by Scott Horst, Executive Director of Marketing, Dell Storage — February 22, 2011
Compellent’s C-Drive Makes a Fluid Move to the 2011 Dell Storage Forum

For four years, C-Drive has been the one week a year we bring the Compellent “experience” to life for our entire ecosystem – partners, customers, media, analysts, technology partners, and more – to drive education, networking and training across multiple days, venues and meetings. Our core philosophy has always been to continually move partners and customers from information to participation in everything we do, driving a fluid learning environment that adapts to the needs of our stakeholders every time we see them.

And now, that we are officially part of Dell, we are combining Compellent’s C-Drive with the Dell EqualLogic User Conference into a combined conference. Compellent C-Drive 2011 US previously scheduled for May 1^st – 6^th in St. Paul, Minnesota at the RiverCentre will be fluidly rolled into the Dell Storage Forum scheduled for June 5^th – 10^th in Orlando, Florida at the Disney Hilton Resort. We are very excited to be part of something that we can all grow together into a bigger, better, and bolder event.

The 2011 Dell Storage Forum will offer sessions, strategies and best practices for the entire Dell Storage portfolio—from Compellent to EqualLogic to PowerVault and more–to ensure this becomes not just an event, but an ongoing initiative for Dell Storage and a recurring investment in our partner’s and customer’s mutual success.

And, for the first time, the Dell Storage Forum will be open to all Dell Storage channel partners selling our innovative storage technologies to businesses and data centers around the world.  There will be a full day of sessions solely for partners, instructor-led training and certifications, and the chance to attend the same technology and product tracks as end users.

‘The Virtual Era Is Fluid’ at 2011 Dell Storage Forum, But You’ll Leave with a Solid Foundation

In its new fluid form, the 2011 Dell Storage Forum will serve as a face-to-face gathering built for the virtual world, allowing everyone to connect to Dell Storage and to each other, to gain a deeper understanding of the technology and the team that can help us all get better together.

The Virtual Era has arrived—and it’s here to stay. Pushing us into this new era of computing are three powerful trends converging like a perfect storm–data volume, velocity and value.

The amount of data IT organizations are grappling with every day is exploding, and nearly 90 percent of that data is not accessed after its creation. Much of this data is created outside of the walls of the traditional office by a mobile workforce and moving from device to desktop to datacenter with increasing speed. Before our eyes, data has transformed into the growth driver for organizations as they strive to find new sources of revenue while controlling costs. 

What does this mean to you?  The Virtual Era has arrived, but you need solutions.

For IT, the Virtual Era brings opportunity, but also layers of complexity and challenges. The Virtual Era demands more—a fluid approach to how technology is designed, engineered, architected, deployed, managed and supported. More and more data means companies need more storage.  Businesses today are ever more reliant on storage, and that makes it a strategic decision–far-reaching, fast-moving and fraught with risk.

Yet, companies are increasingly frustrated with the rigid boundaries of their existing storage systems. Whereas other solutions treat data as a static thing, Dell believes data should be actively, intelligently managed and moved throughout a business wherever and whenever it’s needed.  We’re out to boldly tell the world an essential truth about data, and that truth is that data needs to be fluid.

The time for this “fluid” conversation is now, and that conversation will converge at the Dell Storage Forum in June with storage experts, technology evangelists, industry leaders, passionate customers and our channel partners. Everyone will be learning how fluid storage can help drive efficiency, agility and resiliency, dramatically reducing costs and enabling you to reallocate those savings to strategic initiatives that drive your business.

The Virtual Era is Fluid. And, it requires an approach that is just as fluid as the world in which we live. 

From the back office to the front pocket, the opportunity of the Virtual Era is ripe for the taking. To learn more about how fluid defines the Virtual Era join us at the Dell Storage Forum. Register today.

We’ll contact everyone who already registered for C-Drive 2011 on next steps. You can also read this FAQ for more information.

by Scott Horst, Executive Director of Marketing, Dell Storage — October 28, 2010

I was just at the Midsize Enterprise Summit in San Antonio where I did 6 boardroom sessions in 2 days. Each boardroom consisted of about 20 end users that listen to your pitch on your product and ask questions about how things really work. I always prefer to do these sessions in conjunction with a Compellent customer as they can tell the story on what really matters to IT. I did three sessions with Greg Edwards from Harris County, and I did another three sessions with Chuck Matulik from Cross Country Home Services.

I found that customers of all sizes continue to be very frustrated with the rigid boundaries of their existing storage, to the point of needing to consider a new SAN in just 2 years, as their systems don’t scale beyond today’s needs. Compellent knew from the start that scaling beyond is what every business required. As we prepare to introduce the next version of Storage Center, which will encompass the largest hardware release in our company’s history, we are taking the first step in a series of new product releases designed to drive scale and enterprise deeper into our product. With this upcoming release, our scale up story just gets stronger. Customers can continue to add drives, drive types, more spindles, and more powerful controllers, all to scale to meet the demands of their business. We're talking about the ability to deliver more performance, less hardware and lower power in the same footprint using 2.5-inch SAS drives, and eventually as we add infrastructure to our system, doubling drive counts over time. When we deliver this release, we’ll show you all the details.

Our open and agile Fluid Data architecture makes this transition straightforward and seamless – offering backward and forward compatibility. And with this new release, our scale out story becomes bolder. Enterprise Manager serves as that common framework to manage multiple systems as one, and it also provides dozens of points of integration with leading technology. For example, in August at VMworld, we announced our vSphere 4.1 client plug-in. You will be able to manage Compellent storage, snapshots and replication, all through the vSphere client. (Read more about the plug-in capabilities in a recent blog post from John Dias, storage architect for Compellent.)

A key enabling technology for enterprise to scale-out in this new release is Live Volume. Since we introduced automated tiered storage to the market in 2005, Compellent has enabled the automated migration of storage between arrays. In the past, we were intelligently moving data just within the array – now,  we're also automatically moving volumes between arrays to provide continuous access and high availability to the business. We will go deeper on this feature later.

So for most companies, all of this would be impressive. But for Compellent, scale up and scale out is not quite enough. Scale Beyond is where we're headed. Over the next year, we intend to drive scale into every dimension of the product – integration, performance, availability, policy, persistence, and more. This is a message I just delivered to our entire channel on our recent “Field First” quarterly webinar. It may appear to some that this increased focus on scale and enterprise is taking us in a new direction, but this has been the plan all along. If you ask the two customers who presented with me at the show, they would tell you that we are unique in the industry in our ability to meet the needs of enterprises of all sizes. Our features were developed to be enterprise from the start, while our platform was built to scale from several terabytes to multiple petabytes.  In fact, just to compare, one of the customers I presented with at the show has more than 800 TB’s installed, and the other has less than 100 TB’s – but both are using the same single model we sell to every customer that scales from very small to very large.

The industry alternative to this type of scalability is painful. End users face that real-world cost and hassle of a fork-lift upgrade to a new model, and paying for software all over again. So to Compellent, scale means you can simply upgrade a component at a time, as new technologies arrive, and you can do so without data center disruption and without repurchasing software licenses. That's why technology refreshes with Compellent are actually refreshing, and that’s part of what Scale Beyond is all about. We’re working hard to turn this vision into a reality, and you’ll hear more from us on Scale Beyond soon.

by Scott Horst, Executive Director of Marketing, Dell Storage — October 07, 2010

7 years for me at Compellent today. Time to sit back for 2 minutes and reflect, as 2 minutes is all I can spare as I try to help drive hyper-growth before I hyper-ventilate. The one thing that strikes me the most is for as much as things have changed, so little has really changed. Clichéd yes, but full of truth. And that is the best thing about working here. As much as we have grown revenue, enabled the channel, scaled the product, solved customer problems, added staff, become a campus, and been recognized as a breakthrough business on so many fronts – we have also kept intact the things that really matter, and the things that really impact a company’s ascent and maturation over time. We have kept intact the culture and our belief in “positive aggressive”, the focus on execution and just getting things done, the autonomy that comes with our work and the chance to just figure things out as you go, the ability to make progress again and again regardless of the nonstop pace or the ever-shifting obstacles, and most importantly, we have kept intact the people that make things go.

Compellent has always been a “fluid” place to work with both constant change and challenges, but it has also been a rock for 7 years as more and more people have joined to challenge the status quo and change the world of data storage. Just over 7 years ago I sat in a room with our 3 founders and heard the Compellent story for the very first time, and 7 years later the story is better (I may have even played a small part in shaping that story once and a while), but it is still the same at its core. The story of Compellent, Fluid Data and problems we solve is told over and over to customers and partners, but the real story is how great companies are built from within, not without, and how everyone here has invested so much of themselves to make this thing go and keep going, and going.  There are some around here who joke that storage never sleeps, and neither have I since I started working here, but I wouldn’t have the story told or unfold any other way.

+ Cover of the program guide for the launch of Compellent in 2004