Dell: We are winning the flash race

Vendor reckons it beats EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp as top flash choice due to its cheaper offering

Dell has declared a victory in the flash storage market, claiming its lower-cost technology is making it the number-one customer choice and a hit among channel partners.

According to research from storage analyst Storage Strategies Now carried out in the summer, Dell was the top choice among IT leaders for deploying flash technology - beating rivals EMC, HP, IBM and NetApp by at least six percentage points, it claimed.

Dell's product manager for storage Bob Fine told CRN that his firm's lower price point is a winner with the channel.

"The channel wants to offer something unique and different to their customers, that is why the channel gets so enthusiastic about our technology. Dell is a strong advocate of the channel, and resellers have this technology where they can go to a customer base and offer them - at a much lower cost - a way to bring flash into enterprises for the first time."

He said in the past, end users have been put off flash technology due to its typically high price point, but said its latest flash offering alleviates that problem. According to Fine, Dell's rivals' flash products cost, on average, between $25 (£15.46) and $30 per GB of storage, but its product comes in at around $5 per GB.

Fine put the firm's ability to sell cheaper flash tech to the channel down to it using a combination of high-end enterprise-grade and lower-end flash together in one offering, and he said this provides the channel with a compelling business case for smaller customers.

"By bringing down the cost of flash, it makes it accessible for much more customers," Fine said.

"There is a new market of customers with access to flash that never could have been before, and this helps the channel and gives partners a wider market opportunity instead of being restricted to very large customers."