CRN Interview: Intel's Mike Wall Voices Custom Storage Strategy

CRN: How important is storage to Intel?

Wall: First of all, storage is a great growth opportunity for the company, both from a microprocessor perspective as well as for our storage platform business, the whitebox business. It's a revenue growth opportunity for the company.

In addition, storage happens to be one of the unique market segments where we provide key ingredients to all platforms. Storage is a key ingredient for servers, desktops and mobile PCs. Regardless of the platform, we consider the storage ingredients a valuable feature of any platform. It has both a horizontal strategic value to the company and a new revenue growth opportunity as a vertical in its own right.

CRN: When did Intel first get into the system-level storage products?

Peiffer: The first shipment for an integrated storage solution was Q4 2004. That was the SSR316MJ2, a 3U, 16-drive scalable SAN solution.

CRN: What made Intel get into the system-level storage side?

Peiffer: Growth opportunities and alignment with server sales, offering a complete solution of servers and storage together in the direction of the storage market. Requests from customers was another big factor in our entering that market. Our channel resellers really like the fact they can buy multiple different levels of product integration from Intel.

Wall: From a strategic perspective, we've been very successful over the last decade utilizing standards and standard building blocks and processors to do one-way through n-way servers, driving down the total cost of ownership, and driving a lot of volume. 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. And we feel there's a fair amount of price elasticity to it as well, and that there will be a large volume opportunity.

CRN: Has that volume opportunity showed itself yet?

Wall: Like any new business, it does take time to establish. And we are in the growth phase.

CRN: Who does Intel see as its key storage system competition?

Wall: We compete and cooperate with many of our customers. There are a lot of home-grown solutions out in the market, especially the smaller startups that don't have the same support and infrastructure that Intel provides. We typically compete with them in the smaller VAR or reseller segments. Some of our regional OEMs compete with other more popular storage brands. They take the Intel building blocks like RAID cards and servers and boxes and create their own solutions.

CRN: All of them work with Intel and compete against Intel?

Wall: One difference between the storage market segment and servers is that we have a unique opportunity here to actually create new categories of solutions. Even though the server market based on IA microprocessors is still a growing business — we're cranking the treadmill on new processors, new chipsets, getting them into the marketplace as quickly as possible, which is what we do — in our case, here in storage ... we're also looking at new storage solutions in new categories.

For example, [take] some of the low-end solutions that we've been promoting in the market for the last couple of years, like the four-drive low-end NAS solution that we just announced back in February. We've been promoting that concept for our silicon solutions for the past two years or more. And we see opportunities to create even more categories that are adjacent to that small business solution, even moving down into the digital home.

CRN: Is Intel driving the market through the silicon or through the systems solutions?

Wall: We want to enable it through our silicon building blocks, but especially in a new category, there will be times when we need to build a new solution with our silicon technology and put that in the marketplace to get a category really ramping. And then, as it becomes more of commonplace, then we'll determine whether or not to stay in it with our whitebox solution.