Around The Block Blog
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — June 11, 2010
Five years is a long time in the storage industry. Five years ago, Compellent’s thin provisioning technology was a year old, and we introduced sub-LUN, block-level automated tiered storage to the world. Five years ago, Beth Pariseau,
@PariseauTT, started covering the storage industry over at SearchStorage.com. That’s when Compellent first started working with her, offering our perspective on storage issues and connecting her with our customers across various industries, and we’ve enjoyed a great working relationship ever since. She was always willing to hear our point of view, and that means a lot to a growing company in this competitive market. Today Beth announced she’s
moving on
from the storage beat and will cover broader IT topics in the Data Center and Server Virtualization Group for TechTarget (the parent company to SearchStorage).
While I’m sure we’ll continue to share ideas on the role of storage virtualization in the data center, we’re going to miss regularly working with Beth. When I joined Compellent in 2007, I already knew of Beth’s reputation for balanced reporting, always digging at the story behind the story and never taking any vendor’s claims at face value. I first met Beth in person over dinner (Chinese) while at SNW Spring 2007 in San Diego. I found out that besides being a good reporter, she was a die-hard fan(atic) about all sports teams Boston, and we also compared notes about digital photography. She clearly knew more about ISO and F numbers than I did, and who was playing well or playing hurt. News briefings and phone calls since then have tended to include sideline discussions about the unimaginable life of Tom Brady or whether David Ortiz’s bat swing evoked fear or regret. Regrettably, I was supposed to take her to lunch last year but I broke my leg (playing touch football of all things) and had to take a raincheck.
Beth, the Compellent team wishes you all the best in your new role and thank you for sharing our passion for storage and sports. It’s been a fun and exciting journey for all of us as the market has changed so much over the past five years. We look forward to working with you on new stories, and also following you over
@Cursed_to_First
. Hopefully you and I will have that lunch soon.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — May 11, 2010
Our partners at Citrix and Microsoft are making it easier for Compellent Fluid Data storage users and channel partners to plan cloud computing projects. A few weeks ago, Compellent announced our work with Microsoft on the dynamic infrastructure toolkit for cloud computing. This week the Compellent team will be demonstrating more of our next-gen cloud technology support for both Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco.
In Compellent booth no. 300 in the Moscone Center tomorrow May 12 through May 14, we’re going to showcase support for the next evolution of the Citrix Ready program: StorageLink version 2.2. The upcoming StorageLink 2.2 code from Citrix will include the Compellent Storage Adapter, which integrates provisioning, management and recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines through the StorageLink interface.
The wow factor will be our demo for Site Recovery integration. It’s future technology from both Compellent and Citrix, which will automate setup and execution of disaster recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads. I can’t go into more detail right now but we’re working on enabling customers to integrate Compellent continuous snapshots and thin replication with Site Recovery.
Stay tuned for more official words from Citrix and Compellent. In the meantime, don’t miss our demonstrations of Compellent, Citrix and Microsoft cloud tech at Synergy.
If you can't make it to Synergy, here's a video demo that walks through some of the technical features of the StorageLink 2.2 GUI with Compellent integration. We'll have the second demo with Site Recovery next week.
Let us know if you're going to Synergy. If you're already using StorageLink or plan to use it with Site Recovery we'd love to hear from you.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — April 27, 2010
Today Compellent is pleased to introduce the latest in our unified storage line, the Compellent zNAS , which is our first NAS based on ZFS (Zettabyte file system). Compellent zNAS is ideal for mid-sized and large enterprises with file and block based storage requirements, especially in mixed Unix, Linux and Windows environments.
Why is this important? Because file storage requirements are going through the roof, with analysts like IDC predicting the amount of unstructured data (office docs, videos, graphics files) will increase by more than 60 percent annually through 2012. That's a lot of growth, requiring both granular system intelligence and big file scalability to manage all that data, regardless of size or type, in the most efficient way. The Compellent zNAS was designed with those storage consolidation needs in mind. Here are a few of the product highlights:
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Unified storage management interface - The zNAS interface integrates file and block storage management tasks. For example, an admin can create file shares that are instantly, thinly provisioned on Compellent enterprise SAN. Other data management tasks such as volume deletion, snapshot creation and system analytics are also available from the unified interface (See sample screenshot)
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Fluid Data architecture - Regardless of whether the data is written by file-based or block-based applications, the zNAS leverages our Fluid Data architecture to consolidate the data in a virtual pool of storage and provide granular system intelligence to actively manage the data. The solution offers block-based thin provisioning, automated tiered storage, boot from SAN, continuous snapshots and thin replication applications.
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High-performance NAS hardware - The zNAS ships as a single 1U NAS node or a clustered dual configuration. The NAS comes with dual Intel Nehalem processors and memory up to 48 GB. Because each node is diskless, the management software and NAS image boot from the SAN, which means fewer hardware components to deploy, maintain and upgrade.
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Single, scalable platform - The back-end storage consists of the Storage Center controller and enclosures that can support any type of drive such as SSD, SAS, FC or SATA. By leveraging a persistent hardware platform and managing just one pool of storage, enterprises can greatly simplify management, improve performance for their applications, and save money on hardware and associated costs.
If it's ZFS, it's got to be massively scalable
- ZFS is an advanced, highly scalable file system: it’s a 128-bit file system addressing 18 quintillion (1.84 × 1019) times more data than current 64-bit systems.
- The practical limitations on file size and directory entries cannot be defined, so basically you’re bound more by the physical capacity of the unified platform - in Compellent’s case that’s 1,008 disks.
- ZFS has advanced error detection and correction, using end-to-end checksums to authenticate data integrity.
- ZFS has other valuable storage efficiency features such deduplication, which is expected to ship later this year on zNAS (end of Q2/beginning of Q3).
We'll ship the Compellent unified storage solutions with zNAS by the end of June 2010, available only through our global network of channel partners.
For more information, watch the brief zNAS product tour (below) by Troy Presler, the product manager for zNAS.
If you'd like more information on unified storage, join me (@LiemNguyen) and ESG senior analyst Terri McClure (@esganalysttmac) for the next #SANChat on unified storage at 1:30 pm CDT later today, April 27. We will talk about the benefits of scalable NAS, next-generation unified storage technologies and other storage issues.