A conversation with Dell EqualLogic

Travis Vigil, Executive Director of Dell's EqualLogic product line, and I had an interesting conversation about storage virtualization and its place in a virtualized environment. The conversation echoed one I had with John Joseph of Dell EqualLogic a while ago (see Should storage virtualization always be part of a virtual processing environment? for more information about that discussion.)

Organizations that are engaged with virtualizing the processing for their IT workloads, using one or more of the virtual processing technologies (for the uninitiated, this includes parallel processing/high performance computing software, workload management software, clustering software, virtual machine software and operating system virtualization/partitioning software) typically find that they need to adjust their access, networking, management, security and storage architectures as well.

If we focus on storage for the moment, these organizations discover that it’s desirable to disconnect the storage from the computers doing the processing and to use storage virtualization that can optimize storage performance, storage device utilization and management of storage resources overall. This offers the hope of making storage as agile and reliable as virtualized processing.

Dell EqualLogic offers a number of intelligent storage solutions that are designed to make utilization of storage virtualization easy and make virtualized environments live up to their potential. As I mentioned before, Dell EqualLogic isn’t the only game in town. That being said, what they’re doing is interesting and is worth knowing about.