Dell was touting itself as ‘the largest storage startup’ last week at the Dell Storage Forum 2011 in Orlando. While that claim is somewhat believable to the fanatical Compellent and EqualLogic users, technically Dell is no longer a startup because it is profitable. But it was once a startup. And, a storage startup at that.
Dell was touting itself as “the largest storage startup” last week at the Dell Storage Forum 2011 in Orlando. While that claim is somewhat believable to the fanatical Compellent and EqualLogic users, technically Dell is no longer a startup because it is profitable. But it was once a startup. And, a storage startup at that.
Dell unveils new storage portfolio
Michael Dell told a story during his fireside chat at the Dell Storage Forum. While still a freshman at the University of Texas, he started building hard disk drive kits for IBM PCs, which at the time were diskless. (When James and I worked at a mobile computer company in the early 1980s, we were using PCs to connect mobile equipment to mainframes at the time, but the lack of what main-framers called ‘DASD’ – direct access storage devices – floppies didn’t count – was a huge problem.)
Dell and his friends were building a kit that took a SCSI drive and interfaced it to a PC. In fact, they were selling about a half million dollars worth of them per year. In 1980s bucks, that was a lot of money. As early PC adopters go, the Martin-Marietta guys were used to living on the other side of the chasm long before Geoffrey Moore wrote the book. They asked for a visit to Dell’s production facility, which caused a mild panic because, as Dell described the rented space, it was a cross between “Animal House” and a typical dorm room.
Demonstrating the Dell “get it done” philosophy, the crew cleaned up the space and the inspection by the Martin-Marietta team was going very well. When a principal of the buying team pointed to a clean-looking computer and said “What’s that?,” Dell had to explain that they were building computers to format the drives and perform test functions because the IBM PCs were too expensive. When the buyer asked if Dell would sell them several hundred units of the computer they designed – Michael was in the computer business.
