by Compellent Technologies, — May 03, 2010
IT departments in the healthcare industry, from OEMs to frontline care providers, are facing profound pressure on their data center infrastructures. Mark Manning from McKesson tells his story, describing McKesson’s infrastructure before and after Compellent and why storage really does matter to the world of business.
9:02 am – Mark Manning, Chief Ditchdigger, for McKesson’s EnterpriseRx division is presenting on his infrastructure before and after his Compellent implementation.
9:04 am – EnterpriseRx is the McKesson flagship application for pharmacies. Most of McKesson’s customers are hospitals, outpatients, chain and individual pharmacies.
9:06 am – McKesson has invested heavily in technology to provide better customer service and improve staffing productivity.
9:07 am – There is an unbelievable amount of data out there – when the record comes in, when it goes out, who handled it, etc. There are a lot of improvements that can be made to enhance the customer experience, including things like email and accounting, laboratory data and compliance management.
9:08 am – All records need to be retained, nothing can be deleted. In addition, there’s a big shortage of pharmacists, so while data grows, it’s becoming harder for pharmacists to manage it all.
9:09 am – In 2009, less than 25 percent of US physicians utilized HER systems.
9:11 am – From the time you’re born to the time you die, you generate a lot of records. Every visit to the dentist office, the doctor office, etc., generates health and medical records.
9:15 am – Since 2005, EnterpriseRx has grown to 150 customers in 800 locations across 13 time zones. In 2008, EnterpriseRx had two EMC SANs and one StorageTek SAN. Storage management was at an all-time high, application performance was impacted, and EnterpriseRx was hit with availability issues.
9:18 am – In 2008, we had about 23 customers in about 300 stores. Our SANs were completely maxed out, and we were just throwing more and more storage at the system with very little forethought. Cracks started to develop.
9:20 am – The feeling was best described by a coworker of Mark’s: Imaging you’re in a cactus field, naked, and a tornado comes along…
9:21 am – We decided that we needed a solution that not only kept us afloat, but helps us and keeps us ahead of the competition.
9:22 am – McKesson’s technical needs included a solution that provided scalability, flexibility, restoration of individual databases, multi-site disaster recovery and cost savings from power and cooling.
9:23 am – McKesson’s human needs included manual ILM, quick and easy cloning, reductions in operating costs, idle redundancy and risks for more “hands off” time and more sleep! At the time, the division had 12 people in three locations.
9:26 am – McKesson’s customer service needs included excellence in customer service, quick and complete resolution of IT issues, high availability of customer data, the ability to react to customer requests, and technology partner who know, understand and deliver on McKesson’s demands.
9:28 am – As part of the IT upgrade process, McKesson:
- Conducted market research
- Consulted other business units and industry professionals
- Considered EMC, HP, NetApp, 3PAR and Compellent
- Performed a Proof-of-Concept on Compellent:
- Performance capabilities
- Survivability after failures
- Storage provision process
- Copilot customer service
- Backup, recovery and cloning
- Adding storage to array without downtime
- Automated ILM (Fast Track and Data Progression)
9:33 am – The installation process involved in using a customer to go live with the system. There was one minor issue that was taken care of in one day. McKesson and Compellent both said, “I do!” and surprisingly, even McKesson’s most risk-averse customers were rushing to the front of the line to make the switch. Mark migrated 37 TB of data within a week, and they immediately saw incredible results.
9:35 am – McKesson is in the honeymoon phase. The Compellent SAN collects usage data, can recover from disaster quickly, Enterprise Manager provides a report on how the system is working, and now Mark can spend time fishing with his son.
9:39 am – After an important restoration, other employees thought it was a miracle. Mark told them, “No…it’s Compellent.” Now, the IT team refers to BC and AC: Before Compellent and After Compellent.
9:41 am – McKesson continues to grow with Compellent. Customers continue to enjoy fast response times and on-time deliverables, McKesson is enjoying shorter development lead times, faster turn-around of solutions and fixes, and Copilot responses are over the top. In addition, Compellent continually asks for input and delivers on requests.
9:45 am – One time, Copilot found out that Mark’s team urgently needed some new parts that were not available locally. Copilot had a jet in the air with two of everything the team needed, including an engineer that day.
9:50 am – Mark says that Compellent can’t fly under the radar anymore.
9:51 am – Mark’s team manages 903 volumes across 532 of raw storage at three locations with three people.
9:54 am – Most people may not know this, but Mark said that EMC stands for “Easily Migrates to Compellent”!
9:56 am – Mark’s business unit president is proud of his Compellent installation. He’s happy to go against the grain.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — 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:
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
by Ryan Sclanders, Infrastructure Manager, Credit Market Analysis — March 08, 2010
We are really excited to be ahead of the wave as one of Compellent's first EMEA customers to be part of its new Fluid Data strategy.
Financial institutions across the world depend upon our products and services 24/7. In a $34 trillion market, our clients rely on our pricing data to enhance their ability to manage risk, value their portfolios and understand market trends and themes.
The pressure is therefore on to make sure all of our IT solutions can support us and our clients. Compellent offers a combination of virtualisation and Fluid Data infrastructure, which made it an ideal choice. Not only is it easy to use, but its intelligent automated tiered storage allows the data to flow up and down the tiers. This reduces management costs, avoids unnecessary disk purchases and minimises power costs.
Editor’s Note: Ryan Sclanders of CMA is a Compellent customer and the contributor of this blog post. To learn more about CMA and their use of Compellent systems, watch this video and read this case study.