Скачать или смотреть Travis Vigil, Dell | Dell Storage Forum 2012

The Cube - Dell Storage Forum 2012 - Travis Vigil, Dell, with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman
The Cube’s Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante sat down with Travis Vigil Executive Director Equalogic, Dell at this year’s Dell Storage Forum to chat about EqualLogic’s growth and evolution since joining Dell (full video below). The group also took time to discuss the storage market and Dell’s changing role in that market. The complete video is available after the article.ince Dell acquired the company.

Vigil began by discussing EqualLogic’s growth spanded its customer base from 4,000 to 40,000 in the almost four and half years since joining Dell. Dell has continued to invest in EqualLogic as a key component in Dell storage and its fluid data architecture strategy. Dell has also made a large effort to position EqualLogic as an industry leader in terms of application integration. The platform has deep integration with VMWare, Microsoft applications like SQL and Exchange. They have also added integration with Linux. Ultimately, Vigil explained, the goal is to provide a product with enterprise class features that remains easy to use by lean IT organizations.

Miniman then shifted the discussion of Dell/VMware partnership. Vigil said EqualLogic’s integration with VMware began before the acquisition by Dell and accelerated after the acquisition. EqualLogic began with VMware vCenter integration for virtualization management; the platform also offers support for application consistency and Site Recovery Manager. EqualLogic has developed an ease of use tool for VDI deployment, and has participated in all of VMware’s storage initiatives like VAAI and VASA.

Vellante noted that the VMware has evolved significantly over the last few years. Three or four years ago, it was difficult for customers to deal with storage. He then asked Vigil what everyone can expect from virtualization and storage in the future. Vigil answered, a big part of EqualLogic’s success has been their focus on virtualized environments, VMware in particular. Around 75 to 80 percent of customers are running EqualLogic in some kind of virtualized environment, and they want storage that’s easy to manage and works with their virtualized environment.

Vigil said he believe the industry is on the verge of widespread VDI adoption, but one of the problems the customers often face is storage. He explained that many of the customers he’s spoken to do a proof of concept and virtualize a small number of desktops and VDI works great. However, they experience manageability and performance issues when they attempt to scale the implementation. Vigil believes this problem that can be solved with scale out architectures. EqualLogic allows users to scale performance and capacity linearly, which can eliminate the VDI scaling problem. EqualLogic has made a big effort to resolve these issues, introducing items like the VDI deployment utility and a hybrid that has a solid state drive and spinning media in the same array. The hybrid array also has embedded intelligence to ensure hot, active data is stored on the solid-state drive, which can dramatically improve performance. It is like tiering within the array, and tiering is an area where EqualLogic excels.