by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — May 12, 2010
At EMCWorld, the company announced VPLEX, a set of external, special-purpose hardware appliances that create a heterogeneous storage pool to enable shared access to local and remote SANs and non-disruptive volume migration between them. On his blog, storage analyst Greg Schulz (Twitter @StorageIO) offers a really detailed explanation of VPLEX. Bas Raayman (@BasRaayman) provides some good links for additional reading over on his blog.
A quick glance at available specs tells me it’s not for small or most mid-sized enterprises. VPLEX uses a half or full rack of multi-CPU servers which are inserted between all SANs and servers. An entry level high availability VPLEX system includes total of eight quad-core XEON CPUs, 128GB of cache and 128 8Gb FC ports to connect all front end servers and back end SANs.
The VPLEX software interface comes from EMC’s YottaYotta acquisition and includes a mix of command-line, GUI and custom application tools. You could say there’s a lotta bang for a lotta bucks. This is great news for customers with EMC Symmetrix-sized budgets. However, enterprises facing flat or declining budgets may want to understand the real costs and consider alternatives that are more cost-effective with features and functions that customers will use without adding significant footprint to their data center.
Several folks have pointed out the similarities between VPLEX and Compellent’s Live Volume technology. Both solutions tackle the problem of non-disruptive volume migration, which is very useful in disaster avoidance, load balancing or maintenance situations. The end-user’s storage stays online and the IT department has a lot more flexibility. However the similarities end there as EMC’s VPLEX and Compellent’s Live Volume approach volume migration in entirely different ways.
I sat down with Bob Fine, director of product marketing, to analyze the VPLEX announcement and clarify how it differs from Live Volume. Bob also recaps the difference between Live Volume and VPLEX in this short video clip.
LN: What is the VPLEX Hardware?
BF: VPLEX is a rack mounted hardware system that sits in‑band between heterogeneous storage arrays and servers. A VPLEX system can support one, two or four VPLEX engines. Two VPLEX engines are required for each SAN for high availability. Each VPLEX engine has:
- Two quad-core XEON processors
- 32GB of cache
- 32x 8Gb FC ports
LN: What about cost?
BF: Based on our research, VPLEX starts at about $77,000 for a local-only interconnect system. A high end VPLEX system can scale to over $500,000. These prices do not include the SANs themselves, professional services, the expense of rewiring the data center or the cost of the additional switch ports required for the new high port count devices.
I also wonder about the potential hidden costs because not much is known yet whether VPLEX supports true thin provisioning, RAID6, SSDs, FAST, or other complementary next-generation storage virtualization features.
LN: What are the use cases for VPLEX?
BF: EMC is advocating a high level, “data everywhere and anywhere” storage federation message but the products planned for this year are limited to data center or metro distances. The EMC solution requires multiple high end VPLEX hardware engines and many high bandwidth, low latency network connections. That’s the biggest difference between Compellent and EMC VPLEX. Compellent’s focus is on integrating a software solution that scales. EMC has a significant focus on high-end bandwidth, and all that comes with a hefty price tag. VPLEX uses a great deal of high end hardware to bring several of the Live Volume features to the EMC platform.
LN: Zero downtime maintenance and non-disruptive change management are solid benefits provided by VPLEX. What are the limitations?
BF: VPLEX is not part of the EMC SAN products themselves, but instead is designed as an add-on set of rack mounted servers. VPLEX requires the overhaul of the data center topology and the creation of a new in-between configuration. EMC’s hardware-heavy response is in stark contrast to the Compellent Fluid Data architecture, which enables to non-disruptive data migration to be delivered relatively inexpensively in a software-only configuration. EMC’s technology requires a large complement of dedicated, single-purpose special hardware to deliver the same kind of distributed storage capabilities. Other considerations:
- Requires major hardware investment at each site with one or more high end VPLEX servers for each site plus additional local and remote switch ports
- Major changes to system topology with all SAN and server connections routed through VPLEX
- Write performance decreases with distance and latency
- Conversion of Virtual Machines to VPLEX is not automatic, and requires either additional storage or for the applications to be shut down to complete the process
- Software interface is not integrated with the Clariion software, many features require a command line, others use “AccessAnywhere” or GUI
LN: So what is Compellent Live Volume?
BF: A software feature in the Compellent Storage Center SAN, Live Volume is a virtualized storage application that provides non-disruptive storage migration between SANs in an integrated environment. Live Volume enables on‑demand volume migration, zero downtime maintenance and disaster avoidance capabilities at a fraction of the price of EMC’s VPLEX and requires no hardware, no outages and no system reconfigurations. The Live Volume solution supports any Storage Center configuration or network connections, including iSCSI and Fibre Channel. Live Volume can leverage existing network connections without impact on write performance.
Compellent has made Live Volume to select customers since Q1 of 2010, available with Storage Center 5.1 or later.
Additional features:
- Live Volume is a software-only upgrade and supports all Storage Center models and configurations
- Software is tightly integrated in both Enterprise Manager and the Storage Center GUI
- Asynchronous interconnect is less expensive and enables full performance data writes -- write performance is not dependent on network latency or distance
- Flexible configuration enables unlimited number of Live Volumes between systems, and point-to-point volume migration between more than two data centers
- On-the-fly conversion enables non-disruptive conversion of any volume to a Live Volume—any Compellent system can add Live Volume functionality at any time
Compellent Live Volume
LN: So what’s the starting price for Live Volume?
BF: Live Volume licenses start at under $5,000. As you know, pricing is available from our channel partners and can depend on maintenance and software support options.
LN: Can you summarize Compellent’s point of view on data migration?
BF: From our perspective, data migration capabilities should be built into the architecture itself to reduce complexity, overhead and cost. EMC’s response to Live Volume non-disruptive data migration capabilities further validates Compellent’s vision for a global, shared storage network. The difference is in the implementation. The EMC approach is an external add-on model and is very expensive. The Compellent approach is dramatically more efficient as the core engine is built into the Fluid Data architecture itself.
Comparing CML Live Volume and EMC VPLEX
| Use Cases |
Live Volume |
EMC VPLEX |
| Starting price |
$5,000 |
$77,000 |
| Live volume migration between SANs |
Yes |
Yes |
| Zero downtime maintenace |
Yes |
Yes |
| Disaster avoidance |
Yes |
Yes |
| Volume mobility between 3rd party storage |
No |
Yes |
| Software only architecture |
Yes |
No |
| Integrated software management interface |
Yes |
No |
| Leverages existing data center topology |
Yes |
No |
| Write performance is consistent over distances |
Yes |
No |
| Supports both iSCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces |
Yes |
No |
Additional links:
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — May 11, 2010
Our partners at Citrix and Microsoft are making it easier for Compellent Fluid Data storage users and channel partners to plan cloud computing projects. A few weeks ago, Compellent announced our work with Microsoft on the dynamic infrastructure toolkit for cloud computing. This week the Compellent team will be demonstrating more of our next-gen cloud technology support for both Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco.
In Compellent booth no. 300 in the Moscone Center tomorrow May 12 through May 14, we’re going to showcase support for the next evolution of the Citrix Ready program: StorageLink version 2.2. The upcoming StorageLink 2.2 code from Citrix will include the Compellent Storage Adapter, which integrates provisioning, management and recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines through the StorageLink interface.
The wow factor will be our demo for Site Recovery integration. It’s future technology from both Compellent and Citrix, which will automate setup and execution of disaster recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads. I can’t go into more detail right now but we’re working on enabling customers to integrate Compellent continuous snapshots and thin replication with Site Recovery.
Stay tuned for more official words from Citrix and Compellent. In the meantime, don’t miss our demonstrations of Compellent, Citrix and Microsoft cloud tech at Synergy.
If you can't make it to Synergy, here's a video demo that walks through some of the technical features of the StorageLink 2.2 GUI with Compellent integration. We'll have the second demo with Site Recovery next week.
Let us know if you're going to Synergy. If you're already using StorageLink or plan to use it with Site Recovery we'd love to hear from you.
by Compellent Technologies, — June 15, 2009
On June 16th, Compellent will be participating in an exciting virtual trade show hosted by CIO discussing the benefits of virtualization and how it’s helped organizations cut costs, optimize resources and enable disaster recovery and business continuity.
During the event
Compellent CTO, Larry Aszmann, Burton Group analyst, Chris Wolf, and Compellent customers Tom Gonzales (Credit Union of Colorado) and Ping Ooi (Ares Management) will take part in a “Virtualization at Work” panel discussion. They will address ways virtualization can answer pressing budget questions, the current and future state of virtualization and cloud computing, industry trends and personal experiences with the technology.
The event will air live on Tuesday, June 16th, and be
available on demand from June 17 – September 17, 2009. All attendees who visit the event on June 16, 2009 may win an Apple® iPod touch® 8GB MP3 Player compliments of CIO.
Session Panelists Information:
- Vendor: Larry Aszmann, CTO, Compellent – Larry serves as the pacesetter for the panel discussion, speaking first on almost every topic and dictating the direction and tone of the panel.
- End User 1: Tom Gonzales, Credit Union of Colorado – Tom serves as the primary back-up for Larry, offering an end-user example to many of the points Larry initiates. Like usual, Tom does an excellent job discussing CUoC, while promoting Compellent.
- End User 2: Ping Ooi, Ares Management – Ping has a limited role throughout the first half of the discussion, but begins to speak more effectively towards the end. He seems to miss a few opportunities to discuss Compellent.
- Analyst: Chris Wolf, Burton Group – Chris seems to serve as the impartial participant, providing a general industry perspective. He often speaks for long periods of time without interruption.
CIO’s Virtualization Virtual Conference will provide a drill down into the trends shaping how CIOs are leveraging virtualization. It’ll look at wringing out the maximum cost savings; hidden benefits like green IT and disaster recovery; how virtualization is poised to push cloud computing past the tipping point; best practices for managing your virtual environment; Open Source Virtualization: Ready for Prime Time?; and virtualization and security: the critical issues confronting CIOs.