by Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing, Dell Compellent — October 14, 2008
This week at SNW we announced a new business continuity automation feature we’re working on here at Compellent: Live Volume. Live Volume provides coordinated access to data stored on Compellent SANs—and it doesn't matter where the data is actually housed or how far the sites are from each other. We believe this new technology will complete the server virtualization story by enabling storage to automatically follow the application wherever it is migrated.
Since Live Volume is fully automated, the setup is a simple process. In a virtual server environment, you configure VMs and map volumes for replication, and then you migrate virtual servers using an OS virtualization platform. (Compellent doesn't require host-based agents or third-party software to support the virtualization platforms.) Following setup, Live Volume provides continuous data connectivity and automatically handles storage migration and connection optimization—all with no changes to the original applications.
Live Volume detects when the application has moved to another server located at the same site or to a different site and, if needed, automatically swaps the data access from the primary to secondary SAN. Here's a screen capture of the beta version of the Live Volume GUI, which shows the storage migration underway. In the screen shot you can see Live Volume (shown with some development codenames) in the process of swapping the roles for two SANs. The Primary SAN (#908) is becoming Secondary while the Secondary SAN (#909) is becoming Primary. In normal operation, this will happen automatically when a major topology change has occurred, requiring no user intervention and a minimum amount of time.
We think the Live Volume technology fills a large void in the virtualization world and addresses the promise of the virtual data center: that data is available regardless of its physical location. Our development continues at a fast pace and Live Volume will evolve and improve as we work closely with early access customers and partners. Their feedback on operation, user interface options and best practice usage will all combine to a great launch of this product in Q2 2009. Stay tuned to this site over the next few months for more updates from industry voices, and to learn more about our technology innovations.