by John Dias, Storage Architect, Dell Compellent — November 22, 2010

The future just got a little more "cloudy" for Compellent with the release of some major updates in Storage Center 5.4 including some significant hardware updates—there's a lot to take in so let's get started.

Most notable among the hardware updates with the 5.4 release is the next generation controller in Compellent's lineup, the Series 40. The updated platform brings greater IO card capacity (six PCI-E 2.0 x8 slots) and 25% better performance. This platform will allow customers to take advantage of some of the new IO options (which will also be supported on the Series 30) and scale single systems to even larger capacities. The front end IO options now include FCoE for converged networking support. On the back end 6Gb/s SAS IO cards and enclosures are now shipping, including a 2.5" 24-bay 2U enclosure with three new drive options (146GB 15K; 450GB and 600GB 10K).

On the software side there's a game-changing capability that will resonate with enterprise customers. For years, customers have enjoyed Compellent's Data Progression feature, which provides an automated tiering capability to balance capacity and performance in a given system. Within a system the data is managed in a couple of ways—data protection levels (RAID 10 for writes and distributed parity for read only data) and disk tiering (data management based on disk performance characteristics). This allows customers to grow storage as needed (either by adding performance or capacity tiers) delivering an efficient scale up storage growth model.

However, this "two dimensional" data management scheme had previously been isolated to single systems. Compellent gave customers the ability to manage multiple systems under one console but the Data Progression features described above were limited to a single system (for the most part, replicated volumes can have a different storage profile—but you get my meaning). 

Traditionally, as storage environments grow, so do the number of systems. These silos create a new level of inefficiency and management complexity that potentially cancels out any benefits gained from tiering. Moving data between siloed storage is time consuming and complex and as the infrastructure expands to meet demand, pockets of IO and throughput and capacity disparity begin to appear.

Compellent has introduced a "third dimension" data management capability through Live Volume which allows for rules based automated movement of data between storage systems non-disruptively. Live Volume plays a big foundational role in Compellent's delivery of scale out storage architecture to the enterprise and the cloud. 

Using Enterprise Manager 5.4 the storage administrator can designate replicated volumes as Live Volumes. This allows the target volume in the replication scheme to become a mountable real time read only volume. Writes continue to be ingested at the source system and replicated to the target.      

Should the workload shift (IO or throughput) to the target, the Compellent Storage Centers will swap roles—the target site will then become the source.  Workload triggers are customizable as is the setting for allowing write ownership to transition again. Live Volume also allows for manual swapping as well. Additionally, each copy of a Live Volume enabled volume may have its own replay (snapshot) schedule.

When combined with a virtual server infrastructure the possibilities are pretty exciting. For example, a fully virtualized (compute, network and storage) infrastructure can be distributed among different campus data centers or within different power/cooling zones in a large enterprise data center. As workloads on the virtualized compute environment shift the storage workload will follow. I know from experience that data center power maintenance and generator tests being a huge pain to schedule, coordinate and execute. With this kind of a compute/storage grid available maintenance windows become practically non-existent turning your internal cloud into a 24-by-forever IT engine. 

Live Volume also provides higher availability for servers using multipath SAN connections. Not only can a server have two or more connections to the SAN, with Live Volume, the targets can be distributed between two systems hosting Live Volume copies. Connections to the secondary Live Volume system could be set up as failover connections. Personally, I'm hopeful that MPIO drivers in the future will  become Live Volume aware and distribute read IO between Live Volume pairs—but that's me talking, not a Compellent offering.

This new three dimensional data management model extends Compellent's value into the enterprise and cloud IT offerings where flexibility, reliability and scalability are required, not just desired, features of a modern storage system. Compellent has been the leader in scale up storage and now with Live Volume they're delivering on scale out. You're going to see Compellent continue to build on Live Volume to enable customers to scale beyond.

P.S. If you're wondering about Compellent's potential delivery of data management for the "fourth dimension" then consider that Compellent is a charter member of the Active Archive Alliance .

Editor’s note: This blog post is also appearing on John’s personal blog, StorageGumbo.com.

by John Dias, Storage Architect, Dell Compellent — September 13, 2010

Editor's Note: This blog was originally posted by John Dias, storage architect at Compellent on his Storage Gumbo blog.

Thanks to Darin Schmitz, Virtualization Product Specialist at Compellent, I'm able to share with you some screen captures of the vSphere plug-in previewed by Compellent at VMworld. The finished product will be released Q4 but I've never been good at waiting to open my presents (yes, I was a little brat and would frequently search for my birthday and Christmas gifts—good thing I have a talent for acting surprised).

And what a treat this is! In my previous post I covered how storage administration is made much easier through Enterprise Manager using the Windows and VMware provisioning capabilities to not only carve out volumes but to fully present them for use on the host.

With this plug-in you'll be able to do that and much more for vSphere ESX servers including creating, expanding and deleting storage as well as managing replays and performing data recovery from the vSphere client. The list of features in the final version may differ slightly but in general administrators can save a great deal of time and simplify tasks by using the new plug-in.

A few screen caps are provided below to tease you—enjoy!  Click on the images below for a full view of the screen shots.

The context menu shows options available for managing your data stores and the underlying Compellent volumes. Note that Data Instant Replay (Compellent snapshots) features are available to the vSphere administrator including "Recover VM Data From Replay...."

The storage configuration wizard should be familiar to any Compellent SAN administrator. As you can see below in the summary prior to volume creation the properties for both the Compellent volume and the VMFS datastore have been configured for end-to-end provisioning.

Clicking the "Finish" button will begin the provisioning process and when completed you'll have a new datastore ready for use by guests. No extra steps required.  Expansion and removal of datastores is just as easy.

Selecting "Recover VM Data from Replay..." from the context menu launches a wizard which shows you all the replays available for a given datastore, including information like creation time, expiry, size and replay description.

The replay recovery summary screen lists the properties for the recovery including host(s) to which the replay view will be mapped, the desired datastore name and LUN ID which are all configurable during the wizard steps. This screen cap was taken after the "Finish" button was clicked and shows the status of the background tasks. Note that Compellent administrators have this ability today, but it involves going back and forth between the Compellent management and vSphere client interfaces—it can get confusing. This is one feature I really hope that makes the final cut.

Again, this is really a teaser and hopefully we'll be able to show more very soon.