Almost five years after finalizing its purchase of EqualLogic, Dell has sold the 100,000^th EqualLogic storage array – far cry from the install base of 8,000 it said the company had before the deal.

UK colocation provider C4L (or Conexxions4London) installed the latest array for its colo and cloud computing business.

Dell bought EqualLogic in 2008, and Dell EMEA Storage Business Manager John Everett said this is really where the story with Dell’s storage transformation began.

“In 2008, Dell decided to rebalance its organization,” Everett said. “It wanted to be an enterprise service provider, and this transformation was triggered by the EqualLogic purchase.”

“What is key is that for three consecutive quarters we have been number one in market share in the iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) space and that that is today a US$3bn market.

Dell then acquired Exanet for its clustered file systems which could be embedded across its unified products and Ocarina for its deduplication depression technology and Compellent for aperture recovery backup software and quest for tis IT management software.

He said Dell first takes these companies through an integration phase. With EqualLogic it is one step further, looking at how it can now innovate with the technology to further develop the Dell storage strategy.

“We want to be able to put data in the right place, at the right cost, at the right time,” Everett said.

“Now we see 75% of the virtual server environment running on EqualLogic and we have completely refreshed the whole of the EqualLogic technology and placed significant R&D into the storage portfolio.

Dell released EqualLogic Storage blades PSM4110 earlier this year which takes aim at the converged market. It combines the functionality of EqualLogic’s enterprise-grade storage and Dell’s PowerEdge M1000e blad chassis which can be part of an end-to-end data center infrastructure solution when combined with Force1- or PowerConnect networking switches.

“We are starting to talk about a fluid data architecture from server to cloud –the movement of data,” Everett said.

With the EqualLogic range, you are now going to see us keep building out the unified offering, convergence and blade offering. As we start to build to converged data centers we will pull in the business line of our servers, networking and storage into one solution.

“The next generation with the EqualLogic roadmap will be our hybrid array,” Everett said.