Compellent Announces Data Progression™, New Storage Center Application Delivers Intelligent Tiered Storage to the MidmarketOctober 17, 2005
Compellent's SAN Is Industry’s First to Automate Block-Level Data Migration Between Storage Tiers Based on Usage Patterns
Minneapolis, Oct. 17, 2005 — Compellent Technologies, a provider of affordable and modular enterprise storage solutions, today announced the availability of Data Progression, a new Storage Center™ application that automatically migrates inactive data at the block level to a lower-cost tier of storage based on actual usage patterns. Data Progression delivers intelligent tiered storage capabilities to midmarket organizations at an affordable price for the first time.
“70 percent of all utilized space has not been accessed in the past 90 days,” said Ray Paquet, Senior Storage Analyst, The Gartner Group. “Companies are concerned with their growing volumes of inactive data to the point that it has become a critical business issue that every midmarket company needs to address with their storage solution in order to better manage capacity, control costs and meet the needs of their customers.”
Data Progression automatically classifies and migrates data to the optimum tier of storage based on frequency of access, allowing businesses to retain frequently accessed data on high performance storage and store infrequently accessed data on lower cost storage. By maintaining all data online and optimizing placement across multiple storage tiers, companies purchase less storage overall and increase service levels.
“Midmarket companies are facing problems that can’t be solved with their legacy storage solutions,” said Phil Soran, co-founder and CEO, Compellent. “By managing the data differently than traditional systems, Data Progression automatically moves company data to the optimal storage tier – aligning its frequency of access with the disk capacity and performance required.”
Data Progression is the storage industry’s first application to intelligently classify and migrate data between storage tiers at the block level, rather than requiring the movement of an entire volume or file. Most applications continue to write small amounts of new data to a single large file (e.g. Outlook.pst file). With Data Progression the inactive portions of the file are automatically migrated at the block-level to lower-cost disk, rather than storing the entire file on highperformance disk.
With Data Progression, Replays (snapshots) can be assigned to automatically migrate to a lower-cost tier of storage on a volume-by-volume basis, enabling a continuous set of snapshots online. This accelerates the speed of recovery to any point in time without sacrificing capacity.
Additional capabilities of Data Progression include:
- Automatically categorize storage tiers based on disk drive type, RAID level, and rotational speed
- Intelligently migrate data either across drive technologies (Fibre Channel and/or SATA) or between RAID levels
- Monitor and adjust “high-water” marks to properly regulate and self-tune the movement of data up or down multiple storage tiers
- Based on administrative setting, locks down any volume so critical data remains on high-performance storage
- Compatible with all current and future disk drive and enclosure technologies
- Compatible with all operating systems, databases and applications
“It is impossible for any organization to manually track and determine when any single piece of data has grown inactive,” said Ryan Fletcher, Head Systems Engineer of Whitehall City Schools in Central Ohio with more than 3500 users. “Data Progression automatically migrated 85 percent of our data to lower-cost SATA drives without any manual intervention, resulting in an immediate payback and increased performance and availability on our Fibre Channel disk.”
About Storage Center
Storage Center builds on its Dynamic Block Architecture to deliver a scalable, open-systems hardware platform that is designed to allow businesses to mix and match disk drives, controllers and enclosures; an integrated foundation of core storage capabilities providing functionality previously available only in high-end systems; a suite of software applications that can optimize utilization, automating replication and speeding data recovery; and a single, intuitive, centralized management interface streamlining storage administration.
About Compellent
Compellent delivers affordable, modular storage solutions exclusively through business partners that provide companies of all sizes enterprise storage capabilities without big system costs or complexities. For more information, visit www.compellent.com.