by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — January 12, 2010
Today we announced the launch of Storage Center 5, the fifth release of the Compellent SAN. At a time when storage efficiency and cost reduction are big concerns, we’re pleased to continue offering a single, highly scalable platform with built-in intelligence and automation to help enterprises of all sizes build fluid data environments.
Several people have written about Storage Center 5 such as Chris Mellor, Devang Panchigar, Beth Pariseau, Bas Raayman, Dave Simpson and Steve Wexler and others.
If you’re familiar with Compellent’s culture and design philosophy you know that we work very closely with our customers on R&D. Customer feedback directly influenced the development of enterprise storage features in Storage Center 5 such as:
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Portable Volume external drive kit that allows users to quickly and easily replicate data for disaster recovery purposes
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Scalable SAS drives that mark the first enterprise-class SAS offering from Compellent, which can be mixed and matched within a single enclosure for automated tiered storage
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Automated tiered storage with RAID 6 that automatically moves data initially written in RAID 10 to RAID 6 once it “ages” or becomes inactive and infrequently accessed
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Virtual ports that simplify configurations and lower hardware costs by reducing by 50 percent the number of physical I/O ports required in network switches and Compellent controllers
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Server mapping that allows for the automated deployment and thin provisioning of multiple virtual servers and clusters simultaneously
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Consistency groups that enable fast, accurate Replays of up to 40 volumes at a time for enterprise applications such as databases
One of those customers is Peter Fitch, IT strategic planning and infrastructure manager at Rudolph Technologies, who’s evaluated the platform at an early stage and has offered feedback and shared some of his successes. However, Peter’s not just a beta tester. He’s played a big role in shaping what has become Portable Volume ever since he participated in a product roadmap discussion a few years ago. In 2008, I was with Peter when he met again with Larry Aszmann, our CTO, and Bob Fine, director of product marketing, to talk about what would help him speed up replication for his business, which inspects and test semiconductor products. Peter said a replication solution should be easy to manage, relatively inexpensive and fast, with the convenience of USB. So you can imagine how excited both Peter and I were for him to actually test drive Portable Volume, which was designed with that wish list in mind.
Recently, Moria Fredrickson, who leads our customer case study program, sat down with Peter at his office here in Eden Prairie to talk about how he uses Portable Volume to sync his Minnesota data center with New Jersey. To get the replication started between two sites, what would normally have taken him four months required just a couple of days with Portable Volume. You can watch the interview for a behind the scenes look.
To give you an idea of what the interface looks like when data is replicated from one controller to the next, Chad Thibodeau from our product marketing team created a standalone Portable Volume web demo. (You’ll need about 20 minutes to watch the whole thing.)
Chad’s colleague Tom Sherman put together a brief 4-step web demo on creating Consistency Groups.
Over the next few weeks look for more online demos on Storage Center from them and others on our team.
Additional links:
by Liem Nguyen, Corporate Communications Manager — November 24, 2009
Here at Compellent we’re as proud of the accomplishments of our customers as we are of our own. So we are thrilled to congratulate the Alvarado Independent School District, located about 25 miles south of Ft. Worth, TX, on receiving an InfoWorld 100 Award. Kyle Berger, Executive Director of Technology Services, and his team over at Alvarado ISD have done some very innovative work to support digital learning and help other school districts replicate data for disaster recovery purposes without having to pay for additional gear.
Alvarado ISD believes that all students should be able to access a digital portfolio of their schoolwork from the very first day of kindergarten all the way through high school graduation. That means storing every homework assignment, report card and test, and making sure financial and administrative data is centralized as well. In addition, Kyle and his team have to protect all this data from disasters like hurricanes or accidental data deletions.
The way the Alvarado team approached the problem was pretty ingenious. Kyle successfully coordinated with other K-12 school districts to circumvent budget restrictions and connect Compellent SANs to allow multi-site replication without having to purchase more hardware or software. A district takes snapshots of its data on the primary SAN it owns, and then replicates these snapshots to the SAN owned by another district. Compellent’s fluid data storage allows Alvarado and each district in the consortium to manage rapid information growth as more students enroll, and provides the districts with unlimited capacity without requiring a complete overhaul to meet this future data explosion. The virtualized storage applications they use—automated tiered storage, snapshots, thin replication and enterprise-wide storage management—keep their important data instantly available and secure, and they avoid the cost and maintenance of a secondary SAN.
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At our annual C-Drive event held last May, Kyle shared some really great details about his multi-site replication strategy. Here are some additional resources on the DR consortium’s inner workings:
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In addition, winners of the InfoWorld 100 were formally announced yesterday at InfoWorld.com; you can also visit the awards page here for more information.
Please join me in congratulating Kyle and the Alvarado ISD on this honor!