by Andy Hardy, Managing Director, International Sales — June 25, 2009

The Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA

June 24, 2009

Dear Prime Minister:

Compellent welcomes, in principle, the Global Action Plan’s call on Central Government
for a £1 billion IT stimulus package that will lead to smarter, more environmentally
efficient, higher quality public services.

The recession has clearly forced public and private organisations to look harder at
technology investments, especially anything labelled as ‘green’ or ‘environmentally
efficient’ IT. Organisations have had to move quickly to cull any fuzzy, nice-to-have
green IT options. Only green IT that clearly delivers greater efficiencies, with
measureable and sustainable cost-benefits, can make a real difference.
Most of the greatest recent innovations in true technology efficiency, for example server
and storage virtualisation, have sprung from agile, fast-growing companies, none of
whom has been offered a public role with the Global Action Plan. Instead, it’s the usual
IT behemoths with very limited direct claims, or indeed incentives, to offer truly efficient
IT, who have put themselves at the head of the line for any state funds.

Subsequently, there is a very grave risk that any stimulus package will be put to highly
inefficient use, depriving British public sector organisations of the best technology
options while extending the deployment of ageing, inefficient and power-hungry IT
solutions. Much of any stimulus payment, which comes from the taxpayers, will therefore
be wasted.

We call on the Global Action Plan and the British government to think very deeply about
how any stimulus can be put to best use, based on proven best-practice examples that cite
true efficiency in terms of delivering more in terms of a solution, while using less
hardware and less energy to deliver it.

The digital future of Britain requires a forward-thinking infrastructure based on today’s
technology, not yesterday’s. Such an approach has already been proven to deliver more,
but cost less, a concept that the tax-burdened British public will appreciate and
welcome.

The nation has had its fill of political cosiness and gross fiscal irresponsibility. This
could be an opportunity to start putting things right.

by Compellent Technologies, — June 15, 2009

On June 16th, Compellent will be participating in an exciting virtual trade show hosted by CIO discussing the benefits of virtualization and how it’s helped organizations cut costs, optimize resources and enable disaster recovery and business continuity.

During the event Compellent CTO, Larry Aszmann, Burton Group analyst, Chris Wolf, and Compellent customers Tom Gonzales (Credit Union of Colorado) and Ping Ooi (Ares Management) will take part in a “Virtualization at Work” panel discussion. They will address ways virtualization can answer pressing budget questions, the current and future state of virtualization and cloud computing, industry trends and personal experiences with the technology.

For more information or to register for the event, please click here.

The event will air live on Tuesday, June 16th, and be available on demand from June 17 - September 17, 2009. All attendees who visit the event on June 16, 2009 may win an Apple® - iPod touch® 8GB MP3 Player compliments of CIO.

Session Panelists Information:

• Vendor: Larry Aszmann, CTO, Compellent – Larry serves as the pacesetter for the panel discussion, speaking first on almost every topic and dictating the direction and tone of the panel.
• End User 1: Tom Gonzales, Credit Union of Colorado – Tom serves as the primary back-up for Larry, offering an end-user example to many of the points Larry initiates. Like usual, Tom does an excellent job discussing CUoC, while promoting Compellent.
• End User 2: Ping Ooi, Ares Management – Ping has a limited role throughout the first half of the discussion, but begins to speak more effectively towards the end. He seems to miss a few opportunities to discuss Compellent.
• Analyst: Chris Wolf, Burton Group – Chris seems to serve as the impartial participant, providing a general industry perspective. He often speaks for long periods of time without interruption.

CIO’s Virtualization Virtual Conference will provide a drill down into the trends shaping how CIOs are leveraging virtualization. It’ll look at wringing out the maximum cost savings; hidden benefits like green IT and disaster recovery; how virtualization is poised to push cloud computing past the tipping point; best practices for managing your virtual environment; Open Source Virtualization: Ready for Prime Time?; and virtualization and security: the critical issues confronting CIOs.

by Pete Steege, Global Marketing, Seagate Technology — May 13, 2009

Back in the day, enterprise disk drives were pretty simple to figure out. They were the fastest and toughest drives on the planet - period.  Storage systems would use the newest version available, with pretty much the only choice being capacity.

Now, the game has changed. Enterprise applications have expanded in scope and scale, and storage solutions have evolved in response.

But just like a winning baseball team, the best storage systems combine the strengths of various disk drive technologies to deliver a result better than any single class of drive can provide. Compellent gets this.

Inside Compellent’s Storage Center you'll find up to three types of disk drives working seamlessly together for better results for end-users:

1. The Seagate Cheetah 15K drive leads off, and is the speed demon that delivers the goods when it comes to accessing the most active data.  With capacities up to 600 GB now, it's no slouch on the capacity front either.
2. The Seagate Cheetah NS drive bats cleanup, with Compellent offering 400 GB drives, one of the highest available capacities for a 10K rpm drive.  A great balance of performance and capacity for data that's needed fast, but not the most active.
3. The Seagate Barracuda ES SATA drive carries the load for the lineup, with 1TB capacity per drive. The Barracuda ES has lower performance than the Cheetah family, but lots of cost effective space -- just what large quantities of less active data need.

Behind every championship baseball team is a championship coach, and storage is no different. Storage Center's unique and automatic blending of storage players is what ultimately helps these drives deliver the goods.

Seagate is proud to be a part of Compellent's team. We continue to lead the industry for storage devices, and we work closely with Compellent to get those innovations implemented as soon as they're ready for the big leagues.

We'd love to hear from you, too - what could Seagate do to make a Compellent solution even better?

The Storage Effect http://storageeffect.media.seagate.com/
Inside IT Storage http://enterprise.media.seagate.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/petesteege

by Compellent Technologies, — May 7, 2009

Although SSD was big at C-Drive 2009, the future of Compellent storage is much more than flash. As the conference came to a close, customers were a buzz about several new technologies.

by Compellent Technologies, — May 7, 2009

The executive suite is counting on IT to be nimble enough to keep up with storage growth and help companies stay sharp against the competition. Business technology leaders Brandon Jackson of Gaston County, North Carolina, Giovani Oteri of Iper Montebello, Michael Knocke of Kansas Spine Hospital and John Chaffe of Tidewater Inc discussed the real-world issue they face each day as well as the business impact of IT and storage.

9:10: 62% of attendees said the economic climate has impacted storage spending within their organizations.

9:13: Mike Knocke realized the IT department had unused server equipment and hardware, which was inefficient, and that led him to adopt a phased virtualization approach. 

9:15: Gaston County had the opportunity to revamp data center zoning four years ago. After reviewing how much space the data center was using, the company had a huge opportunity to redesign the data center, with data management topping the list of priorities as the team began evaluating storage options.

9:17: Gaston County dropped energy consumption by 30% and shrunk the data center by 20% after installing Compellent.

9:19: Giovanni Oteri found that Compellent drastically changed the way they look at storage. Storage is not a core business for the company, and while important, it was very important to spend efficiently and Compellent allowed his team to justify that spending.

9:21: During hurricanes Katrina and Rita, John Chaffe had to haul the data center across the country twice. That led to developing a DR plan that could be managed anywhere, by anyone.

9:22: Brandon Jackson looked at 6 different vendors when evaluating storage and ease of administration was a top priority. Replication and boot from SAN were priorities for John Chaffe.

9:24: The audience responded that lowering CAPEX, lower people costs and reducing the environmental impact all ranked equally as far as efficiency priorities.

9:26: John Chaffe stated that efficiency is his focus. Greening the data center isn’t as much of a priority as greening the ships the company has deployed around the world.

9:28: 50% of the audience currently measures the power consumption in their data centers.

9:29: Brandon Jackson is able to measure in the data center, and expects to be able to measure all IT within the next two years. Between 2005 to current, he dropped cooling in the data center by 30%.

9:30: Giovanni Oteri prefers investing in low power consuming technology because it reduces BTUs, but also reduces the complexity of cooling.

9:32: In 20 years, Giovanni Oteri has never had the necessity to recover data more than a week old. They will be abandoning tapes within the next 3-4 years.

9:32: John Chaffe uses Compellent’s replay technology to restore files over tape back-up because it’s quicker and more efficient. He’s fully replicating between New Orleans and Dallas.

9:34: Mike Knocke has a three-SAN solution project where he replicates across the campus, as well as iSCSI replication to an off-site SAN. In the event of a total disaster, they would be able to recover data virtually. Given the healthcare industry regulations, Mike still uses tape back-up.

9:36: The investment in employee training is a case-by-case decision depending on how the environment changes. However, all panelists noted that they try to keep budgets small for training which is another reason why Compellent has been easy to justify.

9:40: How does IT view data deduplication in primary storage now and in the future? Panelists agreed that dedup should be done at the application level and not at the storage level.

9:42: How does the panel feel about SSD support? Giovanni Oteri thinks Storage Center will maximize the performance benefits of SSDs because of its dynamic block architecture. Michael Knocke is looking to invest down the road, but sees challenges within application speeds which may not benefit from SSDs.

9:45: How is cloud computing and storage-as-a-service affecting your long term strategic planning? John Chaffe will be looking for an email and archiving services. Brandon Jackson thinks it will be a slower adoption rate because of security and control reasons.