by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — September 02, 2010
All the buzz at VMworld 2010 has been around virtualization. I had a chance to catch up with Bruce Kornfeld, VP of business development and alliances from Compellent and David West, VP of marketing and business development from CommVault to talk about the partnership between the two companies, how the two technologies work together, data storage efficiencies, and data management and protection.
It wasn’t all work and no play for Compellent and CommVault at VMworld 2010. The two companies hosted customers and prospects at Tres Agaves restaurant on Tuesday, August 31 to unwind after a long day at the show and enjoy some great food and great company.
Watch the video to learn more about the way Compellent and CommVault technologies work together.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — June 11, 2010
Five years is a long time in the storage industry. Five years ago, Compellent’s thin provisioning technology was a year old, and we introduced sub-LUN, block-level automated tiered storage to the world. Five years ago, Beth Pariseau,
@PariseauTT, started covering the storage industry over at SearchStorage.com. That’s when Compellent first started working with her, offering our perspective on storage issues and connecting her with our customers across various industries, and we’ve enjoyed a great working relationship ever since. She was always willing to hear our point of view, and that means a lot to a growing company in this competitive market. Today Beth announced she’s
moving on
from the storage beat and will cover broader IT topics in the Data Center and Server Virtualization Group for TechTarget (the parent company to SearchStorage).
While I’m sure we’ll continue to share ideas on the role of storage virtualization in the data center, we’re going to miss regularly working with Beth. When I joined Compellent in 2007, I already knew of Beth’s reputation for balanced reporting, always digging at the story behind the story and never taking any vendor’s claims at face value. I first met Beth in person over dinner (Chinese) while at SNW Spring 2007 in San Diego. I found out that besides being a good reporter, she was a die-hard fan(atic) about all sports teams Boston, and we also compared notes about digital photography. She clearly knew more about ISO and F numbers than I did, and who was playing well or playing hurt. News briefings and phone calls since then have tended to include sideline discussions about the unimaginable life of Tom Brady or whether David Ortiz’s bat swing evoked fear or regret. Regrettably, I was supposed to take her to lunch last year but I broke my leg (playing touch football of all things) and had to take a raincheck.
Beth, the Compellent team wishes you all the best in your new role and thank you for sharing our passion for storage and sports. It’s been a fun and exciting journey for all of us as the market has changed so much over the past five years. We look forward to working with you on new stories, and also following you over
@Cursed_to_First
. Hopefully you and I will have that lunch soon.
by Compellent Technologies, — May 03, 2010
Both Data Instant Replay and Data Progression can hold their own, but when combined they create a dynamic duo. This session showed VARs how to optimize their customers’ configurations with best practices on progressing replay disks.
3:18 pm – The page pool is a collection of allocated and unallocated disk blocks. Fluid Data architecture maps pages to volumes and maintains metadata with the default page size of 2MB.
3:20 pm – The page pool grows/shrinks as needed. The page pool executes self fragmentation and tuning.
3:22 pm – In the Fluid Data architecture, there are two types of pages, called accessible and replay pages. Accessible pages are pages that can be read or written by a server at the current time. Replay pages are read-only pages (set by Data Instant Replay). Data Progression uses the accessibility to determine the class of station a page should be used.
3:24 pm – Storage Center 5.2 and above adds the ability to define the redundancy level of each tier. Single redundancy configures the tier for RAID10, RAID5/5 and RAID 5/9. Dual Redundancy configures the tier for RAID10DM, RAID 6/6 and RAID 6/10.
3:28 pm – Modifying the tier redundancy will trigger a RAID restripe. The restripe is done line, enabling tier redundancy changes on the fly. If not enough free space for the conversion is available, the system will prompt the user that the conversion is not possible at this time. Compellent highly recommends customers upgrade to Storage Center 5 with RAID 6 if using 2TB SATA drives.
3:30 pm – Data Progression’s data mover runs once per day. The default time is 7 pm, and data is moved per page, with historical replay pages eligible to move to lowest tier immediately. The default setting is set to 12 days of relative inactivity before moving down one level, with three days of activity to move up one level. (The days are nonconsecutive.)
3:33 pm – There are a number of configuration options for using Data Progression. Data Progression moves blocks between disk drive types, RAID levels, even between inside tracks and outside tracks of disks.
3:35 pm – There’s nothing that’s configured on Day 1 that can’t be reconfigured on the fly on Day 90 or Day 365. The ability to change page sizes, policies, etc. on-the-fly shows how different the Compellent SAN is from other SAN solutions.
3:37 pm – Scott takes the audience on the lifecycle of a page and how to recover from a replay.
3:52 pm – Data Instant Replay integrates replays with applications to provide consistency.
3:53 pm – An audience member asks if booting from SAN is like booting from a replay. The short answer is yes.
3:55 pm – If a block of data is accessed every day, it turns into normal activity, meaning that the block will not be automatically kept up or moved up to tier-1 storage.
3:57 pm – Scott asks the audience if being able to articulate how Data Progression and Data Instant Replay works together will turn some of the tougher prospects into customers. One VAR answers, “Hell yes!”