by John Dias, Storage Architect, Dell Compellent — November 22, 2010
The future just got a little more "cloudy" for Compellent with the release of some major updates in Storage Center 5.4 including some significant hardware updates—there's a lot to take in so let's get started.
Most notable among the hardware updates with the 5.4 release is the next generation controller in Compellent's lineup, the Series 40. The updated platform brings greater IO card capacity (six PCI-E 2.0 x8 slots) and 25% better performance. This platform will allow customers to take advantage of some of the new IO options (which will also be supported on the Series 30) and scale single systems to even larger capacities. The front end IO options now include FCoE for converged networking support. On the back end 6Gb/s SAS IO cards and enclosures are now shipping, including a 2.5" 24-bay 2U enclosure with three new drive options (146GB 15K; 450GB and 600GB 10K).
On the software side there's a game-changing capability that will resonate with enterprise customers. For years, customers have enjoyed Compellent's Data Progression feature, which provides an automated tiering capability to balance capacity and performance in a given system. Within a system the data is managed in a couple of ways—data protection levels (RAID 10 for writes and distributed parity for read only data) and disk tiering (data management based on disk performance characteristics). This allows customers to grow storage as needed (either by adding performance or capacity tiers) delivering an efficient scale up storage growth model.
However, this "two dimensional" data management scheme had previously been isolated to single systems. Compellent gave customers the ability to manage multiple systems under one console but the Data Progression features described above were limited to a single system (for the most part, replicated volumes can have a different storage profile—but you get my meaning).
Traditionally, as storage environments grow, so do the number of systems. These silos create a new level of inefficiency and management complexity that potentially cancels out any benefits gained from tiering. Moving data between siloed storage is time consuming and complex and as the infrastructure expands to meet demand, pockets of IO and throughput and capacity disparity begin to appear.
Compellent has introduced a "third dimension" data management capability through Live Volume which allows for rules based automated movement of data between storage systems non-disruptively. Live Volume plays a big foundational role in Compellent's delivery of scale out storage architecture to the enterprise and the cloud.
Using Enterprise Manager 5.4 the storage administrator can designate replicated volumes as Live Volumes. This allows the target volume in the replication scheme to become a mountable real time read only volume. Writes continue to be ingested at the source system and replicated to the target.
Should the workload shift (IO or throughput) to the target, the Compellent Storage Centers will swap roles—the target site will then become the source. Workload triggers are customizable as is the setting for allowing write ownership to transition again. Live Volume also allows for manual swapping as well. Additionally, each copy of a Live Volume enabled volume may have its own replay (snapshot) schedule.
When combined with a virtual server infrastructure the possibilities are pretty exciting. For example, a fully virtualized (compute, network and storage) infrastructure can be distributed among different campus data centers or within different power/cooling zones in a large enterprise data center. As workloads on the virtualized compute environment shift the storage workload will follow. I know from experience that data center power maintenance and generator tests being a huge pain to schedule, coordinate and execute. With this kind of a compute/storage grid available maintenance windows become practically non-existent turning your internal cloud into a 24-by-forever IT engine.
Live Volume also provides higher availability for servers using multipath SAN connections. Not only can a server have two or more connections to the SAN, with Live Volume, the targets can be distributed between two systems hosting Live Volume copies. Connections to the secondary Live Volume system could be set up as failover connections. Personally, I'm hopeful that MPIO drivers in the future will become Live Volume aware and distribute read IO between Live Volume pairs—but that's me talking, not a Compellent offering.
This new three dimensional data management model extends Compellent's value into the enterprise and cloud IT offerings where flexibility, reliability and scalability are required, not just desired, features of a modern storage system. Compellent has been the leader in scale up storage and now with Live Volume they're delivering on scale out. You're going to see Compellent continue to build on Live Volume to enable customers to scale beyond.
P.S. If you're wondering about Compellent's potential delivery of data management for the "fourth dimension" then consider that Compellent is a charter member of the
Active Archive Alliance
.
Editor’s note: This blog post is also appearing on John’s personal blog, StorageGumbo.com.
by Enrico Signoretti, CEO of Cinetica — November 22, 2010
Today, Compellent announced a new version of its enterprise storage platform: Storage Center 5.4.
A brief recap of the announcement
On the hardware side there are a lot of news: new Series 40 controllers (now fitted with the powerful nehalem CPUs, bigger caches, more expansion slots), FCoE and 10Gbit iSCSI support, 2,5" SAS trays. This new hardware is the foundation for the next generation software enhancements bringing a new level of performance and scalability at the same time.
On the software verge, aside from the release of Storage Center 5.4 to support the new hardware and the new VMware integration plug-in, we can find one of the most impressive features I have ever seen in the storage industry: Live Volume.
A step forward in the right direction
Before going deep into the technical details I would like to point out one important thing (that you can't easily discern from the press release): all the features shown above are available to all Compellent customers! Yes, the Compellent software licensing model is perpetual so, if you have a support agreement in place, you can update every hardware series to the new software features (for free!) or, if you don't need new features but merely more power, you can choose to update only your hardware!
This approach is great (customers are always happy about that): they can buy only what is necessary when they need it, no forced upgrades of hardware to get new software features or vice-versa!!!!
Furthermore, you can also add new SAS trays (or IO cards) to old generation systems without changing the controllers. I'm pretty sure that this capability is unique to Compellent (I don't recall anyone in the industry sporting this feature) and makes a big difference with the competition, allowing customers to spend as little as possible to maintain and update their SAN.
Back to the core
I will not spend more time in this article talking about the hardware; it's obviously much more powerful, more expandable, with more IO options while widening the backend options at the same time. It's all you can expect from your storage vendor with a new announcement, isn't it?
But the software part of this announcement is something that you can't ignore! I'm not talking about the better integration with the hypervisors (especially VMware with the new outstanding plug-in, ;) ), I mean Live Volume.
Live Volume is a new SOFTWARE FEATURE enabling non disruptive volumes (LUNs) movements between different arrays! Live volume is to storage as vMotion is to virtualization. No external appliances, no constraints, no limitations – it just works. Well, this feature was mentioned many times in the past and many customers are already using it in production, but now it's official and available to everyone.
I'm sure that this feature will, in some way, disrupt the market for scale out block storage, I'm also wondering when a DRS-like technology will be applied to the Live Volume concept, that will definitely transport the virtualization benefit to the block storage world.
Editor's note: Enrico Signoretti is the CEO of Cinetica, one of Compellent's channel partners in Italy. This post is also appearing on his company blog.