Around the Block

QR codes: What are those?

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:57:00 GMT

My name is Maryna Frolova and I’m the new PR Coordinator for Compellent. This is my first blog post for Compellent and you’ll start seeing more blog posts and tweets from me, so please check back often and give me your feedback here or by following me on Twitter @MarineroF. Before I joined the team, one of the things I liked about Compellent is its forward-thinking product and marketing. Today, I get to tell you about one of those innovative initiatives.

QR codes are a way for us to tell Compellent’s Fluid Data story to the highly mobile crowd. You’ll start seeing us use those in a number of different ways at trade shows and with our marketing materials, so we wanted to give you a quick overview of what they are and how we will use them in the coming weeks.

Now, back to the original question, what’s a QR code? A QR code is a matrix code that stands for “Quick Response” that was intended to quickly decode content using a QR code reader. The codes are starting to show up within ads in magazines, on billboards and clothes, with major brands like Nike and Ralph Lauren using them. Below is an example for you to test out.

When you see this special bar code, scan it with your smart phone. To make this work properly, you’ll need to download an app that enables it (we’re using get.beetagg.com). Once you do that, a video or Web site related to the original poster, brochure, handout or t-shirt that you scanned will pop up on your smart phone. In this case, a YouTube video should start playing. Go ahead, test it out. What do you think? It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

Soon, we will have a dedicated QR mobile site that will pop up and play demos or other videos, much like this YouTube video did, and look like the screen shot you see on the left. This portal will allow you to share the video and get more information on the spot.

If you want to learn more about the use of QR codes, read this New York Times story about it. Keep an eye out for more Compellent QR codes and the mobile site coming your way soon.

Risk Management and Automated Tiered Storage

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:33:00 GMT

This is in followup to my post on performance considerations for automated tiered storage. In a recent blog, Martin Glassborow @storagebod posed some good questions about how admins can stay ahead of data loss in a tiered storage environment. He asked for vendor feedback, so this is Compellent’s.

In a Compellent storage system, customers can specify the volumes that get automatically tiered, so you know what applications are tiered and which ones aren’t. A customer may even choose to “lock” an application/volume to a single tier for a specific business reason.

In a tiered environment, or any for that matter, we also recommend clustering controllers for load balancing and failover (the Compellent controllers don’t have to be the same model so you can cluster a 1st generation controller from 2004 with a currently shipping controller).

In case of physical disk failure, our PhoneHome proactive monitoring will alert both the customer and Compellent Copilot team. Often, a new drive is dispatched before the customer is even aware there’s a problem. In the meantime, hot spares can be used for rebuild. Because with thin provisioning we only use up space when data is written, generally rebuild times are faster than for those drives with a bunch of zeros written to them (ie. In SANs using RAID ranks and groups).

In case of data loss, admins can also roll back to locally stored replays (pointer based snapshots) to quickly recover a volume without having to declare a DR scenario. If it’s a physical server issue – say a power supply conks out - customers can use replays in conjunction with boot from SAN to quickly boot and configure a bare-metal standby server with an image centrally stored on the SAN, and mount the volume to the new server. The administration for the entire process can be handled in several ways – via click-through menus from the Storage Center GUI, scripting using PowerShell cmdlets for Windows servers, or the command utility.

If you do have to declare a DR scenario, you can use Enterprise Manager software to initiate failover to replicated volumes stored at the DR SAN site. Enterprise Manager can be accessed remotely and can used to manage replication between multiple sites. Within Compellent’s environment, a production SAN with automated tiered storage can replicate to a secondary site that’s configured as a single or multiple tiers of completely different storage type, RAID level and speed. This lowers the overall cost of replication and DR because you don’t need a copy-exact config between the two sites to do replication. Some customers want the DR SAN to be a full production site for business continuity purposes so may deploy automated tiered storage at the second site too. Then you can revert back to the primary SAN after you’ve resolved whatever issues caused you to declare a disaster. Enterprise Manager also provides dashboards and reports so admins can monitor capacity utilization by volume, RAID level, disk type and business unit, and the status of the tiered or untiered storage at any site.

A lot of buzz is being generated about automated tiered storage but what’s most important is to think about tiered storage as an integrated part of a Fluid Data environment. What other aspects of automated tiered storage are you thinking about?

Block Performance in Automated Tiered Storage

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:13:00 GMT

I’ve been eating crow from my last post on the hapless Vikings, so it’s taking me a little bit to respond to recent blogs by Hu Yoshida and Martin Glassborow. Hu’s focuses on different aspects of tiering whereas Martin’s frames tiering within the context of disaster recovery and asks vendors to clarify how they approach risk management – both topics of much interest and debate here at Compellent. I thought I’d offer a few thoughts on performance and data protection with respect to automated tiering and how it all relates to storage virtualization, thin provisioning, replays (snapshots), boot from SAN and remote replication.

First, storage virtualization

From our point of view, storage virtualization means separating physical disk from logical volumes and virtualizing all the drives (SSD, FC, SAS, SATA) in a system into a single pool of storage. The performance of all the drives can be shared and the system spreads read/writes across all the disks regardless of type or speed. The way Compellent virtualizes storage, we don’t specify RAID ranks or RAID groups in the way other vendors do—you know who you are =), so the issue of RAID rank loss that Martin talks about doesn’t affect a Compellent customer. Loss of a RAID rank is virtually impossible. The array can dynamically move data across different storage tiers at a very granular level—Compellent page sizes are 512KB, 2MB and 4MB—enabling applications and volumes to leverage tiers between disk types and RAID levels and spindle speeds. Also, with RAID 6 we protect against two drive failures in same RAID set (more on that later).

Additional performance considerations for automated tiered storage

Hu covered a lot of the different implementations of tiered storage and their benefits. However, I think he missed a few. Namely:

Automated tiering inside the volume – Dynamic data movement between tiers certainly cuts storage costs but if the array is tiering data only at the volume level then the efficiencies of automated tiered storage are not being maximized. Better utilization, bigger cost savings and more fluid movement result if the array manages and tiers data inside the volume – at the block level, which is what Compellent does. In a Compellent architecture, written data associated with any volume or application can tier by frequency of use so that the active blocks stay on Tier 1 and inactive blocks cascade down to Tier 2 or 3 storage. An example is e-mail. The Exchange volume doesn’t have to be associated with a specific tier of storage, which means blocks of data representing old PDF or Powerpoint attachments can move to Tier 3 (along with read-only replays of the e-mail volume) while emails about a sales deal in progress stays on Tier 1. Same volume, different tiers, no admin intervention.
Automated tiering within each drive – Let’s take the idea of tiering from within a volume and apply it to the physical tracks on a hard drive. Writing data on the outer edges of a drive helps speed up overall performance. It’s physics really. As data is read or written, the drive head moves across the disk platters from the outer to the inner tracks and back as the disk spins. So if the arm doesn’t have to move very far, the data gets read and written faster than if the arm has to move farther in. I’m grossly simplifying but you get the idea. Some vendors place entire volumes in the outer edge to improve performance. But they’re sacrificing disk utilization and efficiency. Compellent’s Fast Track technology by itself moves the active blocks stored in every drive to the outer tracks for performance (the “fast tracks,” get it?). Inactive data gets written to the inner tracks. When you combine Fast Track with automated tiering, this block-level analysis and movement of active/inactive data happens across all the drives across all the tiers.
Automated tiering based on spindle speed – Take SAS drives. Tiering between15K and 7200 rpm SAS, especially if you do it within the same enclosure, means small enterprises can think more seriously about automated tiered storage at lower cost. Likewise, if you started out with shelves of 10K FC drives you could just add 15K FC as Tier 1 and get more use out of the relatively slower FC drives. Or you could add SSD and SAS or SATA tiers, whichever makes sense. The point is if you’re using different speeds of the same drive type you should be able to tier between them.
Automated tiering between RAID levels – Data movement at a block level enables tiering between RAID 10, RAID 5 or RAID 6. A lot of people don’t implement RAID 6 because of the performance overhead with writing double parity for RAID 6. In Compellent’s tiered storage, active data is written to RAID10 first and then the inactive data is dynamically moved to RAID 6. There’s a better balance of performance and fault tolerance, and the RAID6 write penalty is essentially eliminated.

In my next post I’ll cover the data protection and risk management aspects of automated tiered storage.

Compellent’s Purple People Eater

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:52:00 GMT

If you don’t know anything about Minnesota other than the 10,000 lakes and the winter wonderland weather, you should know that a lot of folks here are pretty passionate about Vikings football. Take for example, our sales rep Ross Smith. Normally, he builds and strengthens relationships with Compellent channel partners. But during the season, he’s been dressing like this for every home game at the Metrodome. And since the Vikings are playing the Saints this weekend in the NFC Championship game, he came into work today dressed and ready to rush the competition. If I were EMC and NetApp I’d try to avoid getting sacked. =) Skol Vikings!

Storage Center 5: Introducing fluid data storage for any budget

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:02:00 GMT

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:

Portable Volume external drive kit that allows users to quickly and easily replicate data for disaster recovery purposes
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
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
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
Server mapping that allows for the automated deployment and thin provisioning of multiple virtual servers and clusters simultaneously
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:

Announcement: Compellent Launches Storage Center 5
Storage Center 5 Product Information: www.compellent.com/storagecenter5
Whitepaper: Four Ways to Lower the Cost of Replication
The Register, Compellent extends tiering to SAS
InfoStor, Compellent simplifies replication, cuts pricing
SearchStorage.com , Compellent Storage Center 5 adds portable volume option for replication
Channel Insider, Compellent Unwraps Goodies for the Storage Channel
StorageNerve (Devang Panchigar), Compellent Storage Center 5 – Introduced
Bas Raayman, Compellent just introduced their new Storage Center 5

Grab your skis, rev the ski-doo: 2010 Sales Kickoff

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:48:00 GMT

There is no doubt that Brian Bell, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marty Sanders, Vice President of Technology Services, are excited about JUMPing into 2010. Watch a video they secretly made to open our 2010 sales kickoff, which went on last week here in the frozen tundra of the Twin Cities.

Like something out of Survivor: Jackson Hole, our extreme sports duo then came out on stage with all their skiing and snowmobiling gear—with ties and button down shirts underneath—and got a standing ovation from about 200 Compellent sales employees from around the world. Anyone who grew up in the ‘80s like I did will appreciate the kickoff’s theme song.

Let us know what you think! Brian and Marty will love to read your comments, especially after performing their death-defying tricks of cruising down a mountain, wiping out, speeding (up to 140 mph) and doing “wheelies.”

Too Long for Twitter – Another Compellent Take on Automated Tiered Storage

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:01:00 GMT

Here’s some light storage reading for whatever holiday you happen to be celebrating. Last week I got some questions from Phillip Jaenke, an IT consultant and Unix guy I “met” via Twitter @rootwyrm. He recently worked on a project for a customer of ours and got a little experience managing a Compellent SAN, which prompted him to ask some really detailed questions about our automated tiered storage technology. Since they were a bit too long for Twitter I thought I’d answer him via this blog. I asked Bob Fine, our director of product marketing to help tackle some of them.

Thanks to Phillip for his interest and for sending me these great questions. They are reproduced pretty much verbatim except in a couple places where I edited them for length. The result isn’t quite Click and Clack but you get the idea.

Look for future blogs and video conversations with Bob about storage technology trends. If you have questions or would like to send ideas for future posts, please contact me via email at lnguyen[at]compellent[dot]com or Twitter @LiemNguyen.

Q. With automated tiered storage, what level of control does an administrator have over the ATS behavior? For example, would I be able to control the number of hits on a block required to mark it as a 'hot' block for migration to the fastest tier?

BF: Although we do not provide control over the number of hits per block, we do provide a number of other options for control with Data Progression. These include locking specific volumes to a particular tier and control over how fast we move data between tiers. Our core algorithm moves the most active blocks to the highest tier allowed (also controlled by the admin) which is working well for our customers across multiple vertical markets.

Q. Am I able to control how long these blocks would stay on the fastest tier before migrating downward, and what level of granularity? For example, can I configure ATS so that a block needs to be hit 20 times in a 1 hour period to be flagged for migration to 15k disk, and once migrated, would only stay there for four hours when it drops below that hit rate?

BF: The system is taking into consideration the access patterns for all the blocks in a given volume, and the overall space available on any given tier, to make sophisticated decisions on where to best place the data. This decision is ongoing for the life of the block. You can adjust how long before the blocks move from the fastest tier to a slower tier through our profiles. Right now the options are for days not hours.

LN: The idea of managing the number of hits in a given hour is pretty cool, but the vast majority of customers that talk to us about tiered storage needs want something that’s a lot more “set it and forget it.” The reason they want it automated is they don’t want to mess with the different dials and levers.

BF: That being said, if a lot more customers want that level of control, we’d listen. We consult with our Compellent Customer Council (C3) and Enterprise Advisory Board on issues like next-gen automated tiered storage. What we hear from them is interest in expanding support for different drive types and I/O, not more manual intervention. But customers can definitely work with our Copilot team for some one-off scripting services if they really need even more granularity than we provide today, which is quite a lot already.

Q. Could I also configure ATS so that certain LUNs could skip tiers while migrating? For example, in a configuration with 15k FC, 10k FC, and SATA, could I configure a LUN that would only migrate between SATA and 15k FC, completely skipping the 10k FC tier?

LN: Yes, you can set a policy, or profile, to migrate a volume to a specific tier skipping intermediate tiers. This is customized in the Data Progression user interface.

Q. When a block is 'hot,' how are cache hits taken into account for managing these blocks? Would cache hits count as disk hits from the perspective of ATS, or does ATS only consider disk hits for migration measurements? To get a good bit more technical - is it possible to configure migration to also be based cache hit/miss rate, so that blocks sitting in cache constantly can be migrated to slower disk?

BF: Disk access is the primary factor for data movement, not cache hits/misses. What matters to customers most is disk access speed. Moving inactive data off expensive drives, or moving active data off slower rotating will have the most impact.

Q. Is the Storage Center management interface a separate server, or embedded in the controller? If it's embedded in the controller, is there some way for me to manage an environment with multiple controllers from a single point? (e.g. I have Compellent behind an SVC cluster, and have 3 smaller systems rather than one large one to increase performance further.)

LN: The browser-based management interface is embedded in the controller. All the typical storage admin tasks like mounting a LUN, mapping a server, executing a Replay (snapshot) can all handled via wizards. The design principle we used for the GUI was akin to TurboTax. If you can file your taxes online, you should be able to manage TBs of storage without special training or services.

The GUI makes managing storage for one server at a time pretty easy. For automating storage management tasks for hundreds of servers at time in Windows environments we’ve also integrated Microsoft’s PowerShell 2.0 cmdlets. For non-Windows users we also support a command utility for scripting.

You can manage multiple controllers and sites using a "single pane of glass" via our Enterprise Manager software, which is installed on a separate server. Some of the things you can do with Enterprise Manger are resource reporting across all sites (e.g. amount of SSD and SAS used), administering replication (including bandwidth shaping, live verification), administering chargeback, and creating handy charts that you can hand over to your CFO or CIO.

Q. Does Compellent provide an SMI-S for performance monitoring or array management? (Otherwise known as "can I hook it to IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, BMC Patrol, Tivoli NetCool etcetera?") In a Tier0 / Telco environment, does it have alarm capability either through SNMP trap or dry contact?

LN: Yes, we support SMI-S 1.2 and SNMP traps. Our PhoneHome proactive monitoring also alerts the administrator of issues and admins can get prompted to do certain tasks like add more physical storage.

BF: We’re doing additional testing with SMI-S 1.4 on enterprise management frameworks from IBM, HP etc.

Fully scalable automated storage tiering should be available for any sized budget

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:11:00 GMT

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.

Compellent Customer Alvarado ISD Earns InfoWorld 100 Award

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:14:00 GMT

Here at Compellent we’re as proud of the accomplishments of our customers as we are of our own. So we are thrilled to congratulate the Alvarado Independent School District, located about 25 miles south of Ft. Worth, TX, on receiving an InfoWorld 100 Award. Kyle Berger, Executive Director of Technology Services, and his team over at Alvarado ISD have done some very innovative work to support digital learning and help other school districts replicate data for disaster recovery purposes without having to pay for additional gear.

Alvarado ISD believes that all students should be able to access a digital portfolio of their schoolwork from the very first day of kindergarten all the way through high school graduation. That means storing every homework assignment, report card and test, and making sure financial and administrative data is centralized as well. In addition, Kyle and his team have to protect all this data from disasters like hurricanes or accidental data deletions.

The way the Alvarado team approached the problem was pretty ingenious. Kyle successfully coordinated with other K-12 school districts to circumvent budget restrictions and connect Compellent SANs to allow multi-site replication without having to purchase more hardware or software. A district takes snapshots of its data on the primary SAN it owns, and then replicates these snapshots to the SAN owned by another district. Compellent’s fluid data storage allows Alvarado and each district in the consortium to manage rapid information growth as more students enroll, and provides the districts with unlimited capacity without requiring a complete overhaul to meet this future data explosion. The virtualized storage applications they use—automated tiered storage, snapshots, thin replication and enterprise-wide storage management—keep their important data instantly available and secure, and they avoid the cost and maintenance of a secondary SAN.

At our annual C-Drive event held last May, Kyle shared some really great details about his multi-site replication strategy. Here are some additional resources on the DR consortium’s inner workings:

Kyle’s C-Drive presentation on Slideshare
Alvarado ISD case study
SearchStorage story “Texas schools form disaster recovery consortium and collaborate with SAN replication”

In addition, winners of the InfoWorld 100 were formally announced yesterday at InfoWorld.com; you can also visit the awards page here for more information.

Please join me in congratulating Kyle and the Alvarado ISD on this honor!

Raise Your Storage IQ

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:10:00 GMT

If you want to raise your Storage IQ, get to C-Drive this year. Based on your feedback, we continue to enhance our conference to make it more geared toward you and your needs. Sign up now at the early bird rate and take advantage of some of the key benefits we have ready for you:

No price increase for channel partner and end user registration fees. We’ve held the line again on price increases, delivering the best value in IT for an industry conference. Take advantage now as we can’t guarantee prices will stay the same for 2011.
More technical content in sessions. We are focusing sessions even more on the key technical aspects of Compellent, getting right to the core on architecture, data center automation, configuration and best practices. These technical deep dives will also run longer than last year, providing more time to talk and interact.
More live demonstrations. We are adding more equipment next year, and will be spending more time showing, rather than just telling across a wide variety of sessions. See first-hand how it really works for new features, for integrated solutions and for bigger picture business solutions.
New sales content. Yes, we’ll continue to provide the basics on how to sell our features, but now we’ve got new content on how to sell our total solution. This content is being developed by the same team that brought your Top Gun training and it goes from
New Super Sessions – Super Sessions feature our Principal Storage Architects, probably the smartest guys on the planet about storage, and they will explain things that instantly raise your storage IQ. Super Sessions are a live technology showcase featuring real-world business scenarios. We’ll have a team of technical experts on stage focused on assembling a complete hardware and software solution. They’ll put it together and tear it apart, all right before your eyes.
Returning to downtown Minneapolis. You asked for it, and we are delivering another conference in downtown Minneapolis. This puts you within walking distance of dozens of local attractions and in the middle of a busy, vibrant city night and day.
Both basic and advanced sessions. We are working behind the scenes to offer content for both returning attendees and new attendees, tagging our sessions with labels so you know where to aim with your attendance.
More Compellent employee involvement. Meet and greet with every major department within the Compellent organization, from Copilot Support to Storage Architects to the Engineering team and more. If you don’t see who you want, ask us and we’ll work to get you access. Meet the people you rely on face to face and have time to go beyond the day to day.

Put Compellent at your core this year and get to C-Drive. Register at cdrive.compellent.com.