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 Compellent Technologies, — May 06, 2010
8:17 am - Bruce Kornfeld and Marty Sanders make an appearance to start off the day talking about Compellent’s product road map. We welcome feedback and help prioritizing what you’d like to see next.
8:19 am - Fluid Data is new, but the underlying architecture is not. We’ve been using it all along, this is just a new way to describe Compellent’s feature set and capabilities.
8:20 am – We’re shipping RAID 6, and we also have the ability to take replays of multiple volumes at the same time (called ‘consistency groups’). Other Storage Center 5 features include Virtual Ports, Portable Volume, server mapping and standards-based space recovery.
8:22 am – Audience Response question: Please describe your replication use today:
- None – 33%
- Server-based replication – 18%
- Compellent storage replication – T3 or less – 24%
- Compellent replication – OC 3 – 12%
- Compellent replication – OC 12 – 5%
- Compellent replication – >OC 12 – 8%
8:24 am – Portable Volume reduces bandwidth requirements and saves time with automation and encryption. It’s an easy way to bring initial synchronization up.
8:25 am – Audience Response question: The fastest storage growth in your environment is coming from:
- Files/unstructured data – 51%
- Email – 12%
- Database & custom applications – 37%
8:27 am – zNAS: we’ve built a file system based on ZFS, runs on the same platform as Windows storage server. Automatically configures Storage Center on the backend.
8:29 am – Live Volume allows for planned migration – it’s non-disruptive. We’re exploring a lot of roadmap options going forward with this product.
8:30 am – We have a great platform based on Fluid Data – our goal is to move that platform to new places in storing data, to have it work seamlessly with new technologies. It’s all based on this same platform, no forklift upgrade necessary.
8:31 am – Compellent Metrocluster will offer easy, practical and affordable enterprise data protection; it’s the next step from Live Volume. Operations keep running, even if one side has an outage; the RAID and system redundancy are built into one system.
8:37 am – Standards based Space Reclamation – we’re one of the first storage companies to support SCSI SBC-3. As Operating Systems start picking up this technology you’ll have the capability to reclaim disk space after files are deleted by any OS.
8:38 am – We’re excited to come out with the Series 40 Controller. There are a lot of advantages – we’re adding another slot (7 total), all will be PCIe. The performance out of this box is just incredible, and we’re looking forward to better and better performance.
8:41 am – We’re very excited about this next generation scalable system – moving further into the Enterprise with the same platform. New capabilities will include: Series 40, larger cache (no more batteries), extreme scalability, more connectivity, and de-dupe options.
8:44 am – Dynamic Block Deduplication – we’re still working on this, but think about what we do from a Fluid Data standpoint: we put the right types of data on the right types of drives at the right time. Now, when we’re doing this, we can take a look at the blocks and compress if possible – it’s just part of the natural flow of data progression. Good show of hands when asked who’s excited about this technology!
8:46 am – How many people are using SAS technology from Compellent? Very few – probably because you’ve been using FC and SATA for some time. These are continuing, but SAS is the future of the back end of the Compellent Storage Center. It’s higher performance – we’re going to 6 Gb later this year. 2.5 inch drives will also be shipping.
8:50 am – The next phase of Storage Center is having the ability to take multiple storage centers and have volumes exist partially on each system. As replays age, have them automatically migrate to less-costly storage. Flexibility with the high-availability environments.
8:57 am – We’ll be doing more work on application integration, with partners like VMware (SRM, vSphere API with space reclamation), Microsoft (PowerShell, SCOM, DIT-SC (Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center), Citrix (StorageLink with replication), Commvault (replay integration with Simpana), and Oracle (RMAN integration). Also Enterprise Certifications with IBM (SVC, VIOS, DB2, Tivoli), HP (Storage Essentials), and Symantec (NetBackup, Array Support Library – Linux, Solaris, Windows, AIX,HP-UX).
9:01 am – Audience response: Which of these Alliance Partner projects are you most interested in?
- CommVault snapshot integration – 27%
- Oracle RMAN integration – 22%
- Symantec Windows ASL – 24%
- Microsoft DPM integration – 27%
9:02 am – Audience questions focusing on dedupe – lots of interest and curiosity! More drill-downs will take place in individual sessions later today.
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.