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.