger point, to allow a lot of companies to play in an area where maybe only a few did before. So it's key to the industry organizations to get the standards set in the marketplace. Once that happens, and that is happening right now--which is why we're talking about this small and medium business opportunity--then that cycle of innovation happens. Maybe this is a simplistic view, but then capitalism and competition is going to be the fastest path to getting these end users the simple, easy to use things that we're talking about today. Not bodies of people that are going to play together and agree to things. It's going to be Microsoft wanting to win in the marketplace and therefore knowing what they have to do to satisfy and make their product more competitive than others. But standards are the key to enabling that competition to take place.

Questioner 2: I'm from IDC. Many of you have said that part of the secret of getting SANs into the SMB area is simplifying. Essentially, what you've all said is they only need a percent of the function that you're currently supplying into the enterprise. Can you give us some idea of the things you're currently supplying into the enterprise that you don't think SMBs needs?

Lofgren: One quick example is being able to take a look at a lot of performance metrics, such as real detailed information on I/O performance. I would doubt if a large percentage of the SMB market users need to know all this nitty-gritty, detailed, granular information. Now, they do need to know some things. Maybe they need to figure out that there's something there that's a bottleneck for them, but I don't believe that they're going to need those "137 different things." Those things just get in the way for them. Now again, they need to know if there's a problem. But looking at what the cache hit ratio is of this or that, for the most part, they're not going to be interested in. They're never going to look at it. They don't have the time because they're not just looking at storage: storage is kind of a part-time job for them. And all they really want to know is if there is a problem. In many cases, what they tend to do is solve problems through hardware (which may not necessarily be the best way of doing things). But given the time that they have, that they can dedicate towards managing their storage environment--that kind of detailed information is just not as valuable as it is to somebody in the data center who's managing several hundred terabytes where it really makes a big difference in their transaction environments.

Marrone-Hurley: Mike, from the Emulex perspective?