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, — April 19, 2010
Presented by Dave Cearley, VP and Fellow, Gartner, and Carl Claunch, VP and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
8:31 – This list has been compiled after looking at what technologies will impact businesses over the next three years—technologies that are reaching maturity or a tipping point and technologies that target mainstream companies.
8:33 – The list is not meant to be exhaustive, but the list will rotate new technology strategies in and out of the list.
8:34 – Recap of the 2009 list compared to the 2010 list. Some strategies have been removed, and new ones have been added, but virtualization remains at the top of the list. Here’s the complete round-up:
- Virtualization
- Cloud computing
- BI & Advanced Analytics
- Client Computing
- Social Computing
- Mobile Applications
- Security: Activity Monitoring
- Reshaping the Data Center
- IT for Green
- Storage-Class Memory
8:35 – Starting with cloud computing. Gartner defines cloud computing as "a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided as a service to customers using Internet technologies." Cloud computing takes things that have happened over the last 10 – 15 years, like SaaS, virtualization, etc., and pulls them together to provide a new target on how data centers and infrastructures are being delivered and applications are being designed.
8:37 – The five broad categories of service are:
- System infrastructure (IaaS)
- Application infrastructure (PaaS)
- Applications (SaaS)
- Information
- Business Services
8:39 – There are three focal points for cloud projects:
- Consuming public cloud services
- Implementing private cloud-computing environments
- Developing cloud-based applications and solutions
8:41 – When consuming cloud-computing services, the IT department’s responsibility will vary depending on the cloud model chosen. Different service models place different levels of management ability on IT. The more capabilities that are put into the cloud, the less control the enterprise has over them.
8:45 – Virtualization is advancing in many ways. It’s a very old technique in computer science—introduced in 1950’s. What’s changing is how we use it. We can now ignore the boundaries of the limitations of the server or storage box. There’s been a real explosion in a number of areas. Server virtualization is the hottest trend, and the goal is to cut costs and improve the overall use of the data center. Still, the minority of all workloads are running from virtualization.
8:47 – Over time, there’s a shift in virtualization. Companies that adopted it for cost cutting want to use it for increased scalability, flexibility and testing environments.
8:49 – One thing to keep in mind is that virtualization adds complexity, and complexity can create errors. When implementing virtualization, make sure that it won’t negatively impact the rest of the organization. When moving resources around with virtualization, workloads are going to shift.
8:53 – Virtualization goes beyond simple consolidation. The potential of a live migration capability eliminates downtime in the event of a failure. It also eliminates extra equipment – like high-availability equipment, fault-tolerant servers and more.
8:57 – Many of the things we thought about building the data center for so many years is actually wrong. It’s far more efficient to split the data center into power zones of high-, medium- and low-density equipment, based on workload mix.
9:00 – Green IT means more than energy-efficient IT. In only a few sectors do the primary contributors to an enterprise’s carbon footprint come from IT. So the question becomes, how much of a contribution to the overall green footprint will green IT make? Other green strategies include carbon tracking, smart building technology, teleworking, optimizing transportation of goods and remote communication and collaboration to reduce travel.
9:03 – Even though IT may not have a huge impact on the overall carbon footprint, it does make a large contribution.
9:08 – Mobile Applications: Many tens of thousands of new and more powerful applications are coming online, and the trend seems to be accelerating. Mobile applications need new servers to which they can connect.
9:10 – The next wave of business intelligence is here. The current PCs and cell phones are so powerful that enterprises can simulate or model the future before making strategic decisions. Before, enterprises would offer customers the same products and treat everyone the same. There was then a shift to data-driven decision making. Now, enterprises can look into analytics that present overall effects on the business for every business transaction.
9:14 – Web 2.0 and social software has a lot of applications, like social networking, social collaboration, social media and social validation. Enterprises need to look into the use-case scenarios. Successful companies blend business social software, customer community and public social media strategies.
9:18 – Storage Class Memory: The penultimate issue. There are interesting things going on in storage today, and one of the most impactful is flash memory. Flash is persistent, and doesn’t need to be powered to retain information. Flash memory allows the data center to access data much faster than disk drives. It shouldn’t be treated as just more memory or more disks. There needs to be a management layer that optimizes the memory. By moving some information or data to flash or SSDs, the data center can experience much improved performance. While flash is much more expensive, there are interesting cases that show how flash can dramatically benefit the business. It goes beyond simply adding tiers of storage, and changes the way applications are designed and performed.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — February 01, 2010
This is in followup to my post on performance considerations for automated tiered storage. In a recent blog, Martin Glassborow @storagebod posed some good questions about how admins can stay ahead of data loss in a tiered storage environment. He asked for vendor feedback, so this is Compellent’s.
In a Compellent storage system, customers can specify the volumes that get automatically tiered, so you know what applications are tiered and which ones aren’t. A customer may even choose to “lock” an application/volume to a single tier for a specific business reason.
In a tiered environment, or any for that matter, we also recommend clustering controllers for load balancing and failover (the Compellent controllers don’t have to be the same model so you can cluster a 1st generation controller from 2004 with a currently shipping controller).
In case of physical disk failure, our PhoneHome proactive monitoring will alert both the customer and Compellent Copilot team. Often, a new drive is dispatched before the customer is even aware there’s a problem. In the meantime, hot spares can be used for rebuild. Because with thin provisioning we only use up space when data is written, generally rebuild times are faster than for those drives with a bunch of zeros written to them (ie. In SANs using RAID ranks and groups).
In case of data loss, admins can also roll back to locally stored replays (pointer based snapshots) to quickly recover a volume without having to declare a DR scenario. If it’s a physical server issue – say a power supply conks out - customers can use replays in conjunction with boot from SAN to quickly boot and configure a bare-metal standby server with an image centrally stored on the SAN, and mount the volume to the new server. The administration for the entire process can be handled in several ways – via click-through menus from the Storage Center GUI, scripting using PowerShell cmdlets for Windows servers, or the command utility.
If you do have to declare a DR scenario, you can use Enterprise Manager software to initiate failover to replicated volumes stored at the DR SAN site. Enterprise Manager can be accessed remotely and can used to manage replication between multiple sites. Within Compellent’s environment, a production SAN with automated tiered storage can replicate to a secondary site that’s configured as a single or multiple tiers of completely different storage type, RAID level and speed. This lowers the overall cost of replication and DR because you don’t need a copy-exact config between the two sites to do replication. Some customers want the DR SAN to be a full production site for business continuity purposes so may deploy automated tiered storage at the second site too. Then you can revert back to the primary SAN after you’ve resolved whatever issues caused you to declare a disaster. Enterprise Manager also provides dashboards and reports so admins can monitor capacity utilization by volume, RAID level, disk type and business unit, and the status of the tiered or untiered storage at any site.
A lot of buzz is being generated about automated tiered storage but what’s most important is to think about tiered storage as an integrated part of a Fluid Data environment. What other aspects of automated tiered storage are you thinking about?