Comment The Dell EqualLogic engineering team is going to be lead by Brian Nadeau, one of EqualLogic's first ten employeers.

Like the founders Nadeau worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, now absorbed into HP courtesy of its Compaq acquisition. He was involved in SCSI things inside Ultrix, DEC's Unix-alike offering. After leaving DEC he worked in the storage area with a couple of start-ups before joining a third startup; EqualLogic. Paula Long, the inspirational and now departed engineering leader at Dell/EqualLogic nominated Nadeau as her preferred successor.

When Dell acquired EqualLogic around 95 percent of the then 130-strong engineering team stayed on. That team is now around 200 strong and is set to grow to 300 or so next year, and remain in New Hampshire. It's expected that there will be some involvement with the scale-out NAS engineering team at the Dell-acquired Exanet operation in Israel.

This suggests that unified file and block storage has a role to play in EqualLogic's future, and/or that scale-out clustering is going to feature too.

EqualLogic marketing lead Travis Vigil commented that solid state drives (SSD) were interesting and that customers would appreciate anything that could be done to make the movement of data from hard disk drives to SSDs and back again easier.

The net of this is that EqualLogic engineering is in a good state, is going to grow substantially, and has interesting things to accomplish. ®