by Compellent Technologies, — September 01, 2010
A press conference was held today to announce Heineken Netherlands as a new customer of Compellent. Phil Soran, Compellent, Tod Nielsen, VMware, and Mike Robers and Lucien de Konink, Heineken were at VMware’s Blogger’s Lounge to share the news.
9:15: Tod Nielsen, COO of VMware kicks off the press conference with introductions and highlights the importance of partners like Compellent who provide efficient storage solutions to their customer base. Tod adds “My favorite twist of this press conference is the fact that Compellent is different than other vendors because of their Fluid Data architecture. Funny how last night was the VMworld Hall Crawl, and now we have Heineken a new customer of Compellent.”
9:19: Phil Soran steps in- “We are thrilled to be participating in this conference, and happy to have Heineken as one of our new customers. We’re providing Fluid Data storage solutions to our customers and have been the primary innovator in the storage space, with thin provisioning, sub-LUN automated tiering and intelligent data management. Compellent is one of the fastest growing SAN vendors in the world.” We’re in 34 countries and have 2,100 end-users with about 1,900 of those customers running VMware.
9:21: “Fluid Data is so simple to use that you can even enjoy a Heineken while using our technology it’s that easy.” He adds. “We are expanding globally as a company, as you can see with customers like Heineken and we’re also announcing our Australian market opening this week.” But let’s hear from Mike and Lucien about Heineken
9:22: Lucien: A little about Heineken, we brew great beer and brands. We are the #1 Brewer in Europe. We have 200 regional beer and ciders. We have a brewery in almost every country. The 140 breweries in 70 countries, brewed 200 million hectoliters of beer in 2009. In Netherlands, we have 3 breweries that brewed 18 million hectoliters of beer, 5 million is for domestic and the rest for export.
9:23: “We started Heineken Light last year just for the USA market, because we don’t drink that stuff,” Mike adds, getting laughs from the crowd.
9:24: Mike: Why did we choose Compellent? We needed to look for other solutions. We had a serious problem with support costs from HP, along with capacity and performance issues, so we had to take action and fast. We were stuck on EVA 5000 which didn’t allow us to upgrade to a newer version of VMware. We chose Compellent because it operates with every system and enabled us to have business continuity.
9:27: Lucien: We also had major issues with reporting. Thus, the major pro of Compellent is the reporting, I’ve never seen better. Right now we are 61% virtualized as of last week. We plan to be 90% by 2012. On our old EVA, some business critical reports took 35 minutes to generate, with Compellent it’s done in 20 minutes, showing the obvious performance improvements we’re seen.
9:28: Lucien: The Fluid Data concept gave us high flexibility and reporting functionality. Plus, the 24x7 proactive support, which is critical for us and our business. In addition, with Compellent we were also able to automatically tier 5% SSD, 72% Fibre Channel and 23% to SATA. We lowered our disk count by 40% in Zoeterwoude and 60% in Den Bosch.
9:32: Dave Villante, from Wikibon Group comes to the table
9:33: When you migrate to new systems what do you expect? From my research, customers plan for migration to cost $50,000 and take 6 months, do you guys think that is reasonable? What have you found? He asks of Mike and Lucien. They reply with a couple of raised eyebrows at the cost and said, “We expect it to be very easy. We migrated in three weeks. Our business is a 24/7 operation, so we cannot have much downtime.”
9:36: Can you talk about being a 24/7 company? Dave asks. Mike: You can’t stop brewery systems. If you interrupt the process, the beer goes bad. If a line goes down, it costs 12,000 Euros an hour. Same with packaging and distribution, all of those systems need to stay up and running.
9:38: Dave to all: What do you see as a big disruptive technology in the future? Phil- On the connectivity side, we have 10G iSCSI, FCOE, Infiniband, etc. On the hardware side, smaller drives, SAS taking over and SSD/flash drives. The core of Compellent is the flexibility to incorporate new technologies into existing systems, so when Heineken is ready to adopt the next new technology, they can do that with Compellent.
9:39: On the software side, he adds, data will be managed differently. It will need to be flexible to fit into cloud. You will need automated tiered storage at the block level. When we’ve had customers migrate over to Compellent they reclaim 60-70% of their capacity that they didn’t have with other systems.
9:40: Dave asks Mike and Lucien: What’s the benefit of saving all that space? Mike replies with- Not only are we spending less money, but we’re looking at green IT. Less hardware also means less cooling and power that we need.
9:41: Dave also asked about chargebacks . Mike: We are a non-profit IT organization so, we do chargebacks on a yearly basis and only charge for normal maintenance and hardware. Dave replies asking if charge backs were difficult? Mike promptly answers- no, it was fluid. We’ve been doing it for the past five years.
9:43: Dave to Lucien and Mike: What would you say is on Compellent’s to do list? Lucien- things are very good, all of our previous problems have been solved by Compellent.
Read more about this press conference and the announcement on SiliconAngle.
by Robin Fairchild, Marketing Programs Coordinator — June 14, 2010
Compellent will be showcasing Fluid Data storage solutions at Gartner IOM on June 14 – 16 in Orlando.
If you are planning on attending, visit us!
- During the exhibit hours visit Booth #5 to see Fluid Data in action and register to win an Apple iPad! Our booth will be open on Monday from 11:45 AM – 1:45 PM and 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM. On Tuesday, visit us from 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM.
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Monday, June 14 | 12 PM – 12:30 PM
Join our lunch chat titled “Turn Your IT Infrastructure into a Virtualized Super Stack” and bring your business card for a chance to win one of four $15 iTunes Gift Cards.
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Tuesday, June 15 | 9:15 AM – 10:15 AM
Join us for our solution provider session “True Data Center Virtualization with a Fluid Data Architecture” and hear a real-world story from Seth Mitchell, infrastructure team manager at Slumberland Furniture, and Bob Fine, director of product marketing at Compellent. They will talk about how to unlock the full potential of the virtual data center and the need for a storage solution that automates the movement and management of data and enables you to constantly adapt to change and grow. Bring your business card for a chance to win one of four $15 iTunes Gift Cards.
Hear what Seth had to say about Compellent's Fluid Data in this video.
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Tuesday, June 15 | 6 PM – 8 PM
Unwind and enjoy hors‘d oeuvres & beverages in the Fluid Data hospitality suite in the Del Lago rooms 3 &4. No sales pitches, just casual networking that is as easy to manage as our storage. The drawing for the iPad and four additional $15 iTunes Gift Cards will take place at 7:00 PM! You must be present to win!
Regardless of whether you’re at the show or stuck in the office, you can also tweet your way to an iTunes gift card:
- Throughout Monday and Tuesday be sure to Tweet using both the #Compellent and #GartnerIOM hashtags to be entered into the drawing for four $15-iTunes gift cards! Anyone in Twitter-land can win!
We hope to see you in Orlando—or chat with you online! If you’re planning on being at the show, let me know and we can connect at the show.
Follow me @RobinFairchild or @Compellent.
by Josh Raw, Virtualization Product Specialist — 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.