It comes down to fixed resources and reducing operational costs. Yes, you could write your own iSCSI driver, running against a large distributed drive system, or other interfaces, but people don't. There's also a significant cost difference in manufacturing a run of 10k system boards vs 1M of them. Tooling alone is very expensive, and retooling more so.
EMC in particular is fairly custom hardware and software and still tends to deliver better value and consistency than the competition. EMC offers NAS options that has always been ahead of its' competitors. I say this as a passive observer as I've been in software development more than anything operational for the better part of two decades, but I remember in the mid-late 90's that what EMC offered simply had no competition at that time.
Today, it's entirely possible to build a software system similar to what S3 does in-house, but that isn't always what a given system/application, especially legacy systems, require. Not to mention a black box that's mostly closed vs needing specialized software management in-house. There are operational costs to this.
Using a single EMC device vs. hiring 3-5 FTEs making > 80k (120-150K after employer-side taxes) for 5+ years? That's a few million right there. This is often the trade off that EMC offers.
Dell itself offers consistency in broader terms... the same/compatible hardware across all employees... all the same docking stations, all the same monitors, etc. There's value in that as well.
EMC in particular is fairly custom hardware and software and still tends to deliver better value and consistency than the competition. EMC offers NAS options that has always been ahead of its' competitors. I say this as a passive observer as I've been in software development more than anything operational for the better part of two decades, but I remember in the mid-late 90's that what EMC offered simply had no competition at that time.
Today, it's entirely possible to build a software system similar to what S3 does in-house, but that isn't always what a given system/application, especially legacy systems, require. Not to mention a black box that's mostly closed vs needing specialized software management in-house. There are operational costs to this.
Using a single EMC device vs. hiring 3-5 FTEs making > 80k (120-150K after employer-side taxes) for 5+ years? That's a few million right there. This is often the trade off that EMC offers.
Dell itself offers consistency in broader terms... the same/compatible hardware across all employees... all the same docking stations, all the same monitors, etc. There's value in that as well.