"Dell has built a fairly substantial company based on driving outrageous efficiencies and almost daily riding down the economic commodity cost curves," Duplessie said. That's good for storage customers even if they don't buy Dell gear, he added. "Any volume producer ... forces the economics to work for everybody."

One area where the company will make an impact is in SSDs, which Dell is rolling out ahead of the pack, Duplessie said. As the price difference shrinks between SSDs and spinning drives, IT departments will start to put all the data they regularly use on the new media and remove the delays caused by hard drives starting up and spinning, he said.

"SSDs in storage, a year from now, are going to change the fundamental economic and performance paradigm of storage in general," Duplessie said.

Meanwhile, Dell is not as exposed as HP and IBM to competition from Cisco, because it doesn't yet play in the core of many big data centers, he said. "The Fortune 500 is going to look very closely at Cisco, but that's not really where Dell's bread and butter is," Duplessie said.