 Okay, we're back again, this is Dave Vellante and I'm with Stu Miniman, we're with Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.TV's live production of Dell Storage Forum 2012, we're here live in Boston and we are simulcasting in San Jose at the Hadoop Summit. Our colleague John Furrier and Jeff Kelly are there, we've got a team in the ground covering the big data trends at Hadoop Summit with Hortonworks and a number of the other companies that are gathering there in San Jose, but we're here in Boston talking about Dell, talking about small business stores, talking about integration, converged infrastructure, flash, the whole gamut of Dell, the transformation of Dell, big news this morning, Dell's announced that it's going to pay a dividend, Michael Dell was on a conference call with analysts trying to help them understand the transformation of Dell, Dell's going to cut a couple of billion dollars in cost over the next three years, the stock price is up today, that's good news, Tarkin Mainer was on, talking about the WISE integration and the WISE acquisition, a big move by Dell to get into the end user computing space beyond the typical desktop and laptop, so a lot going on here and we're here with Denny Conner, good friend and analyst, writer at Storage Strategies Now, a person that I have known for a number of years, one of the best, I don't even know how to categorize you anymore, it's like analysts, writers, journalists, bloggers, Twitter, social media maven, so welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, well we do it all, we're an analyst firm that specializes in storage and virtualization, but also in small business and the technologies and the products that they adopt and the trends that they go after, I also write for Information Week and I think we first met when I was writing for Network World, which we were at IG together, so it's been a long thing but I've covered storage for about 15 years now and it was particularly interesting to come to Dell's storage summit because I've been to several of the C drives before, probably for the last five years and they're always a really interesting mix of customers and analysts and press all together and talking and chatting about storage technologies. Makes it fun and diverse, right? Yeah, it really does, it really does. And so I think one of the most interesting things is if a San Antonio company hadn't coined the term fanatic support, when we talk to Dell customers, they talk about their co-pilot support and they're absolutely rabid about it and I mean how excited they get about it, they say we had a drive failure, we didn't even know about a drive failure until the driver arrived on the front door the next day and that's the first time we heard about it and to see Dell possibly extend that to it's equal logic and its power of all and to its server lines would be a really exciting thing for customers. Well, you know, when large companies buy small companies, a lot of times they pollute them and we haven't seen that with Dell. I mean obviously the jury stood up but we're seeing very positive momentum and the customers seem very happy about the integration, the scale, the breadth that we're getting so they seem to be preserving the DNA of the startup while at the same time bringing scale. Very much so and we talked to customers who were concerned when their compelling installations got subsumed by Dell or the equal logic customers the same thing and they said you know they were wondering how they were going to be handled by Dell and they said there really wasn't any difference and that was really good for them they were really happy about that because they wouldn't have been if if somebody had messed up the acquisition. Right, so one of the things that we've heard was two things really two vectors right the the integration of startups that Dell has acquired and other IP that it's acquired and the transformation of Dell into a company that owns its own sort of IP destiny and the other is the convergence between compute and storage and and networking something that has been a trend that's been going on you know in this business since the 2009 timeframe so what's going on with Dell are they you know right in the mix so they late to the party what's their differentiation what's your take on all well I think with the equilogic storage blade that was introduced at the show here that was really exciting for for end users they were a little late to the party on that there was a another company with a two-letter acronym that came up with a storage blade last summer but the thing about Dell in their there be start configurations their configurations for you know companies that need to get deployed fast and don't have the IT infrastructure to do it or the IT you know management to do it and need to have a fast implementation they can put in a v-start that is consists of the PowerEdge servers the power connect switches and the equilogic storage and then now this week the v starts with the force 10 switches which you know that integration just took place recently and also the compelling and you know build systems that are real easily management managed that they have application recipes for integration of exchange or deployment of SQL server or primarily Microsoft applications right now and also for for integrating in virtualization which is so important for most businesses so Denny I'm wondering if you look at those kind of the v-start pieces so you know force 10 there was no form factor change it's a standard force 10 switch that that goes in there right absolutely putting all the pieces together helps the speed to deployment I love Ben Tao actually has talked about you know convergence innovates consumption yeah on there so as so it goes through faster my question to you is operationally does this change the customer environment other than the deployment side you know is it simpler for me to manage the day-to-day can I do it with less people is it more of an IT generalist that manages this rather than what I had before well I think it is more of an IT generalist that manages it and I think that there you know for a lot of the customers they've been doing it with you know Dell powered servers before or with a power vault storage so having a you know all-in-one you know package that that comes in the front door and and except in businesses that don't have elevators having to cart it up to the upstairs floor that you know that it's pretty easy that they they can put it in they can put it in really fast I mean Dell is really commoditized the the the converged infrastructure and I think that's that's good but they've done it for with specifically the SMB in mind that not the the enterprise though that's possible with their other converged platform the M 1000 E the blade chassis that they could do that and build in higher and more scalable so one of the things about doing a converged environment is trying to get a more homogeneous environment kind of have standard building blocks the challenges on the lower end of the market at least from what I've seen is there's so many more of them that everybody has their own tweaks that they need to do so we saw some of the the first entrances in the convergence tend to be the higher end of the market that market you know Oracle you know has that you know they're they're they're red stack and everything's in there and everything's Oracle and you're going to pay for it and you know there's other people that are in there so what what do you think about kind of the SMB mid-market and convergence well I think you know you look at them and they are primarily deploying on my on Microsoft platforms with SQL server and exchange and SharePoint and Dell has an application recipe right now for for SharePoint that tells how to deploy it and how to configure and makes use rate use recommendations and that and while they're not going after that high end of the market that would have an Oracle database deployed that's not something that a lot of small businesses are doing and the small businesses we talked to are using Microsoft and they're pretty happy with it they're using ice guzzly they're happy with the performance of ice guzzly and don't don't see any reason to go elsewhere yeah absolutely we've got one of our guys down at Microsoft Tech Ed you know so two things on the SMB first of all for virtualization standpoint where do you see the hyper V versus VMware battle going maybe to address that first you know it's interesting as we we see when I attended VMworld several years ago and I was asking VMware to give me reference customers to talk to it was primarily SMB's that had two to five virtual servers and now it's hardly a customer that we don't talk to that doesn't have a virtualization environment and even in the SMB space which has you know under a thousand employees we see organizations with 20 employees that have these dictates that no server goes in unless it's virtualized now as for VMware or hyper V we're seeing a lot more hyper V than we are VMware it may be because of the pricing structure they because they're in Microsoft shop and they like what you know Dell wouldn't originally got into virtualization came out with a Dell hyper V package and was installing that in in SMB's so yeah and just one of these pundit questions that I have for you it seems every time SMB gets mentioned on Twitter you know everybody's like you know it's kind of like open I'm more open than you and it's you're not SMB SMB smaller that there was a three letter name company that made a SMB solution that started well over six figures you know is that an SMB type converged solution or does it what where's the IT budget fit for that I think you said thousand cut employees or a thousand employees are less and we're doing a study on SMB storage because it's been as it's been an area that's been really neglected companies like EMC have come out with the you know SMB storage and then dropped it net apps come out with SMB storage and then dropped it so they're paying more attention to it now EMC actually did the SMB storage partnered specifically with Dell right so and that didn't didn't didn't take that's right and yet you look at them you look at American business and 95% of the American business is qualifying as SMB's so that's a huge chunk of the market that's not not paid attention to I mean you look at you look at data protection come products from some of the big companies that has been dumbed down to the SMB and it really can't be you need to you need to look at the SMB as you know having they have a problem that they need to get solved they often do it through and manage service provider through a var and allow that that company to manage their infrastructure they don't have a lot of experience with IT or or the time of the budget to spend on on IT we talked to one guy who was managing something like 90 petabytes of storage he was a radiology office where they took lots of radiological images he was the IT administrator he was office manager and he said he vacuumed the carpets if he needed to right so I selected the into this a little bit so yes we're talking about some other companies you mentioned emcee netapp specifically had an initiative and sort of dropped it and then after the Dell emcee relationship cooled off emcee announces VNXE right so that's obviously targeted toward small and mid-sized businesses how do you compare that sort of mindset with what what Dell does in SMB because I think that Dell is singly single-mindedly focused on on the SMB business and that's you know maybe more of the M in the SMB but still the the small businesses who go in and buy a power it power edge server and then it expands to two servers and three servers and that these other companies have you know these huge audiences and for them the SMB is a small though you know unrealized audience that they're now paying paying attention yeah we got to go after that because it's future growth the IDC price band show that's a lot of growth so let's go do something there versus what Darren Thomas said last year we we want to be the leader in SMB period that's our strategy yeah are they the leader in SMB storage I would think so I think that I would look to them as a leader in SMB storage so Denny what about cloud for SMB can't we just you know go take it all to the cloud no I don't think and I think it be foolhardy to tell everyone to take everything to the cloud I mean when you look at the SMB when we did a cloud storage survey last year in partnership with storage networking industry association and we found that the people that were adopting cloud first were SMB's that it wasn't necessarily though in those SMB's the IT manager but the CIO that said we're going to have a cloud initiative and that for them the applications that they were going to put in the cloud were backup and recovery disaster recovery our guys for archive but archive to a lesser point than this and that it was because it was an easy way for them to replace their you know tape based shuttle it off in a truck maybe get it back you know in time to recover your business but that you could have a cloud alternative we talked to businesses and there are some companies who say you know let's just go with pure cloud I mean some vendors who have software that said let's just go to pure cloud I think that's foolhardy because you really need to protect your data on on site you know on disk as well as maybe shuttle it in into the cloud and so we've seen SMB's be really excited about that that opportunity so then you said you've been following storage for the past 15 years what are some of the big changes that you've seen and what do you you know put on your bring out your telescope what do you see for the future and what you know when I started covering storage we were talking about fiber channel back then I mean we had companies like Gadzooks who and you know I mean you work with Gadzooks years ago I still have lots of them notepads from get Vixell we've got the all the mugs and t-shirts from companies that have gone by the way side of an acquired yeah and we were talking about fiber channel and then you know we got into the transition to ice guzzly and people said ice guzzly it's just not a good form and yet talking to customers it hasn't been a performance problem for them at all I mean except for the largest companies with it you know true huge transaction processing needs yeah then then you know ice guzzly is not going to go well so when the equilogic came out and that was probably what 10 years ago at the server summit the Michael Peterson server summit you know people wondered about that I said yeah well gee we you know we're using direct attached storage and now we're expected to do this and and my ecologic was able to make that transition for those customers to to a shared storage right and so okay so so so we've seen a dramatic shift to IP based storage that's right which has sucked a lot of the cost out and made it appealing for small businesses so what do you see going forward is that is that class of storage going to become the predominant type of storage in your view or we're going to see a bifurcated market for a while or what's here what's your crystal ball tell you I think you're going to see an awful lot of them SAS based storage on less data an awful lot less fiber channel I mean there are big companies that are shipping no fiber channel anymore and it's all SAS based but also that we're going to be paying a lot of attention to SSD implementations where where you need them where you have applications that require you know really high performance you guys do a lot of research on SSD we do do a lot of research on SSDs and actually we have a newsletter that comes out twice a week that I think you receive I think everybody receives I think we have about 7,000 people that get our newsletter and that's about a third end users a third vendors a third venture capitalists and we get a lot of feedback but we cover most of our SSD research in that newsletter so you can see it there one of my partners Jim Bagley he's our expert on on SSDs I can't go a thimbleful of what he can go on SSDs so how do people get that newsletter it's free so just go to storage strategies now dot com sorry strategy SSG now dot com and you can sign up from the newsletter and it comes out twice a week and that rolls up all of our all of our writing our reports our SSD research our cloud research SMB and we just did a data deduplication some day to do research as well as information week coverage fantastic all free all open no firewall we love the model we love it democratizing the research slash publishing slash analyst business right there excellent any Connor well thanks very much for taking time out of your schedule to join us on the cube and having me luck with everything I see you all right all right keep it right there everybody we'll be right back to wrap up the Dell storage forum 2012 in Boston this is the cube