by Stephen Anderson, (former) Director of Alliance Marketing, Compellent Technologies — March 06, 2009

It’s no secret that in a time of tightened budgets and IT departments need to do more with less, and virtualization technologies become more important as a strategic way to save money and resources. It has always been a founding principle of our company to be a leader in ease of use with server virtualization platforms. That is why we are so excited about Compellent’s latest achievement—to date we believe we’re the first storage partner to complete iSCSI certification for VMware ESX 4.0. And we’re hard at work on getting FC certification for server interconnectivity choice. Read more on this from Chris Mellor at The Register.

Compellent and VMware work together to provide end users with a powerful virtualization solution which enhances the benefits of server virtualization and significantly simplifies server and storage management within the data center. We view certification testing as continuous, and never just a point-in-time exercise—and we can test quickly because we don’t require server agents. This latest accomplishment is further validation of our commitment to providing customers with the most advanced storage technologies, and the ability to seamlessly integrate with a leading server virtualization platform. Of course, Compellent’s support for ESX 4.0 won’t be available for customers until VMware ships the platform later this year, so stay tuned for more news.

by Stephen Anderson, (former) Director of Alliance Marketing, Compellent Technologies — October 28, 2008

This week a couple of folks from my team will be at the Citrix Summit in Orlando to talk to channel partners about their experiences designing and implementing Citrix solutions for customers. Compellent recently completed certification work to be Citrix Ready, a program that says we met requirements for the Citrix Delivery Center infrastructure for application delivery.

So what does being Citrix Ready really mean? Our SAN passed a lot of verification tests established and confirmed by Citrix to make sure Storage Center will work effectively within a Citrix-based infrastructure. For the enterprise, for instance, Citrix customers who want to use XenServers for server virtualization can be confident that Storage Center will simply just work as the backend, networked storage system.

Of course, we’ve been a Citrix partner for a very long time, and by now hopefully everyone knows that Compellent doesn’t require any third-party apps or agents to have servers talking to the SAN. That means it’s pretty easy to deploy any OS, provision storage for apps, and manage any server connected to the Compellent SAN—in Citrix environments or otherwise. Being Citrix Ready just gives customers that extra level of confidence for deploying Compellent and Citrix together.

Drop us a note if you’re going to Citrix Summit or let us know what you thought of the show afterward.

by Stephen Anderson, (former) Director of Alliance Marketing, Compellent Technologies — June 17, 2008

It was an exciting time to be at TechEd last week, where we were not only included in Microsoft’s partner sessions, but also learned we are now a worldwide Microsoft Partner of the Year.

Compellent is honored to have been chosen from among more than 2,000 partners for the Partner of the Year award. The award recognizes partners who delivered on “significant customer impact, originality, effective time to market, deployment of advanced features, and the ability to optimize their use of Microsoft technologies to meet business needs.”

According to Microsoft’s award summary, “The flexibility of Compellent Storage Center, coupled with its integration with Volume Shadow Copy Services, makes it possible for administrators to recover data for Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and other Microsoft applications—quickly and efficiently.”

Selected for the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Storage Solutions category, Compellent virtualized storage and Microsoft just go together. In fact, they complement each other so well that earlier this year Compellent was selected as a core storage component of the Microsoft Partner Solution Center’s (MPSC) virtual data center and disaster recovery strategy.

So here’s to a tried-and-true combination: Compellent and Microsoft.