by Compellent Technologies, — May 06, 2010
8:17 am - Bruce Kornfeld and Marty Sanders make an appearance to start off the day talking about Compellent’s product road map. We welcome feedback and help prioritizing what you’d like to see next.
8:19 am - Fluid Data is new, but the underlying architecture is not. We’ve been using it all along, this is just a new way to describe Compellent’s feature set and capabilities.
8:20 am – We’re shipping RAID 6, and we also have the ability to take replays of multiple volumes at the same time (called ‘consistency groups’). Other Storage Center 5 features include Virtual Ports, Portable Volume, server mapping and standards-based space recovery.
8:22 am – Audience Response question: Please describe your replication use today:
- None – 33%
- Server-based replication – 18%
- Compellent storage replication – T3 or less – 24%
- Compellent replication – OC 3 – 12%
- Compellent replication – OC 12 – 5%
- Compellent replication – >OC 12 – 8%
8:24 am – Portable Volume reduces bandwidth requirements and saves time with automation and encryption. It’s an easy way to bring initial synchronization up.
8:25 am – Audience Response question: The fastest storage growth in your environment is coming from:
- Files/unstructured data – 51%
- Email – 12%
- Database & custom applications – 37%
8:27 am – zNAS: we’ve built a file system based on ZFS, runs on the same platform as Windows storage server. Automatically configures Storage Center on the backend.
8:29 am – Live Volume allows for planned migration – it’s non-disruptive. We’re exploring a lot of roadmap options going forward with this product.
8:30 am – We have a great platform based on Fluid Data – our goal is to move that platform to new places in storing data, to have it work seamlessly with new technologies. It’s all based on this same platform, no forklift upgrade necessary.
8:31 am – Compellent Metrocluster will offer easy, practical and affordable enterprise data protection; it’s the next step from Live Volume. Operations keep running, even if one side has an outage; the RAID and system redundancy are built into one system.
8:37 am – Standards based Space Reclamation – we’re one of the first storage companies to support SCSI SBC-3. As Operating Systems start picking up this technology you’ll have the capability to reclaim disk space after files are deleted by any OS.
8:38 am – We’re excited to come out with the Series 40 Controller. There are a lot of advantages – we’re adding another slot (7 total), all will be PCIe. The performance out of this box is just incredible, and we’re looking forward to better and better performance.
8:41 am – We’re very excited about this next generation scalable system – moving further into the Enterprise with the same platform. New capabilities will include: Series 40, larger cache (no more batteries), extreme scalability, more connectivity, and de-dupe options.
8:44 am – Dynamic Block Deduplication – we’re still working on this, but think about what we do from a Fluid Data standpoint: we put the right types of data on the right types of drives at the right time. Now, when we’re doing this, we can take a look at the blocks and compress if possible – it’s just part of the natural flow of data progression. Good show of hands when asked who’s excited about this technology!
8:46 am – How many people are using SAS technology from Compellent? Very few – probably because you’ve been using FC and SATA for some time. These are continuing, but SAS is the future of the back end of the Compellent Storage Center. It’s higher performance – we’re going to 6 Gb later this year. 2.5 inch drives will also be shipping.
8:50 am – The next phase of Storage Center is having the ability to take multiple storage centers and have volumes exist partially on each system. As replays age, have them automatically migrate to less-costly storage. Flexibility with the high-availability environments.
8:57 am – We’ll be doing more work on application integration, with partners like VMware (SRM, vSphere API with space reclamation), Microsoft (PowerShell, SCOM, DIT-SC (Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center), Citrix (StorageLink with replication), Commvault (replay integration with Simpana), and Oracle (RMAN integration). Also Enterprise Certifications with IBM (SVC, VIOS, DB2, Tivoli), HP (Storage Essentials), and Symantec (NetBackup, Array Support Library – Linux, Solaris, Windows, AIX,HP-UX).
9:01 am – Audience response: Which of these Alliance Partner projects are you most interested in?
- CommVault snapshot integration – 27%
- Oracle RMAN integration – 22%
- Symantec Windows ASL – 24%
- Microsoft DPM integration – 27%
9:02 am – Audience questions focusing on dedupe – lots of interest and curiosity! More drill-downs will take place in individual sessions later today.