Posted on behalf of Travis Vigil, Executive Director of Dell Storage
Time flies when you’re having fun. On Monday Nov. 5, 2012, it will be five years since Dell announced its intent to acquire EqualLogic. Since then, we have reached some important milestones, including growing EqualLogic’s customer base from 4,000 to over 45,000 customers worldwide and becoming the recognized leader in iSCSI-based storage for the past 18 quarters running (IDC)1. These milestones really illustrate the value storage customers place on ease of use, virtualization and scalability without forklift upgrades, all of which EqualLogic storage provides.
I’m excited to share with you that we recently hit another noteworthy milestone at Dell. Connexions4London (C4L) purchased the 100,000th Dell EqualLogic storage array as part of a growing infrastructure supporting its colocation and cloud services business. C4L added new Dell EqualLogic PS6100 storage arrays to its existing storage infrastructure without any forklift upgrades. The company gains performance and capacity across multiple generations of EqualLogic, seamlessly integrating and managing new arrays along with those first acquired in January 2010.
“Our industry is fast-moving and competitive, so we have to be responsive and adaptable to change,” said Andrew Sturmey, solutions architect at C4L. “EqualLogic met our expectations from day one. It’s easy to configure and install – initially taking around an hour– and it deploys with every feature we need to manage data services for our customers, and seamlessly scales performance and capacity with ease every time we need to expand as our business grows.”
While we certainly take pride in our milestones and celebrate our wins, what we really thrive on is continuing to enhance our portfolio in support of our customers’ growing needs. Recent integration of the Dell Fluid File System into the EqualLogic FS Series enables customers to unify block and file with a highly scalable, high-performance clustered file system on top of traditional EqualLogic block-based arrays.
Another big milestone we hit this year is the recent availability of Dell EqualLogic Blade arrays and Active System 800 which enable customers to simplify their data centers by combining storage, servers and networking into a single blade chassis. Bringing these technologies together enables Dell to deliver an end-to-end data center offering that addresses some of the core challenges of customers today including limited resources, time and physical space.
The original EqualLogic vision was that enterprise storage should not require a tradeoff between functionality and simplicity. It’s a vision we’ve stayed true to for the last 5 years and something that continues to resonate with customers. While we are equally thankful for all of our 45,000 customers, it goes without saying that C4L will always hold a special place in our hearts as we remember hitting our 100,000th array shipped milestone. Cheers to C4L, and all of our current and future customers!
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1 Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker, September 6, 2012