by Josh Raw, Virtualization Product Specialist, Dell Compellent — May 25, 2010
Approximately 4,000 IT professionals from around the world gathered for the 2010 Citrix Partner Summit and the 2010 Citrix Synergy event which was held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The big buzz this year was around desktop virtualization. Everyone is looking for a way to get it into their environments and for a good reason, to take their wasted desktop administration time back. It’s great to see everyone getting behind server and desktop virtualization, now just add storage virtualization to the mix and the party is on.
At the Compellent booth we were featuring our new Citrix StorageLink Adapter, which will be included with the release of StorageLink 2.2. We gave attendees demonstrations of Citrix StorageLink and the ability to manage virtual machines and storage, as well as perform automated Site Recovery for Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer virtual machines. CitrixTV filmed me giving the demo, so you can check it out below.
Attendees were impressed with the ease of use and the ability to save storage costs by utilizing Compellent Data Instant Replay™ technology to quickly deploy multiple virtual machines without using additional storage. I was discussing our Data Progression™ technology with one of the attendees and they thought it was too good to be true, so it must be magic. Just for the record, it may look like magic but the power to save on storage costs is real. Check out our Fluid Data Architecture at www.compellent.com/fluiddata.
On Tuesday night, the opening of the show floor, I was surprised by the number of resellers that approached us asking how they could become partners as their customers were demanding Compellent storage. It is great to see the crowds getting educated on the benefits of storage virtualization with Compellent.
Overall, this was a big show and some exciting new technologies were unveiled such as XenClient, XenServer 5.6 and StorageLink 2.2.
by Liem Nguyen, (former) Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — 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.