In what way will you expand your storage software development? Management software is one of the areas where we do development, but even there we develop it with partnerships. It's never our desire to develop technology so we can lock out competition and lock in the customer. That's the model of the proprietary vendor. We're very much the standards provider. We try to find ways to let customers leverage Microsoft ..., even EMC. We've opened up our PowerVault storage management software so EMC can manage PowerVault. As time goes on, we're going to make it so you can manage EMC through PowerVault technology. Our goal is to give the customers what they want, which is easier tools to use, not a proprietary use.
Are you talking about using the SMI-S standard or your own API to manage EMC's products through PowerVault systems? Over time we will continue to deploy more cross-management tools. I don't have the time frame right now. SMI-S is the endgame, but it's a couple years away because everyone is still designing to it. But in the short term, we can have their browser tools launched by our browser tools. We can also take all the error handling and pass it up to each other. Even though you wouldn't go to a PowerVault tool to launch a configuration device from EMC, you can go there to monitor the EMC device if that happens to be your corporate monitoring strategy. There are levels that cross management just doesn't make sense. For us to change the configuration utilities to map to your standards, you'd have to rewrite all the code. This is more about discovery, change management and error handling, but not the reconfiguration.
What's Dell's goal for storage? We're the fastest-growing storage company. We're the No. 1 Windows, Linux storage company in the U.S. We're now solidly in fourth place, and it's my goal to be in the top three of that market space and ultimately become No. 1. We're steadily moving like a juggernaut into that position. That's a Dell sweet spot. The SMB-like customers ... are today faced with as much storage management issues as a Fortune 1,000 company was 15 years ago. SATA [serial advanced technology attached disk drives] is just now beginning to get into big solution. ISCSI [Internet SCSI] is going to come out in a large way over the next 15 months. SAS [serial-attached SCSI drives] is right around the corner. That's an inexpensive, direct-attached solution that's more capable than any SCSI solution ever was. All of those companies now have the opportunity to buy all these new sub-$20K products. That's an explosive opportunity for Dell.
How is Microsoft's play into storage changing your road map? Microsoft is providing software tools that's allowing some of these new technologies to be accepted on a broader scale. What SATA drives have done is because the serial interface raised awareness for corporate users of these drives, it's really about software that makes those drives usable. Those drives theoretically have half the reliability that a Fibre Channel or SCSI drive does. So you have software tools that allow you to use these products not in primary disk applications, but in nearline applications, which is what the Data Protection Manager software is all about.
They've created a user-friendly data restore capability. That just opens the doors for hundreds of thousands of companies to do real-time backup with client-level restore. That's the impact Microsoft is having on us. Data Protection Manager is simple and more affordable. That's a huge movement in the Dell direction. And nobody sells Microsoft as good as Dell.