Inside Intel's Storage Plans

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When Intel unveiled plans in early April to OEM entry-level storage technology from EMC for its custom-system builder partners, it sent its strongest signal yet that it expects storage to be a growth opportunity for itself and its channel partners.

For Intel, it is an opportunity that is still evolving as the company continues to match its silicon-based controllers and processors, many of which came from its server business, to its growing line of storage-specific chassis to build storage blocks for its system builder channel.

In discussing Intel's strategy with CRN, Mike Wall, general manager of marketing for Intel's Storage Group, said the move parallels the company's use of standards and standard building blocks and processors over the past decade to push sales of white-box servers while making them more cost-effective. "We see this as very analogous to what's about to transpire in the storage marketplace—more systems based on standards, driving down the total cost of ownership," Wall said.

Intel formed its Storage Group in October to work closely with storage providers so that it could understand and anticipate their future requirements, Wall said. "We're looking to understand more about customers' storage requirements, integrate those into our system-level technology and our chipsets going forward, and put those into mass production," he said.

As with its custom server business, Intel's storage strategy is to provide hardware platforms on which system builders can add their own value in terms of capacity, operating system and application software.

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For instance, the company's new SSR212CC array can be configured for use as a NAS or an iSCSI SAN appliance with up to 12 250-Gbyte or 500-Gbyte SATA hard drives. The 2U appliance, code-named Compass Creek, was certified by several software vendors, including Microsoft, for its Windows Storage Server operating system; FalconStor, Melville, N.Y., for its IPStor storage software; and Open-E, a German developer of NAS software, for use as an iSCSI target.

Intel also recently started shipping its SSR212PP, based on the EMC technology, which can be ordered in either an iSCSI or a Fibre Channel version, with the solution provider adding the hard drives. Unlike Intel's other storage appliances, the SSR212PP, code-named Pyramid Peak, comes with a software stack that makes it an EMC Clariion AX150 in all respects except the name.

"Compass Creek is a hardware-only platform that we're putting out there for folks to load their own software or develop their own software," Wall said. "At the same time, we have our white-box solutions that come with a NAS stack or a SAN stack. We're doing both. But with the hardware-only solution, we're creating an environment where lots of smaller companies that have not had the opportunity to have a world-class hardware platform to develop and even productize their solutions and have access to it in a big way."

In the meantime, Wall said, new server components also continue to play an important role in Intel's storage market plans. For instance, he said Intel's new Woodcrest family of processors, which were released late last month, has increased I/O bandwidth that can be exploited for use in high-performance SAN and NAS solutions.

As a result of its move into the custom storage appliance business, Intel has enabled system builders to find new opportunities, Wall said. "There are a lot of homegrown solutions out in the market, especially the smaller startups that don't have the same support and infrastructure that Intel provides," he said. "We typically compete with them in the smaller VAR or reseller segments. Some of our regional OEMs compete with other more popular storage brands."

While Intel has done much to build the custom storage market and channel, it has also fostered more competition for custom builders that were already building storage, said Todd Swank, director of marketing at Northern Computer Technologies, a Burnsville, Minn.-based system builder.

"You always wonder if they are competing with us or working with us," Swank said. "We build a lot of storage devices ourselves. We build storage boxes for our customers. But selling someone else's boxes brings up questions of where our value-add play is."

Even so, Swank said his sales colleagues like the top-notch quality of Intel's products. "And it's nice to promote Intel's infrastructure," he said. "It's something the smaller vendors can't match."

Read the full interview with Intel's Mike Wall.

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