In my world, storage virtualisation means putting a virtual layer between different vendors’ storage arrays, like IBM’s SVC, HDS’ Virtual Storage Platform or NetApp’s V-series. They’re all boxes that can sit in front of arrays from different vendors and present them as one pool of storage. DataCore’s and LeftHand Networks’ products do a similar job, but with scattered server hard drives as well as arrays.

So, I was looking forward to Dell making its case for some new product in this mould. It’s not the hottest technology area in storage, despite being extremely useful. I was soon disappointed. It soon became clear that Dell’s marketing man was not going to talk to me about storage virtualisation in the sense I’ve described above.

Instead, it emerged that what he called storage virtualisation was the volume management layer in EqualLogic and Compellent arrays, the automated tiered storage of the latter, plus the scalability of each of these array lines.

He added mention of Dell’s Fluid File System, and that one day it will work across the vendor’s Compellent, EqualLogic and PowerVault arrays, but as we’ve seen, this is a long way from bearing real fruit as a project.

So, the conversation wasn’t quite what I expected but did get me thinking about the issue of defining storage technologies. I think there’s genuine confusion about some terms, and there are definitely vendors who try to ride that confusion, especially in the context of the recent upsurge of server virtualisation.

For example, I recently recorded a podcast with a storage analyst from a leading research company. One topic of the discussion was meant to be storage virtualisation, but it soon became apparent that the way he understood the term was “storage for virtualisation” and off he went talking about server hard drives and the need for shared storage in virtual server environments. We had to scrap the podcast as we just weren’t on the same hymn sheet, but at least that seemed to be a genuine misalignment of understanding, though a little surprising from such an eminent industry watcher.

Then there are the likes of Virsto and DataCore, which both use the term “storage hypervisor” for quite different products, neither of which is a hypervisor in the sense that a VMware hypervisor is, and that’s clearly the usage they’re trying to piggyback upon here. (The DataCore product is actually a classic example of storage virtualisation.)

So, in conclusion, I think what Dell was trying to do in the conversation reported here was to piggyback on the current wave of virtualisation talk, which results from the sweeping popularity of server virtualisation.

It’s understandable of course, and it’s always possible to argue that something or other is an example of virtualisation, because when you think about it, almost every aspect of IT above the level of the physical is actually virtual, or aggregates lower levels of operation into abstractions that are more easily handled or understood, such as, in storage, blocks, files, the file system, RAID, LUNs/volumes, etc, etc, etc.

But it’s not really very helpful. You really need to define terms very clearly, and failing to do so as a marketing ploy may work in the short to medium term, but it won’t win friends in the long run.

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It’s useful to look at just to know who the Big Five are, for example. But we’ll also compare Gartner’s research with SearchStorage.co.UK’s 2011 storage Purchasing Intentions survey findings among UK IT departments, which provides a different top five.

Gartner’s estimates for 2011 revenues from “external disk systems” have EMC way out in front.

The Gartner top five are as follows:

· EMC: $6.279 billion and 32% market share

· IBM: $3 billion and 14.2%

· NetApp: $2.45 billion and 11.5%

· HP: $2.07 billion and 9.8%

· HDS: $1.99 billion and 9.4%

Sixth placed is Dell with $1.58 billion and 7.4%, followed by Fujitsu with $472 million and 2.2%, then Oracle with $359 million and 1.7%.

That, however, is not the ranking we usually refer to on SearchStorage.co.UK.

Instead we go on the basis of our Purchasing Intentions survey, which early last year asked 302 European storage professionals about their storage purchasing habits, including who they got their disk systems from.

The SearchStorage.co.UK top five from that survey were:

· HP: 33%

· IBM: 24%

· EMC: 24%

· Dell: 19%

· NetApp: 18%

After the top five in the SearchStorage.co.UK results are Adaptec, HDS and Oracle, all at about 11%.

What stands out in comparison of the two sets of results?

Well, the top five is almost the same. HDS drops out in the SearchStorage.co.UK results and is replaced by Dell. Does HDS have a lower market penetration in the UK compared with globally? Perhaps; it’s no scientific measure, but as a UK storage journalist it’s not a company with a high profile in the communications that come across my desk.

Also, Gartner’s research is based on revenue estimates, while ours is based on asking people whose arrays they use; and many of those in our survey — and perhaps representative of the UK IT departments as a whole — are from SMBs. About 55% of those who answered the SearchStorage.co.UK survey were from organisations with fewer than 500 employees. I would speculate here that among such smaller companies there is a higher likelihood of the chosen vendor of IT kit being the one that supplies storage in addition to servers, which would account for the good showing of HP and Dell.

The puzzling result is why in the SearchStorage.co.UK results so many vendors register a bigger share of the market. Some are the kind of soup-to-cheese board/sweet trolley vendors described above, and that would make sense among SMBs, but NetApp, HDS, etc, just don’t fit this model.

Your theories are very welcome.

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Dell also announced an upgrade to the Compellent OS, Storage Center, which will now move to Version 6.0. The upgraded controller OS will be 64-bit and will feature greater integration with VMware’s vStorage APIs for Array Integration, support for Site Recovery Manager 5 and vSphere storage management plug-ins. The 64-bit architecture will allow up to 16 exabytes of addressable storage.

At the morning keynote Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell’s storage division, sought to underline that confidence with a narrative of Dell’s transition from EMC reseller to storage vendor with its own technology.

Thomas expounded a vision of the future of “fluid data” and a seamlessly integrated product portfolio. At one point he told the audience of a Texan aphorism — “big hat, no cattle” – when making reference to competitors.

But what exactly does Dell have in the storage stockyard right now?

These are the key technological components of the Dell storage roadmap, based on the concept of “fluid data” as outlined by Thomas:

· “Dynamic tiering”

· “Better together”: a reference to the goal of developing an integrated product portfolio, with interoperability between and using Dell’s key acquisitions (EqualLogic, Compellent, Exanet and Ocarina)

· “Self-protection”: data protection “at the push of a button” to supercede traditional backup

· A “consistent ownership experience”: see “better together”

· “Native cloud”: a recognition of the cloud as a key storage tier

· “Scale-out designs”

Looking at these in detail, what emerges is a roadmap rather than a current reality.

Tiered storage, for example, exists in Dell’s Compellent products. In fact, Compellent was a pioneer of strorage tiering. But, that said, there’s no way of tiering across products, say between EqualLogic arrays and Compellent. There’s also the issue of the flash tier, which we’ll return to below.

Dell fares better on its “better together” goal, although “nearly together” would be more accurate. Its PowerVault and EqualLogic product lines both got the Fluid File System (which resulted from Dell’s acquisition of Exanet) last year, which allows file-based access to these subsystems. Compellent will get it in 2012 sometime.

Dedupe/compression (from the Ocarina acquisition) is already in the DX object storage platform and the new DR4000 disk-to-disk backup product and will be incorporated into the Fluid File System, so will get into Equallogic and Compellent arrays that way.

Meanwhile, Compellent products are set to get a 64-bit makeover on their controller OS. That’ll mean massively increased addressable block numbers for one thing, but EqualLogic won’t go 64-bit, and those two products will retain separate OSes. Thomas expressed a general aim to get Compellent and EqualLogic arrays to work together more, such as allowing replication between them, but that’s also a work in progress. So much for “better together” and “consistent ownership experience” there.

“Native cloud” is also at the aspiration stage right now. Dell’s storage vision is based on the idea of tiers, and the cloud is one of those recognized tiers. It’s just that right now no products allow tiering to the cloud, but they’re “working on it,” said Brett Roscoe, general manager and executive director for Dell’s PowerVault and data management solutions.

When it comes to the idea of tiers, right now we need to talk about server-side flash, the arena where the likes of Fusion-io have made waves, driven by the huge random I/O needs of server and desktop virtualisation.

Dell was coy about it today. Thomas talked about the potential pitfalls of large chunks of data being in server-side flash and a failure happening and the need to link many such lumps of memory together. “Flash without resilience is no good,” he said, adding that “there’ll be an announcement … sometime.” This is clearly a reference to the technology acquired from RNA in June last year, which includes server memory acceleration.

So, summing up, I wouldn’t say Dell is a “big hat, no cattle” vendor. It certainly has a big hat, and it has cattle. It’s just they’re a bit of a way from all being the same breed right now.