by Maryna Frolova, PR Coordinator — February 25, 2010
Training is an important part of familiarizing yourself with a new data storage system. Compellent hosts training sessions almost every week for our customers, partners and new employees. Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Jim Wegner from Synergy Medical Education Alliance to talk about his new Compellent SAN and the training session that he was attending at Compellent headquarters. Listen to Mr. Wegner talk about his virtualization project, as well as why he is enjoying his training course.
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Next week, I will be traveling to Atlanta to attend one of the biggest healthcare IT trade shows, HIMSS10, to talk to our healthcare customers and healthcare experts about what’s on their mind for healthcare IT and storage issues for the industry in 2010. If you are planning on attending the show, please visit us in booth #8741. Stay tuned for more videos from the show floor. Follow me @MarineroF for news and updates from HIMSS10. |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmJOjco3Ojs
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 — September 02, 2009
We’re posting two videos from the conversation we had with Jon Toor, VP of Marketing for Xsigo. In this video, Jon talks about how virtual I/O works.