But Russ Holt, general manager of Dell's Storage Systems Group, stands by the company's decision to move into limited areas of the storage market, gradually offering higher-end products to bigger customers.
"We want to begin forcing the commoditisation," he said in an interview.
Holt has credentials for the task: He laid the groundwork for Dell's current ascendant position in the low-end server market. And before joining Dell in 1998, he spent 14 years at the old-line computing company NCR, most recently in charge of servers.
But storage is a tough nut to crack, as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems have found as they try to win back former customers who now source hardware and services from storage specialists, such as EMC and Network Appliance. Dell won't be granted an exemption just because it's dominant in the PC market.
Dell's storage effort "hasn't been a total success when looking at the...mix of storage to total sales," said Technology Business Research analyst Brooks Gray. "It's been down there in the 1 to 1.5 percent range for the last four quarters."
While Dell's storage revenue is increasing quickly, "that's from a very small base," Gray said. Gray estimates that Dell garnered about US$102 million in the fourth quarter of 2000 for standalone storage products--products such as direct-attached hard disk arrays, storage area networks (SANs), network-attached storage (NAS) that are independent from a server.
Storage companies promised that high-speed SANs would ease storage headaches, but that promise proved overambitious as companies struggled to get their switches, network cards, and storage systems to work together. NAS, a much simpler form of storage product attached to a network, has been easier but still comes with its share of headaches involving managing the profusion of NAS systems.
But there's no question Dell is ambitious. Though its high-end storage systems currently can be used with Windows servers but not Unix servers, the company has expanded so the products work with Windows servers from IBM, Compaq Computer and Hewlett-Packard as well as those from Dell. Holt described his aspirations in an interview with CNET News.com.
