The Cube - Dell Storage Forum 2012 - Bob Fine, dell, with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman Bob Fine is the director of mobile marketing for Compellent, and he dropped by theCube with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman during the Dell Storage Forum this week. The first thing he decided to address was fluid data, one of the biggest topics at the gathering. He stressed that it’s more than just a marketing term – its real technology that Dell implemented across its portfolio and is currently used by customers. He followed with a brief explanation. The idea behind data progression is that customer data is automatically moved “to the right place in the right time,” with the goal of achieving a reduction in overheads. For example, information that may not be accessed by end users too frequently is moved from the tier 1 storage to the less expensive tier 3 hardware. This emphasis on infrastructure intelligence is something that was there from the get-go, Fine said. The underlying architecture was developed with a good bit of foresight, and the more advanced capabilities weren’t just added on the fly. The second big topic of discussion was, not surprisingly, flash. And Fine does think that there’s a lot of potential, although not necessarily in the short term from Dell’s point of view. He noted that the demand for all-flash arrays is far from peaking at the moment, but his company is starting to open up to this trend as it evolves. For one thing the ability to migrate data dynamically – or data progression, as Fine called it – can work in flash environments. Dell’s acquisitions come into play as well; the company has a few very solid assets that tie in with the SSD movement. Fine went on to discuss the Compellent point of view: the efforts to expand in the virtualization front, and the fact that the brand is benefiting from Dell’s large partner base (including VMware) and global reach.