Around The Block Blog

by Berit Johnson, Product Marketing Manager, Dell Compellent — June 29, 2011

Dell Compellent is introducing the latest addition to its unified storage line, the Dell NX3000 for Compellent. Another step in the integration of Compellent into the Dell Fluid Data architecture, the Dell NX3000 for Compellent connects to the Compellent Storage Center SAN and leverages Dell’s cluster-ready, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2-based NAS solution to provide advanced file management services such as single-instance storage (SIS) for file-level deduplication and DFS (Distributed File Services) for namespace service and replication.

The amount of unstructured data is expected to grow drastically over the next several years, causing the need for NAS storage to increase significantly. Companies are tasked with finding ways to effectively manage this data growth under strict budget restrictions.

NAS products such as the Dell NX3000 for Compellent enable end-users to leverage file system protocols to provide file shares for centrally storing unstructured data such as word processing, spreadsheets and presentation files among many users. In addition, NAS systems host file-oriented application data such as static web farm content, document management data stores and source-code storage for both Windows and Linux/Unix clients.

By consolidating all block-level (SAN) and file-level (NAS) storage onto a single scalable Dell Compellent storage platform, end-users experience a number of benefits, including cost savings from leveraging a single virtualized pool for both block- and file-level storage, the ability to take advantage of Dell’s patented architecture for NAS-dedicated volumes, and access to Dell Compellent’s award-winning Copilot support for the entire unified storage solution.

The new Dell NX3000 for Compellent includes the following hardware features that enable improved performance and scalability options for Windows NAS users:

• Leverages a Dell 11G server (2U form factor) with 24GB RAM and dual quad-core processors
• Scales out to 4 clustered nodes with active/active failover
• Supports a quad-port 1Gb NIC or a dual-port 10Gb NIC for network connectivity
• Supports a dual-port 10Gb iSCSI HBA or a dual-port 8Gb FC HBA for SAN connectivity

For additional information about the new product, please visit the unified storage page on our site and view the video.

by Compellent Technologies, — May 06, 2010

Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, and Marty Sanders, vice president of technology services at Compellent are talking about the company’s unified storage offerings, including the latest introduction of zNAS based on ZFS.

by Liem Nguyen, (former) Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — April 27, 2010

Today Compellent is pleased to introduce the latest in our unified storage line, the Compellent zNAS , which is our first NAS based on ZFS (Zettabyte file system). Compellent zNAS is ideal for mid-sized and large enterprises with file and block based storage requirements, especially in mixed Unix, Linux and Windows environments.

Why is this important? Because file storage requirements are going through the roof, with analysts like IDC predicting the amount of unstructured data (office docs, videos, graphics files) will increase by more than 60 percent annually through 2012. That's a lot of growth, requiring both granular system intelligence and big file scalability to manage all that data, regardless of size or type, in the most efficient way. The Compellent zNAS was designed with those storage consolidation needs in mind. Here are a few of the product highlights:

• Unified storage management interface - The zNAS interface integrates file and block storage management tasks. For example, an admin can create file shares that are instantly, thinly provisioned on Compellent enterprise SAN. Other data management tasks such as volume deletion, snapshot creation and system analytics are also available from the unified interface  (See sample screenshot)
  
  
• Fluid Data architecture - Regardless of whether the data is written by file-based or block-based applications, the zNAS leverages our Fluid Data architecture to consolidate the data in a virtual pool of storage and provide granular system intelligence to actively manage the data. The solution offers block-based thin provisioning, automated tiered storage, boot from SAN, continuous snapshots and thin replication applications.
• High-performance NAS hardware - The zNAS ships as a single 1U NAS node or a clustered dual configuration. The NAS comes with dual Intel Nehalem processors and memory up to 48 GB. Because each node is diskless, the management software and NAS image boot from the SAN, which means fewer hardware components to deploy, maintain and upgrade.
• Single, scalable platform - The back-end storage consists of the Storage Center controller and enclosures that can support any type of drive such as SSD, SAS, FC or SATA. By leveraging a persistent hardware platform and managing just one pool of storage, enterprises can greatly simplify management, improve performance for their applications, and save money on hardware and associated costs.

If it's ZFS, it's got to be massively scalable

• ZFS is an advanced, highly scalable file system: it’s a 128-bit file system addressing 18 quintillion (1.84 × 1019) times more data than current 64-bit systems.
• The practical limitations on file size and directory entries cannot be defined, so basically you’re bound more by the physical capacity of the unified platform - in Compellent’s case that’s 1,008 disks.
• ZFS has advanced error detection and correction, using end-to-end checksums to authenticate data integrity.
• ZFS has other valuable storage efficiency features such deduplication, which is expected to ship later this year on zNAS (end of Q2/beginning of Q3).

We'll ship the Compellent unified storage solutions with zNAS by the end of June 2010, available only through our global network of channel partners.

For more information, watch the brief zNAS product tour (below) by Troy Presler, the product manager for zNAS.

If you'd like more information on unified storage, join me (@LiemNguyen) and ESG senior analyst Terri McClure (@esganalysttmac)  for the next #SANChat on unified storage at 1:30 pm CDT later today, April 27. We will talk about the benefits of scalable NAS, next-generation unified storage technologies and other storage issues.