Around The Block Blog
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — June 17, 2010
As you may know, over the past several months Compellent hosted a series of Twitter chats known as #SANChat. #SANChat first started in March, and through these chats we’ve generated some great discussions on important data storage topics, including virtualization, unified storage, and risk vs. reward. Funny how much you can fit into a tweet.
I’m happy to announce that #SANChat will be moving forward with a dedicated schedule of monthly discussions, the first Wednesday of every month from 3:00 – 4:30 pm CT. Please join us and guest experts, end-users, and others interested in today’s most important data storage topics.
Our next #SANChat will be Wednesday, July 7, 3:00 – 4:30pm CT with John Troyer (@jtroyer) of VMware and Craig Miller (@craigwmiller) of Bioware, to discuss Virtualization and DR. It’s the follow on to last month’s discussion on virtualization 101 issues. We hope to see you there!
Below you will find some FAQs about #SANChat.
What is #SANChat?
#SANChat is an open Twitter chat on enterprise storage issues and trends such as virtualization and unified storage. #SANChat is vendor neutral, and invites a variety of moderators and guest experts on different topics.
Who participates?
Everyone with an interest in (an opinion on!) IT is welcome to participate—vendors, solution providers, end-users, bloggers, reporters, analysts and other independent observers.
Is it all about Compellent?
No. While #SANChat is founded and administered by Compellent, the purpose of the chats is to provide a Twitter-based venue for fun, informative, real-time conversations about storage and its role in enterprise IT. Everyone is encouraged to participate in the effort to create a well-rounded look at current trends and a collection of different opinions. It makes for much more interesting discussions!
When is #SANChat?
#SANChat takes place on the first Wednesday of each month, from 3:00 – 4:30 pm CT. Each #SANChat topic and participants are announced in the weeks leading up to the chat.
How do I participate?
To take part in the conversation, we recommend using the TweetChat application, which can be easily accessed by visiting http://tweetchat.com/room/SANchat.
What if I missed the previous SANChats?
You can visit http://wthashtag.com/sanchat for up-to-date information on our upcoming chats and past dates. Here are our latest #SANchat transcripts:
Data Center Risks, March 24 (Moderator: @johnddias, Guest: @bencredible)
Unified Storage, April 27 (Moderator: @liemnguyen, Guest: @esganalysttmac)
Virtualization, June 2 (Moderator: @justinbraun, Guest: @dconnor)
Can I become a guest or moderator?
We are always on the lookout for new topic ideas, moderators, and guests. If you would like to participate or have an idea for the next #SANChat, please contact me at Liem[dot]Nguyen[at]compellent[dot]com or @liemnguyen. If you’re a good fit for an upcoming topic, chances are we can arrange for you to moderate or be a guest.
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, — May 05, 2010
2:17 pm - Steve Merkel from Latisys will discuss how Latisys has evolved it’s Compellent based managed storage practice to support changing IT needs within the market and create a cloud-based recovery platform. A packed house, even some attendees standing!
2:18 pm - Latisys is an infrastructure services provider headquartered out of Denver; customers range from small to enterprise class. Lots of our customers have compliance requirements (HIPPA, for example). We have four sites across the country.
2:19 pm – Latisys started using Compellent in 2007. Steve goes over IT spending trends using data from Gartner. Bankruptcies have increased, as has cloud service adoption.
2:24 pm – Staffing trends are towards reduction in staff in 2009 and 2010.
2:24 pm – Recently customers have been asking more about cloud services – they want to understand what it is and we’re seeing them push hard to identify initiatives. On the DR side and testing is where we’re seeing people pick up cloud adoption in the enterprise space.
2: 27 pm – The convergence of staffing cuts and budget decreases means it’s the perfect chance to introduce cloud. There is a “do more with less” mentality.
2:28 pm – In 2009, Latisys grew its storage platform 700 percent. Started at 10TB and is now at 90TB.
2:29 pm – Steve doesn’t care for the term cloud; says the term is the ‘bellbottoms’ of the IT industry. It really is on-demand infrastructure services from a third party.
2:30 pm – Security is the biggest challenge/issue with cloud. Performance is next, and availability is the third most frequent concern.
2:31 pm – Latisys environment overview: Four data centers (275,000 square feet), 40 gbps of IP across four centers, 2750 servers (physical and virtual).
2:34 pm – Data Progression is critical to our operation (SATA-only for anything production doesn’t work for us). We use it to normalize I/O variables.
2:36 pm – How did we achieve I/O Zen? We removed pure SATA volumes as an option for production environments and implemented snapshots on our storage profiles (even if clients don’t require them).
2:37 pm – Security is a roadblock to cloud adoption – we need to help make customers feel better about how we store their data. Storage Center allows us to track activity (a “paper trail” so to speak). Also, we don’t do shared compute today for enterprise clients.
2:41 pm – We are redundant in all actions – resiliency.
2:44 pm – VMware SRM – we have a couple of beta customers and hoped we’d be able to share that detail here, but delays have unfortunately prevented that.
2:46 pm – Lessons Learned/Best Practices:
- Don’t make DR about IT – it’s about the RTO and RPO. DR should be tied to the system requiring availability.
- Do the front-end leg work – pre-configure network components, including firewalls and VPN’s
- Test – Test it again and again! Many people don’t do it enough.
2:49 – Steve takes questions from the audience.