In this blog I look beyond the obvious and try to find out why people and companies do what they do - and what it means for the rest of us. 
Exanet is one of those crazy Israeli tech companies that never figured out sales and marketing. They are a classic example of all that I’ve ranted about lately in this area. They have some good distributed file system technology – or had anyhow (I’m not sure how it stacks up in the current environment, I stopped paying attention to them a while ago to be fair). Â Michael paid for them with the change in his ash tray ($12M – a truckload less then they had invested in them). Â I’m not sure exactly what they want with it, but I can speculate.
I see a few angles to pay attention to. Â First, I don’t think Dell’s plan is to build a mega internally developed set of IP based on Exanet, but you never know. Â I think Ibrix was a better play, and told Dell so, but who listens? Â HP is, in fact, rebuilding their entire array of NAS offerings around Ibrix, so perhaps Dell is thinking the same way. Â Or it could just be that they have some interesting patents or IP.
The Exanet stuff was always geared toward mega throughput apps such as rich media. Â Ibrix is much more mainstream in that it supported random access, smaller I/O such that it can be used in the “real” world. Â I’m not sure if Exanet can be tweaked to be a mainstream NAS file system, but history tells me probably not. Â That’s why I’d be surprised if Exanet became the basis of a high-volume NAS play.
Dell does need a real scale-out  NAS play, in my opinion.  They are doing well in the market with their efficiency story and have made great strides to “sell the portfolio” to customers.  They have a great story with EqualLogic, EMC, and their own lower-end block gear, but a Windows NAS offering is sooooo 1980′s.  They need to have a scale-out file play the way they have a scale-out block play.  Perhaps Exanet gets them in the conversation.  If HP has LeftHand and Ibrix, IBM has SONAS and XIV, then Dell needs to add something to EqualLogic for balance.
I’m not sure what the grand plan is, or even if there was one. Â It didn’t cost them anything really, so I’m fine with the buy if for no other reason than it’s yet another small step toward internalizing some IP. Â Everyone knows what they did with EqualLogic, but the smaller steps have been just as important. Â The stuff they did on server management (embedding a ton of functionality) is awesome, for example. Â In a world where Intel is the maker of the commodity, little things like that can have a huge impact on a company’s success. Â Maybe they can rip something smart out of Exanet that gives them that type of nondescript advantage in other areas.
Or, maybe Michael wanted a good salted fish recipe.
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Actually Exanet was also built to have versatile performance- being able to support random and smaller I/O for the real world. They just never successfully sold it that way. Well – they never sold it successfully in any way. Not only can it scale out but can also scale vertically.
Well, there you go! Love the line “well, they never sold it successfully in any way.” Brilliant. Do you think that’s the play then? This becomes the basis of their scale-out NAS offerings?
Where HP goes, Dell follows…
. However another validation of the major players needing a scale out file serving solution.
I believe that Dell understands that NetApp is pretty much the only game in town for NAS and therefore the only game in town for unified storage – which means the battle is not only for NAS but for SAN business as well. Although Exanet was managed poorly they do have really good technology that does have both a mainstream appeal and can also support rich media and HPC. When also considering their bigger overall competitor – HP – they can now go toe-to-toe with IBRIX on all levels. The big thing in Dell’s advantage is EqualLogic – that business is booming and the Dell “machine” is cranking at full speed. If they can elegantly integrate Exanet then they will get complimentary business left and right. The hard part is integrating Exanet elegantly. I am not sure how many of the engineers come with the code – or how well they will work with the EqualLogic group. Yes, there is a pure-play NAS market out there too but it is not nearly as interesting ($$$) as the unified storage play with EqualLogic.
[...] this point, this looks like a vote for Exanet’s technology and a reaction to HP’s PolyServe and Ibrix moves, not a statement against EMC or Celerra. [...]
I know we’re puny and therefore currently sort of irrelavent (but,for some reason the industry and non-industry press seems to love us) but, Scale Computing can pretty much cover all of these bases. True Unified SAN/NAS, Scale Out, Parallel file sytem, Snap and Rep and all that jazz and all that stuff on (take your pick) Scale branded or IBM branded System X. All at the very important cost effective price point thingy…
Scale Computing = Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than brilliant. The brilliant product is/was pretty obvious, the lucky part happened when HP nabbed LHN and Dell nabbed EQL.
That blew the market open for us with the partners that don’t do Dell and the partners that hold their nose on doing HP.
IBM partners have been and continue to love our stuff, because the rest of their product offering “Can’t touch this…”
DeWall
Dude, I love the little guy. The only thing that makes you irrelevant, is being irrelevant. Just because you are small doesn’t mean you can’t act like a real company! At the end of the day, you make your own way. I don’t ever apologize for being “small” – but command attention for being good – and thus, so should you. The press might love you, but I can tell you they don’t love you enough, because I don’t know jack about you! You are right on one thing, it’s way better to be lucky than good. Cheers.
In addition to above comments, how about something as simple as Dell had been in the past OEMing/reselling IBRIX running on Dell servers/storage for rich media, high performance and other similar apps where traditional NAS did not have the juice. With HP buying IBRIX, recent rash of IP fire sales and valuations, $12M looks like a bargin to have a solution in the space where Dell had been selling IBRIX.
Meanwhile I suspect Dell will contiunue selling MSFT based NAS for entry level along with EMC for mid range and mainstream scenarios.
GS
I’ve worked with most of the parallel file systems and scale-out NAS systems, and Exanet really differentiated itself in terms of reliability, performance (esp with small I/O), snapshots, and replication. The architecture is well suited to the brick-by-brick model and thus would be a great fit for Equallogic. That said, Exanet had a long way to go when it comes to the sublteties. There are a lot of nuances to playing nice in a multi-protocol enterprise data center. There are even more nuances in terms of being easy to use in an SME data center. If Dell can manage the R&D teams to dot the I’s and cross the T’s, they will take a big bite out of the NAS marketplace.
My question is whether Dell will continue to sell Exanet as a high performance NAS gateway for 3rd party storage. Any ideas?
I would be shocked if they start selling in front of other storage. I am fascinated with the idea of integrating it onto EQ, however. That would be one serious unified scale-out storage story wouldn’t it? Nice pick up.
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