by Maryna Frolova, PR Specialist, Dell Storage — September 08, 2011

When you run a 24/7 operation for a luxury jet service, an IT outage is something you can’t afford. The Flight Options IT team was finding that its legacy EMC storage system was running out of capacity. To keep up with data growth, the IT team started looking into different systems that would scale alongside its business, increase performance and reduce physical footprint and management time--until an unexpected disaster accelerated their decision making timeline. On Sept. 22, 2009, the Flight Options IT team discovered that a leaking air conditioner left its four-cabinet rack of database and applications servers and storage under water. The team needed to react quickly to protect its business systems. The backup data center worked as expected and the data was recovered. The next logical step was to get new equipment into the data center, quickly.

The Flight Options IT team spoke with EMC (the legacy vendor) and Dell Compellent about getting a new system quickly. The Compellent team was able to be agile, deliver the right product and act quickly. In less than a day, a Compellent system was ordered, shipped, installed and running. David Davies, CIO of Flight Options, said that in his long tenure as an IT professional he has never seen something like this done at such a rapid pace. It was a storage miracle.

As Flight Options deployed the new SAN, the company reaped the benefits of leveraging an efficient storage architecture to reduce the physical data center footprint by 80 percent, virtualize all applications, reduce costs, improve performance and cut management time to 15 minutes per week. To learn a bit more about the Flight Options story, check out the press release. David Davies is a great speaker who captivated an audience by presenting his story at SNW Spring in Santa Clara, CA. It’s not every day that you get to hear a story like David’s. He even joked that the marketing folks, like me, will love his story when we heard it for the first time.

Has your data center ever been stuck by an air conditioning disaster? What about any natural disasters? How did you recover? Please leave us a comment and tell us about it.

by Maryna Frolova, PR Specialist, Dell Storage — November 30, 2010

What better way to celebrate the return from Thanksgiving food and merriment than with a new #SANchat? Please join us tomorrow, Wednesday, Dec. 1 from 3 – 4:30 PM CT. This month’s guest moderator is Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett), an industry blogger and vendor-independent IT/business consultant who has been in the storage industry for over ten years. Stephen will be talking about the top 11 trends that will have the greatest impact on IT and storage in 2011, and we are looking forward to getting thoughts from the Twitter group on what the biggest headlines will be.

While we know that it’s not quite revolutionary to focus on upcoming trends during December industry discussions, what is revolutionary is some of the technology we’ll be addressing. From automated data management and migration to cloud storage and next steps in virtualization, today’s leading trends are poised to have a significant effect on next year’s data centers and IT as a whole. Stephen has already started the conversation on his Pack Rat blog—make sure you head over to see his take before Wednesday’s discussion.

To join in #SANchat, we recommend using the TweetChat platform; you can also get additional information on the SANchat series by visiting our previous blog post on the topic. We look forward to having you join the conversation about the 2011 predictions!

by Maryna Frolova, PR Specialist, Dell Storage — March 11, 2010

Last week, healthcare IT professionals from around the world gathered in Atlanta, Georgia for HIMSS10, the world’s largest and most respected IT exhibitions for healthcare organizations. Attendees were looking for ways to manage their IT, while meeting regulatory compliance requirements and digitizing medical records and patient information. Electronic medical records (EMR), electronic health records (EHR) and picture archiving communication systems (PACS) were the talk of the show.

When healthcare companies embark on EMR, EHR and PACS projects, they need data storage that will grow with them over time. At the Compellent booth, I heard a director of IT passionately exclaim that he is “sick and tired of forklift upgrades.” He wants a system that would be scalable and will not leave him with an enormous rip-and-replace bill every time they outgrow their storage capacity. This is just one of the many candid comments that we heard during the show.

In fact, a number of past Compellent customers stopped by the booth to tell us how much they miss their Compellent systems now that their new employer does not have a Compellent system. Some had plans to introduce Compellent into their environments, for others it was too early to tell, but it was great to have them visit.

Those who currently have a Compellent system did not hold back in giving us feedback. Mark Manning from McKesson told us that Compellent does not do enough promotion around the system’s performance and outstanding support services. McKesson has seen system performance improvements and found a way to verify significant cost savings associated with running a Compellent system as opposed to other storage vendors.

All in all, it was nice to hear about the success our healthcare customers were having with their storage. Steve Melcher, IT Director of Lincoln Surgical Hospital in Nebraska, talked to us about his disaster recovery project based on Compellent Fluid Data storage. Check out the video below.

Overall, this was a big show and the who’s who of healthcare IT vendors were all in attendance. Back for the second time, this was the first time that Compellent was exhibiting in the new Fluid Data booth. What do you think? A couple people actually stopped and commented on how much they liked the booth. We’re looking forward to HIMSS11!