Around The Block Blog

by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — September 01, 2010

We are very excited to have Heineken Netherlands join us at VMworld 2010, particularly for the press conference at the VMware Social Media and Blogger’s Lounge in Moscone South at 9:15 AM PST and the SuperSession today at 3:00 PM in Room #134 in Moscone North. Being the number one brewer in Europe with more than 200 regional, local and specialty beers and ciders, it’s no surprise that Heineken Netherlands generates a lot of data. What you may not know is that not too long ago Heineken Netherlands wanted to upgrade their VMware infrastructure but was faced with capacity, performance and reporting issues with their HP EVA storage systems. After evaluating other vendors they landed on Compellent Fluid Data for our automated tiered storage with enterprise SSD, scalable and persistent hardware, and, of course, the seamless integration with VMware. Together, Compellent and VMware have increased performance for Heineken Netherlands by as much as 300 percent and reduced disk requirements significantly using tiers of SSD, FC and SATA. In the future, Heineken Netherlands will be able to save even more money adding SATA disks almost exclusively.

As part of the team preparing for the press conference and SuperSession, it’s been a pleasure working with the IT folks from Heineken Netherlands and talking with them about the real-world problems they were faced with and how they went about addressing those enterprise challenges. I remembered how we joked about the connection between Fluid Data and enjoying your fluids in moderation, but in the end, the Heineken Netherlands IT story is really about better enterprise performance and storage efficiency since they’ve introduced Compellent into their VMware environment.

Here are additional press conference details:

• Who: Phil Soran (CEO of Compellent), Tod Nielsen (COO of VMware), Lucien de Konink and Mike Robers (Heineken Netherlands)
• When: Wednesday, September 1 from 9:15 AM to 9:45 AM (PST)
• Where: VMware Social Media and Blogger’s Lounge, Moscone South

Can’t make it to the press conference? Or even worse…couldn’t make it to VMworld? No problem. Tune in to find out more and watch it streaming live at http://www.SiliconAngle.TV starting at 9:15 AM PST.

**Update: View the recorded session here: http://www.siliconangle.tv/video/compellent-ceo-phil-soran-customer-heineken-netherlands**

SuperSession details:

• Who: Bruce Kornfeld (VP of Alliance for Compellent), Parag Patel (VP of Global Alliances for VMware), Lucien de Konink and Mike Robers (Heineken Netherlands)
• When: Wednesday, September 1 from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (PST)
• Where: Room #134

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:

1. Virtualization
2. Cloud computing
3. BI & Advanced Analytics
4. Client Computing
5. Social Computing
6. Mobile Applications
7. Security: Activity Monitoring
8. Reshaping the Data Center
9. IT for Green
10. 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:

1. System infrastructure (IaaS)
2. Application infrastructure (PaaS)
3. Applications (SaaS)
4. Information
5. Business Services

8:39 – There are three focal points for cloud projects:

1. Consuming public cloud services
2. Implementing private cloud-computing environments
3. 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 Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing, Dell Compellent — December 08, 2009

As many people know, Data Progression, Compellent’s automated tiered storage application, is one of our main differentiating technologies. Data Progression leverages our Dynamic Block Architecture to move individual blocks of data to different tiers of storage based on a set of pre-defined or custom policies. This means only frequently accessed, mission-critical data resides on high-performance storage tiers and infrequently accessed blocks moves to less expensive storage.

Today we received more validation on the value of Data Progression from one of the largest vendors in the industry, EMC. EMC announced it’s now shipping FAST, and in a recent presentation, EMC showed a graphic on their FAST application (slide 16 in this presentation), which is strikingly similar to our Data Progression. (We’ve also seen 3Par, Sun, Avere and Pillar recently announce or promote their own form of automated tiered storage.) The fact that other vendors in the storage industry are following Compellent’s lead in enabling automated tiered storage is flattering.

However, it is worth pointing out a few fundamental differences between the implementations of automated tiered storage. For instance:

• As I’ve previously outlined, Data Progression is a proven, mature technology that has been in use by customers since 2005.
• FAST and other competitive solutions only have the capability to move entire volumes of data between tiers, while Compellent’s Data Progression moves data at 512KB blocks, regardless of the storage volume or disk type. Our customers can tune Data Progression to move up to 4MB pages depending on the application, but of course, the more granular the data movement the better. Because of this active management of data, Compellent’s automated tiered storage can save customers 50 percent or more in storage costs.
• Data Progression and our Fast Track feature will also automatically migrate blocks of data based on frequency of access from the inner to the outer tracks of every disk drive, further saving about 20 – 30 percent in storage costs while improving performance. The fastest parts of a drive is typically the outermost edge. Some vendors put entire volumes on the outer tracks, which in many ways negates the efficiency advantages of automated tiering.
• Data Progression also tiers data between RAID volumes, so for example, in a single tier of FC storage a Compellent customer can migrate the inactive blocks off of RAID 10 to RAID 5 to further save on disk costs and free up their RAID 10 space for higher-performance needs. Compellent recommends customers use RAID 5 and slower high-capacity drives for read-only snapshots, which don’t need the performance of RAID 10 or fast disk. Why buy tier 1 disk for inactive data?
• Data Progression software is also an integrated part of our modular and scalable solution, which does not require customers to rip-and-replace their current storage investment just to acquire automated tiered storage as their needs grow. This is perhaps the most important difference between Data Progression and FAST and others. Data Progression is built into the Compellent SAN, just like boot from SAN, snapshots and replication software, and all existing customers need to do is purchase and download a license key.
• Whereas other implementations are limiting the technology to a small number of enterprise customers today, we believe an automated tiered storage solution should be able to accommodate all enterprises, from the SMB all the way up to the largest enterprise, without discriminating.
• Many vendors including Compellent, Pillar and 3Par support thin provisioning with automated tiered storage. The combination is critical for maximizing storage efficiency and utilization. On the other hand, EMC doesn’t appear to support thin provisioning with FAST.  The lack of support on EMC’s part further limits the customer base that can actually use FAST. Compellent’s thin provisioning software, Dynamic Capacity, and Data Progression work together seamlessly. About 2/3 of our customers use Data Progression together with Dynamic Capacity, with installations ranging from 2TB to 1PB or more.
• The maturity of Compellent’s automated tiered storage solution also enables customers to easily mix and match popular and emerging drive technologies such as SAS, SATA, FC and SSD in one virtual pool of storage. The tiering is based on rotational speed, so it’s possible to use different spindles  of the same drive type—such as 7,200 and 15K RPM of SAS, or 10,000 and 15,000 RPM of FC—in different tiers within the same system. Because the Compellent architecture is also open, we’ll support a range of I/O technologies from FC to FCOE and iSCSI to 10GbE without requiring controller upgrades.
• The benefit of a truly dynamic and persistent storage architecture means you can scale automated tiered storage to keep up with changing data requirements. We have customers such as Munder Capital that have simply added an SSD tier for better performance to their existing automated tiered storage system that they’ve been using for years (integrated with thin provisioning, replication and so on).
• Data Progression is a technology we’ve worked hard to develop, patent and improve upon since we shipped our first SAN, and we couldn’t be happier with the feedback from customers of all sizes. They tell us how much Compellent’s automated tiered storage has saved them money, both in IT staff time and hardware acquisition costs. Automated tiered storage has relieved the traditional pain points of data management—and revolutionized the storage marketplace. Naturally, we’re very interested to see how end-users of EMC, 3Par and Pillar will use automated tiered storage over the long-term. But until then, we’ll happily appreciate that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.