Around The Block Blog
by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — March 09, 2010
When it comes to your IT environment, sometimes the best decisions involve an element of risk. Implementing a new technology can be a difficult choice – but the payoff can be pretty big.
Just ask Ben Higginbotham, director of new technology at WhereToLive.com, a company that offers real estate brokers behind-the-scenes applications that support daily property transactions and listings. Ben’s job centers around evaluating new technologies to help manage the data that realtors need – and decide whether the risk of implementation is worth the payoff. Using the Compellent SAN, Ben has created an ideal Fluid Data platform to test new resources and assess new capabilities.
Compellent invites you to join Ben, as well as Compellent storage architect John Dias, for a Twitter Chat we’re calling #SANChat. The very first one will about new technology risks you are taking or considering in the data center – are you curious what others have similarly done? What about the results? Was the payoff worth the risk? Did your recommendations, particularly storage-related ones, generate business-improving benefits in the end? Take an hour to chat with us and share your questions, best practices, and advice about doing something new in storage.
#SANchat Details:
- Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm CT
- Topic: Evaluating the Risk of New Technologies
- The hashtag #SANchat will be used to identify the thread for this chat; use the #SANchat identifier to submit questions during the chat session
- If you can’t attend the session, you can submit questions in advance to @Compellent, and we’ll provide these advance topics to our participants for discussion during the chat
- Follow: John Dias: @johnddias, Ben Higginbotham: @bencredible, Compellent: @Compellent
- We recommend using the service TweetChat.com to follow the conversation.
by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — February 22, 2010
When the marketing team and I first met Ben Higginbotham, director of new technology at WhereToLive.com, a real-estate Web infrastructure company, we had no idea what a technology mad scientist he really was. He’ll tell you himself that he’s a geek. This was a guy who gleefully showed us around his new data center, a Google map of his Twitter followers by location, the webcam setup he uses to shoot video blogs at his desk, and lots of pictures of outer space, one of his passions. The other passion is, of course, technology. When you talk to Ben about technology, his eyes light up, he talks fast(er) and waves his hand in the air. You’ll see what I mean if you watch his video case study.
We’re grateful Ben and 10 other equally passionate customers converged in downtown Chicago last October to participate in a two-day shoot for our “Future is Fluid” video. This video is the story of how Compellent’s Fluid Data gave these customers their weekends back and saved their organizations a ton of money. Besides Ben, there were: Kyle Berger (Alvarado ISD, Texas), Eric Hart (PING Golf, Arizona), Brandon Jackson (Gaston County, North Carolina), Mike Miller (National Print Group, Tennessee), Seth Mitchell (Slumberland, Twin Cities), Sandee Sprang (Office of Attorney General , South Carolina), and Barry Thomas (Graves Gilbert Clinic, Kentucky). Rutch Johnson and Chris Kucik of Metro Pier and Exposition Authority were already in Chicago. Tom Gonzalez (Credit Union of Colorado) was all set to go but got stuck in Denver due to bad weather. On the other hand, Ryan Sclanders from Credit Market Analysis flew all the way from London, UK – he clearly took the mileage prize.
We sincerely appreciate all the time and energy these customers put into the making of the video and all the customers who gave feedback that went into developing the new Fluid Data campaign. Everything we do at Compellent is based on end-user feedback, from product design to go-to-market strategy. I’m proud to be part of company that has such great customers, who are as passionate about enterprise storage as we are. Our customers and the innovative work they do is a huge part of why we believe the future is fluid.
by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — January 12, 2010
Today we announced the launch of Storage Center 5, the fifth release of the Compellent SAN. At a time when storage efficiency and cost reduction are big concerns, we’re pleased to continue offering a single, highly scalable platform with built-in intelligence and automation to help enterprises of all sizes build fluid data environments.
Several people have written about Storage Center 5 such as Chris Mellor, Devang Panchigar, Beth Pariseau, Bas Raayman, Dave Simpson and Steve Wexler and others.
If you’re familiar with Compellent’s culture and design philosophy you know that we work very closely with our customers on R&D. Customer feedback directly influenced the development of enterprise storage features in Storage Center 5 such as:
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Portable Volume external drive kit that allows users to quickly and easily replicate data for disaster recovery purposes
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Scalable SAS drives that mark the first enterprise-class SAS offering from Compellent, which can be mixed and matched within a single enclosure for automated tiered storage
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Automated tiered storage with RAID 6 that automatically moves data initially written in RAID 10 to RAID 6 once it “ages” or becomes inactive and infrequently accessed
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Virtual ports that simplify configurations and lower hardware costs by reducing by 50 percent the number of physical I/O ports required in network switches and Compellent controllers
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Server mapping that allows for the automated deployment and thin provisioning of multiple virtual servers and clusters simultaneously
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Consistency groups that enable fast, accurate Replays of up to 40 volumes at a time for enterprise applications such as databases
One of those customers is Peter Fitch, IT strategic planning and infrastructure manager at Rudolph Technologies, who’s evaluated the platform at an early stage and has offered feedback and shared some of his successes. However, Peter’s not just a beta tester. He’s played a big role in shaping what has become Portable Volume ever since he participated in a product roadmap discussion a few years ago. In 2008, I was with Peter when he met again with Larry Aszmann, our CTO, and Bob Fine, director of product marketing, to talk about what would help him speed up replication for his business, which inspects and test semiconductor products. Peter said a replication solution should be easy to manage, relatively inexpensive and fast, with the convenience of USB. So you can imagine how excited both Peter and I were for him to actually test drive Portable Volume, which was designed with that wish list in mind.
Recently, Moria Fredrickson, who leads our customer case study program, sat down with Peter at his office here in Eden Prairie to talk about how he uses Portable Volume to sync his Minnesota data center with New Jersey. To get the replication started between two sites, what would normally have taken him four months required just a couple of days with Portable Volume. You can watch the interview for a behind the scenes look.
To give you an idea of what the interface looks like when data is replicated from one controller to the next, Chad Thibodeau from our product marketing team created a standalone Portable Volume web demo. (You’ll need about 20 minutes to watch the whole thing.)
Chad’s colleague Tom Sherman put together a brief 4-step web demo on creating Consistency Groups.
Over the next few weeks look for more online demos on Storage Center from them and others on our team.
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