After the lengthy and "boring" presentation of Dell's new storage area network device aimed at smaller businesses, I sat down with Darren Thomas, the general manager and vice president of storage at Dell. Thomas questioned HP's commitment to that space (HP is announcing storage devices for the SMB market this Wednesday), as they "haven't refreshed it for 5, 6 or 7 years". Thomas also claimed that Dell is the only "big" OEM to design storage systems specifically for the SMB market. And according to the Dell exec, the #1 supplier of storage network devices for the SMB market are... "whitebox" manufacturers!

"What's common about the way the big suppliers are going about that market is they are all taking their basic products and de-featuring them to get into this space [...] What you end up with is, the customer has to choose between a highly de-featured product at the right price, or a highly feature product at the wrong price", said Darren Thomas.

The Dell Model: Partner vs Build Your Own
The Dell exec acknowledged that what differentiates Dell and HP, is not necessarily on the hardware side, but on software/firmware.

"What they did is wrote their own code. And the reality is that code is fairly stable: mirroring, RAID 5 [...] And what you find is that Dell partners very well with the industry [to bring the code in]. I think it takes more discipline and better engineering to be able to maximise the value of the industry and bring it all together than it does to go off and do it by yourself. Going off and doing it by yourself takes very talented engineers, no doubt. But designing the product and bringing it all together takes the same level of talent"