Around The Block Blog
Larry Aszmann
Chief Technology Officer (retired), Dell Compellent
Larry Aszmann retired from his position as chief technology officer of Dell Compellent in April 2011. Larry co-founded Compellent Technologies with John Guider and Phil Soran in 2002. As the chief technology officer, he defined the company’s technology strategy and evolution of its Fluid Data storage management capabilities.
Compellent’s first storage product introduced in 2004 also included feedback from prospective end-users and resellers two years before it was brought to market. Larry challenged the engineers at Compellent to make storage as easy to manage as filing income taxes online. Customer input led to other key features such flexibility to accommodate different storage and server technologies in the same system and a persistent architecture to enable upgrades without a rip-and-replace process.
In 1995, Larry co-founded XIOtech Corp. with Phil Soran and John Guider. As chief technology officer, Larry designed the storage virtualization architecture and underlying software that formed one of the industry’s first virtualized SAN systems.
Before XIOtech, Larry was director of intelligent I/O subsystems at Tricord Systems, where he and Mr. Guider developed the Tricord Superserver, which provided extremely high levels of availability and scalable performance using separate, dedicated system and I/O processors.
Prior to joining Tricord in 1988, Larry served as chief software architect at Star Technologies, a scientific computer company which designed and developed the image reconstruction processor for GE’s high-end cat scanners.
Posts
by Larry Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer (retired), Dell Compellent — April 22, 2009
A recent Gartner, Inc. survey indicates that while recession-related cutbacks will have effects across all projects, most organizations will maintain the priority of green IT initiatives. Overall, more than one-third of the 620 respondents anticipated spending more than 15 percent of their IT capital budgets on green IT projects.
With Compellent, ‘going green’ doesn’t require big-budgets. In the spirit of Earth Day, I’d like to point out that Compellent offers a proven, affordable, one-of-a-kind proposition in energy savings. Thin provisioning provides as-you-grow scalability and eliminates the need to over-purchase and over-power unused disk space. Advanced storage virtualization can cut power and cooling costs for our customers up to 93 percent. Boot from SAN capabilities reduce power draw by eliminating the need for internal server disks, and we offer carbon and energy savings reports through Enterprise Manager to guide green IT strategies.
Environmental responsibility is more than just meeting superficial standards for corporate stamps of approval—it is the quest for quantifiable, significant results. We recently shared the stories of two of our customers who have used Compellent to realize sizeable green benefits. Using storage virtualization, ROEL Construction was able to reduce its cooling load from 4.5 to 1.5 tons and reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent. GreenWaste Recovery cut physical hardware in half and reduced paper consumption by 60 percent by virtualizing CRM, e-mail and productivity tools on Compellent storage.
And it’s not just our customers that are noticing Compellent’s green edge; Computerworld named Compellent one of the Top 12 Green-IT vendors in 2009.
At Compellent, we are committed to giving our customers the tools to efficiently green their businesses in the IT department and beyond; from eliminating excessive hardware footprints to slashing data center energy use. Let us help green your data center, starting with the storage.
by Larry Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer (retired), Dell Compellent — March 09, 2009
Comic Relief, the UK charity that has inspired similar relief organizations around the world, is putting on its bi-annual “Red Nose Day” fundraising event this Friday, March 13th. We’re happy to announce that the Compellent SAN is a core part of their IT infrastructure, which is helping to support events like Red Nose Day and Sport Relief as well as everyday operations. Comic Relief implemented Compellent and VMware virtualization platforms to cut their server count by 1/5th, and reduce powering and cooling costs along the way. In the end, Comic Relief is going green to raise green, and that’s no laughing matter.
John Thompson, Comic Relief’s Head of IT, in front of photos of British comedy duo, Dawn French (right) and Jennifer Saunders (left), who ended their 30-year run together last fall. They’re reuniting for one last sketch on the “Comic Relief: Funny for Money” program airing on the BBC Friday night.
by Larry Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer (retired), Dell Compellent — February 20, 2009
BusinessWeek features Compellent in the March 2 issue (online now). Read the short, but very positive column, “Inside Wall Street,” and watch the video interview with the editor.