Around The Block Blog
Liem Nguyen
Corporate Communications Manager
Posts
by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — March 09, 2010
When it comes to your IT environment, sometimes the best decisions involve an element of risk. Implementing a new technology can be a difficult choice – but the payoff can be pretty big.
Just ask Ben Higginbotham, director of new technology at WhereToLive.com, a company that offers real estate brokers behind-the-scenes applications that support daily property transactions and listings. Ben’s job centers around evaluating new technologies to help manage the data that realtors need – and decide whether the risk of implementation is worth the payoff. Using the Compellent SAN, Ben has created an ideal Fluid Data platform to test new resources and assess new capabilities.
Compellent invites you to join Ben, as well as Compellent storage architect John Dias, for a Twitter Chat we’re calling #SANChat. The very first one will about new technology risks you are taking or considering in the data center – are you curious what others have similarly done? What about the results? Was the payoff worth the risk? Did your recommendations, particularly storage-related ones, generate business-improving benefits in the end? Take an hour to chat with us and share your questions, best practices, and advice about doing something new in storage.
#SANchat Details:
- Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm CT
- Topic: Evaluating the Risk of New Technologies
- The hashtag #SANchat will be used to identify the thread for this chat; use the #SANchat identifier to submit questions during the chat session
- If you can’t attend the session, you can submit questions in advance to @Compellent, and we’ll provide these advance topics to our participants for discussion during the chat
- Follow: John Dias: @johnddias, Ben Higginbotham: @bencredible, Compellent: @Compellent
- We recommend using the service TweetChat.com to follow the conversation.
by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — February 22, 2010
When the marketing team and I first met Ben Higginbotham, director of new technology at WhereToLive.com, a real-estate Web infrastructure company, we had no idea what a technology mad scientist he really was. He’ll tell you himself that he’s a geek. This was a guy who gleefully showed us around his new data center, a Google map of his Twitter followers by location, the webcam setup he uses to shoot video blogs at his desk, and lots of pictures of outer space, one of his passions. The other passion is, of course, technology. When you talk to Ben about technology, his eyes light up, he talks fast(er) and waves his hand in the air. You’ll see what I mean if you watch his video case study.
We’re grateful Ben and 10 other equally passionate customers converged in downtown Chicago last October to participate in a two-day shoot for our “Future is Fluid” video. This video is the story of how Compellent’s Fluid Data gave these customers their weekends back and saved their organizations a ton of money. Besides Ben, there were: Kyle Berger (Alvarado ISD, Texas), Eric Hart (PING Golf, Arizona), Brandon Jackson (Gaston County, North Carolina), Mike Miller (National Print Group, Tennessee), Seth Mitchell (Slumberland, Twin Cities), Sandee Sprang (Office of Attorney General , South Carolina), and Barry Thomas (Graves Gilbert Clinic, Kentucky). Rutch Johnson and Chris Kucik of Metro Pier and Exposition Authority were already in Chicago. Tom Gonzalez (Credit Union of Colorado) was all set to go but got stuck in Denver due to bad weather. On the other hand, Ryan Sclanders from Credit Market Analysis flew all the way from London, UK – he clearly took the mileage prize.
We sincerely appreciate all the time and energy these customers put into the making of the video and all the customers who gave feedback that went into developing the new Fluid Data campaign. Everything we do at Compellent is based on end-user feedback, from product design to go-to-market strategy. I’m proud to be part of company that has such great customers, who are as passionate about enterprise storage as we are. Our customers and the innovative work they do is a huge part of why we believe the future is fluid.
by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — February 01, 2010
This is in followup to my post on performance considerations for automated tiered storage. In a recent blog, Martin Glassborow @storagebod posed some good questions about how admins can stay ahead of data loss in a tiered storage environment. He asked for vendor feedback, so this is Compellent’s.
In a Compellent storage system, customers can specify the volumes that get automatically tiered, so you know what applications are tiered and which ones aren’t. A customer may even choose to “lock” an application/volume to a single tier for a specific business reason.
In a tiered environment, or any for that matter, we also recommend clustering controllers for load balancing and failover (the Compellent controllers don’t have to be the same model so you can cluster a 1st generation controller from 2004 with a currently shipping controller).
In case of physical disk failure, our PhoneHome proactive monitoring will alert both the customer and Compellent Copilot team. Often, a new drive is dispatched before the customer is even aware there’s a problem. In the meantime, hot spares can be used for rebuild. Because with thin provisioning we only use up space when data is written, generally rebuild times are faster than for those drives with a bunch of zeros written to them (ie. In SANs using RAID ranks and groups).
In case of data loss, admins can also roll back to locally stored replays (pointer based snapshots) to quickly recover a volume without having to declare a DR scenario. If it’s a physical server issue – say a power supply conks out - customers can use replays in conjunction with boot from SAN to quickly boot and configure a bare-metal standby server with an image centrally stored on the SAN, and mount the volume to the new server. The administration for the entire process can be handled in several ways – via click-through menus from the Storage Center GUI, scripting using PowerShell cmdlets for Windows servers, or the command utility.
If you do have to declare a DR scenario, you can use Enterprise Manager software to initiate failover to replicated volumes stored at the DR SAN site. Enterprise Manager can be accessed remotely and can used to manage replication between multiple sites. Within Compellent’s environment, a production SAN with automated tiered storage can replicate to a secondary site that’s configured as a single or multiple tiers of completely different storage type, RAID level and speed. This lowers the overall cost of replication and DR because you don’t need a copy-exact config between the two sites to do replication. Some customers want the DR SAN to be a full production site for business continuity purposes so may deploy automated tiered storage at the second site too. Then you can revert back to the primary SAN after you’ve resolved whatever issues caused you to declare a disaster. Enterprise Manager also provides dashboards and reports so admins can monitor capacity utilization by volume, RAID level, disk type and business unit, and the status of the tiered or untiered storage at any site.
A lot of buzz is being generated about automated tiered storage but what’s most important is to think about tiered storage as an integrated part of a Fluid Data environment. What other aspects of automated tiered storage are you thinking about?