If you haven't gotten the message already, Michael Dell wants you to know that his PC company is "not really a PC company."
Nowadays, Dell is a server company and a storage company and a software company and a services company and even a networking company. "You're going to hear today about a very different kind of Dell than you would have heard about five years ago," Michael Dell said on Monday morning at a press event in San Francisco as the company unveiled a new collection of hardware gear for big businesses. "It's not really a PC company. It's an end-to-end IT solutions company."
To prove the point, Michael Dell and his executive cohorts announced that the company is now accommodating 10-gigabit ethernet throughout its portfolio of servers, storage hardware, and networking gear. That would be ethernet networking that can transfer a billion bits of data each second -- at least theoretically. Dell's move to across-the-board 10-gigabit ethernet is driven at least in part by Force10 Networks, the networking outfit it acquired last summer.
The Force10 acquisition was an apparent response to networking giant Cisco entering the server business. In 2009, Cisco introduced its Unified Computing Systems, an effort to unify networking, computing, storage, and virtualization tools in a single product. It was no longer just a networking partner to server sellers such as Dell and HP. It was a competitor. Both Dell and HP responded by acquiring networking companies -- before Dell acquired Force10, HP snapped up 3Com -- and both sought to bundle data center technologies together in much the same way Cisco had done. At least up to a point.
Part of Dell's message is that unlike Cisco, it doesn't attempt to "lock you in" to its own gear. Dell offers Force10 networking gear with its server and storage systems, but it also offers gear from the likes of Brocade, Juniper, and, yes, Cisco. "We're trying to adhere to the principle of being open and flexible," said Forrest Norrod, vice President and general manager of Dell's server platform group. "We're not going to lock our customers in with a choice we make for them."
That said, Dell will soon be a company that sells only its own storage gear. Over the past few years, Dell has gobbled up four separare storage outfits, and late last year, the company announced that it would no longer sell storage gear from longtime partner EMC. In its last fiscal quarter, as Michael Dell pointed out today, Dell storage gear accounted for 93 percent of its storage sales. "Obviously," he said, "we're rapidly going 100 [percent] on this."
On Monday, Dell introduced two new storage arrays equipped with 10-gigabit ethernet, and both are based on technology Dell acquired with the purchase of the New Hampshire-based EqualLogic. Michael Dell and company also unveiled their latest generation of PowerEdge servers, but these are not yet available for purchase. Dell says its new servers will be available "in the near future."
