by Stephen Anderson, Director of Alliance Marketing — October 28, 2008

This week a couple of folks from my team will be at the Citrix Summit in Orlando to talk to channel partners about their experiences designing and implementing Citrix solutions for customers. Compellent recently completed certification work to be Citrix Ready, a program that says we met requirements for the Citrix Delivery Center infrastructure for application delivery.

So what does being Citrix Ready really mean? Our SAN passed a lot of verification tests established and confirmed by Citrix to make sure Storage Center will work effectively within a Citrix-based infrastructure. For the enterprise, for instance, Citrix customers who want to use XenServers for server virtualization can be confident that Storage Center will simply just work as the backend, networked storage system.

Of course, we’ve been a Citrix partner for a very long time, and by now hopefully everyone knows that Compellent doesn’t require any third-party apps or agents to have servers talking to the SAN. That means it’s pretty easy to deploy any OS, provision storage for apps, and manage any server connected to the Compellent SAN — in Citrix environments or otherwise. Being Citrix Ready just gives customers that extra level of confidence for deploying Compellent and Citrix together.

Drop us a note if you’re going to Citrix Summit or let us know what you thought of the show afterward.

by Stephen Anderson, Director of Alliance Marketing — June 17, 2008

It was an exciting time to be at TechEd last week, where we were not only included in Microsoft’s partner sessions, but also learned we are now a worldwide Microsoft Partner of the Year.

Compellent is honored to have been chosen from among more than 2,000 partners for the Partner of the Year award. The award recognizes partners who delivered on “significant customer impact, originality, effective time to market, deployment of advanced features, and the ability to optimize their use of Microsoft technologies to meet business needs.”

According to Microsoft's award summary, "The flexibility of Compellent Storage Center, coupled with its integration with Volume Shadow Copy Services, makes it possible for administrators to recover data for Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and other Microsoft applications—quickly and efficiently."

Selected for the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Storage Solutions category, Compellent virtualized storage and Microsoft just go together.  In fact, they complement each other so well that earlier this year Compellent was selected as a core storage component of the Microsoft Partner Solution Center’s (MPSC) virtual data center and disaster recovery strategy.

So here’s to a tried-and-true combination: Compellent and Microsoft.

by Stephen Anderson, Director of Alliance Marketing — April 29, 2008

The talk surrounding Interop today is about how much larger the show is than last year. The show is hot and exhibitors and attendees have grown considerably; a testament to the continued importance of driving storage and networking efficiencies in the data center. Compellent is no exception to the trend. We made our show debut today inside the Riverbed Pavilion.

Many are flocking to the show seeking innovations to help them make the most of their resources. Today our team in the booth will be telling attendees how the combination of Compellent and Riverbed can help them optimize their disaster recovery plan, even in the face of shrinking budgets.Compellent’s thin replication and Riverbed’s WAN acceleration has made remote replication a reality for mid-sized businesses by allowing them to save thousands each month replicating over low-cost IP lines without impacting performance.

As recent joint tests show, Riverbed Steelhead Appliances can improve copy time by as much as 87% when using a 100Mb/s WAN link—talk about making the most of your storage and network resources. The plug-and-play integration between Riverbed and Compellent can be up and running in about 15 minutes. If you are unable to make it to Interop this year, you can hear how Rudolph Technologies combined Compellent and Riverbed to do just that at our upcoming webinar.