Dell's desktop market has been shrinking. Well, not to say that it's been shrinking, but the desktop market itself isn't going to last forever and HP has been much more aggressive the past few years. That has prompted Dell to target small business more and more, and lately they have come up with a new product that is critical to many small businesses, a storage device.
They are releasing the PowerVault MD3000i, a SAN array that uses iSCSI, aimed at giving a huge and reliable chunk of storage. Given that data retention has only grown year by year, obviously it's a win win situation for Dell. On top of that, they plan on expanding their storage products even further in the future:
Storage is an area in which Dell is looking to grow. It is its smallest business, responsible for only 4 percent of its revenue in the most recent quarter. Dell is also looks to be making a play in the small-business category.
The unit offers capacities up to 18TB, a behemoth amount indeed. At around $13,000 for a fully configured system, that's under $1 per gigabyte - not a bad price point, and something that might make mass amounts of data retention for companies that have been struggling with it, such as ISPs.