by Liem Nguyen, (former) Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — September 19, 2010
Last week, Compellent celebrated the availability of Storage Center 5 and the opening of our office in Australia. Brian Bell, VP of worldwide sales, Craig Stockdale, managing director of ANZ, Stephen Madden, solutions architect for ANZ and I hosted locally based customers, channel partners, reporters, analysts and bloggers as well as the IT community at events held in Sydney and Melbourne. Craig and Stephen are based in Melbourne though they spend a lot of time in Sydney. (Look for them next month at the vForum in Sydney.)
On Wednesday, Sept. 15, we converged at the Park Hyatt Sydney hotel, located alongside Sydney Harbor with a spectacular view of the Sydney Opera House. We spent the following day in Melbourne at the Riva St Kilda overlooking Port Phillip Bay. It was a great week. Even better knowing Compellent is now forever linked to Australian history. No, I didn’t get hit in the head with a boomerang. Let me explain.
Australian History Lesson
Two people were key to the founding of Australia: Arthur Phillip and James Cook. Phillip, appointed as governor of New South Wales, led the expedition that sailed into Sydney Harbor and founded the city of Sydney. There are many places named after Phillip, Port Phillip Bay for one. Cook was the first European to discover eastern Australia and circumnavigate New Zealand, and his name is on many places too—places like James Cook University, which implemented two Compellent SANs while working with our long-time partner Regal IT.
We were honored that Lee Askew, IT manager at the university, flew 6 hours from Townsville, Queensland to come to our launch event at the Park Hyatt. The Park Hyatt sits by Sydney Cove where the first European settlement was established by Phillip. I’d be a far wiser man if I told you we chose the location because of the historical significance. In reality, our reasons were a bit more practical; the fun connection to Fluid Data and the location’s availability swayed our decision to go with this location. Only later did I learn from Chris Chambers with our partner XSI that Phillip landed and pitched the first tents just a boomerang’s throw from the hotel. So you could say that Compellent launched its business in Australia at the same spot where the country itself was launched. That’s a good sign.
Many thanks to our Australian community for coming to our launch event, which included customers from Children’s Medical Research Institute, KPMG, Mitchell Communications Group, Metricon, Pepper Homeloans and Stryker, and representatives of our channel partners Geomatic Technologies, Interconnekt, Regal IT, Sententia and XSI.
Click to watch a brief video message from Brian and Craig recapping the launch as well as photos and additional links below.
Sydney:
From left: Craig Stockdale, managing director of ANZ; Brian Bell, VP of worldwide sales; Stephen Madden, solutions architect for ANZ
Watching the Fluid Data customer video.
James Henshaw, head of IT at Pepper Homeloans, and Brian Bell of Compellent
From left: Chris Ober, VP and senior analyst of Ideas International; Darryn Capes-Davis, ICT manager of Childrens Medical Research Institute; and Stephen Madden of Compellent
Melbourne:
The calm before the storm. Literally, high winds and waves came to St Kilda right after I took this photo.
Brian Bell with members of the XSI team in Melbourne
Craig Stockdale of Compellent with Mark Deady of Geomatic Technologies
Additional Links:
Press Release: Compellent Announces Strong Channel Partner and Customer Momentum in Australia, Introduces Storage Center 5
Customer Story: Childrens Medical Research Institute
Customer Story: Mitchell Communications Group
ITwire: Compellent customers speak about Australian storage market
ITwire: Compellent Australian expansion gains momentum
Techworld: Compellent launches in Australia
ARN: Compellent sees wealth of opportunity in Australia
ITNews: Compellent launches ‘fluid data’ in Australia
by Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing, Dell Compellent — February 22, 2008
We hope you’ve all been following the launch of Compellent’s Storage Center 4.0. We’re excited about all of the upgrades we’ve made and the potential the product has to impact the storage market. We’ve noticed from some of the articles that have run have compared one of our new features, Fast Track, to solutions already on the market, like this article. And to that, we’d like to take a couple of moments to provide some additional clarity on our Fast Track feature.
Fast Track provides benefits far beyond short stroking. Fast Track does provide performance benefits similar to short stroking since data is written to the outer zones of the drive. However, Fast Track goes beyond short stroking by utilizing the full capacity of the drive as inactive data is placed on the inner tracks. All the benefits without the high cost of short stroking.
Fast Track is fully automated and dynamic. The storage admin sets up the volume once through a few clicks and never touches it again. All blocks are analyzed daily to determine frequency of access. The most active blocks are moved to outer zones and inactive blocks are moved inward, automatically.
Fast Track operates at the block level rather than a volume level. By working inside the volume, only the small portion of a volume that has the highest activity will be moved. Other storage products operate at the volume level, which requires movement of the entire volume.
Fast Track leverages Thin Provisioning. This is very important since only the actual data is committed to the disk. Some vendors that lack thin provisioning must write the entire volume to the outer edge of the disk. Since only 20% of the total capacity provides the highest performance, a thick provisioning volume will typically consume more than just the outer zones, eliminating any potential performance gains.
Let us know what you think about Fast Track, Thin Import and other features of the new release.