This is the first of what I hope to be many thought-leader interviews featured across Dell’s blogs.
Today, I had a conversation with an enterprise IT industry thought-leader, EMC’s Chuck Hollis, on the news Dell and EMC issued earlier this morning. The news release talked about the expansion of the two companies’ global alliance through 2013 and that Dell will add the EMC Celerra NX4 storage system to the Dell | EMC portfolio of networked storage systems early next year.
Dell’s storage leader, Darren Thomas, blogged about Dell’s storage strategy on Direct2Dell. In his post, Darren gives a historical perspective on Dell’s storage business in 2008, our focus on our PowerVault products, our acquisition of EqualLogic, our ongoing focus to drive simplification in storage and then looked at how the expansion of Dell’s relationship with EMC will fuel our storage business in 2009.
Chuck Hollis has been with EMC for 13 years and is a storage guy that gets blogging – he does it with ease over at http://chucksblog.typepad.com/. You’ll hear in the podcast that Chuck (and EMC) holds a strong view of the viability of fiber channel and FCOE. Both Chuck and I were with our respective companies back in 2001 when the first agreement was signed. I had just returned from a short-term assignment in Singapore and it was one of the first projects I worked on upon my return.
That was an interesting time. Our economy was reeling from the implosion of the dot com bubble, the U.S. had just been attacked and overall there was great uncertainty.
Fast-forward seven years and we find ourselves back in a situation that isn’t too different from when our companies first joined forces. I asked Chuck about the economic similarities, what his crystal ball shows for the future of storage and many other things – have a listen.