Striding toward the podium to The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ “Tuff Enuff,” Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell laid down a gauntlet of sorts this morning at a launch event in San Francisco calling out the storage industry for failing to address storage concerns particular to SMBs. “You can blame the storage vendors in the industry and say they really haven’t met the unique needs of small and medium-sized companies, even as their storage needs have become more complex,” Dell said to a crowd of around one hundred SMB organization representatives.Describing a bleak low-end storage ecosystem of consumer-focused devices and overpriced enterprise-based solutions stripped down to SMB price points, Dell and Darren Thomas, general manager and vice president of storage at Dell, outlined the company’s strategy for delivering simple, capable, and affordable storage solutions to smaller organizations in the face of the data deluge currently besieging IT. Dell’s proposed solution, the PowerVault MD3000i, is an iSCSI-based SAN, which Dell believes better suits smaller environments than competing offerings from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, built around the more expensive FC (Fibre Channel). [For InfoWorld‘s full review of Dell’s PowerVault MD3000i, see “Dell bulks up storage appliance.”]Putting what the company calls “server family values” to work, Dell hopes to leverage its installed base of PowerEdge server customers by offering a familiar interface and drives that are swappable across server and storage environments. “If you’ve seen a PowerEdge server, you know what an MD3000i looks like before taking it out of the box,” Thomas said. According to Dell, the combination of interface familiarity and iSCSI gives the company a unique advantage in both removing the need for dedicated IT people at small organizations and optimizing the performance of the virtualized environments increasingly favored by midsize companies.Coupled by Dell’s PowerConnect series of switches, the PowerEdge/PowerVault combination presumably gives Dell the ability to offer SMBs a one-stop datacenter solution. Dell’s recently launched Vostro brand of notebooks and desktops, complete with support services, are also part of what appears to be a larger makeover of Dell since Michael Dell resumed the role of CEO earlier this year. Dell has been aggressive in repositioning the company as a services and solutions provider, a strategy clearly targeted at the growing SMB market.Whether this transition proves compelling depends in large part on the company convincing SMBs that widespread complaints about its customer service have been addressed — and that it has put a year marred by safety recalls behind it. In other words, can Dell, as The Fabulous Thunderbirds crooned, “put out a burning building / With a shovel and dirt / And not even worry / About getting hurt”?