by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — September 11, 2008

Two of Compellent’s key technologies – Data Progression and Replays – have recently been accepted for patents.

I’m excited to tell you that as of the patents’ issue dates, July 8^th and July 22^nd, we are the only company with these proprietary technologies. We have many other patents pending.

You can read the full patents, in all their legalistic language, at the US Patent and Trademark Office site, but for those of you who aren’t lawyers, here’s what they mean:

Data Progression Patent

Our Dynamic Block Architecture is the foundation for everything Compellent does and is the key to the way blocks of data are metatagged and manipulated. Unlike legacy storage systems, Compellent manages data inside the volume, and DBA enables all the features that Compellent offers in one SAN – and competitors can’t – like Data Progression (automated tiered storage), Dynamic Capacity (thin provisioning), Fast Track, Free Space Recovery and other storage management applications.

The patented Data Progression software takes a problem—information lifecycle management—that can’t be solved well manually, and automates storage tiering. Simply, Data Progression moves unused (or rarely used) data to lower-cost, more energy-efficient storage. Because you aren’t using the data anyway, it’s there, it can be easily retrieved, but it isn’t eating up your IT budget. When the data is used again, it automatically moves back to a higher tier, to eliminate latency.

The key advantages of Data Progression are cost, footprint and energy savings. In a recent test, 146 GB were stored on RAID-10 volumes, versus 1 TB stored on RAID-5 SATA drives. The terabyte of data, although much greater in quantity, used just 8% the cost, 8% the footprint and 6% of the energy. This translates into real savings.

The configuration of Data Progression is now optimized in the latest version of Storage Center, version 4.1. We’ve incorporated best practices for tiering storage, and have applied recommended parameters automatically to volumes, which will make it easier to get the benefits of automated tiered storage right out of the box. If customization is needed you can create profiles and apply that same tiered setting for one volume, a group of them, or all volumes--for instance, you can create a unique tiered setting for all digital images.

Here are some screen shots of the old and new interface for comparison.

Data Progression Interface – Storage Center 4.0

Data Progression Interface – Storage Center 4.1.x
1. Default, optimized setting: No configuration needed, all active data written to RAID 10, Replays written to RAID 5 for all volumes

2. Creating Customized Automated Tiered Storage Profile

Data Instant Replay Patent

Our patented Data Instant Replay technology enables continuous snapshots but does it in a way that’s more efficient – we only copy changed data, not full clones of entire volumes. This makes it easier to replicate data over IP networks, using Remote Instant Replays, for a relatively inexpensive disaster recovery solution.

Storage Center 4.1 now makes it possible to automatically migrate Replays within a single tier. This means you can dynamically migrate Replays between RAID volumes – e.g. from RAID 10 to RAID 5—within one tier of storage.

Compellent improves storage performance by creating practical and innovative ways of managing your active and inactive data. We want to hear from you. What are the greatest challenges to you in terms of managing your storage? How are you tiering storage today?

by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — April 22, 2008

Marc Farley over at Dell/EqualLogic noted we promoted the Quality Award story and mentions iSCSI competition in his brief post. Compellent has always considered itself a positive aggressive company and we have always strongly believed in presenting the facts and letting customers decide. As I mentioned yesterday, Compellent was rated #1 overall and #1 in 3 out of 5 categories, voted on by customers.

Whether it's iSCSI or Fibre Channel, we think the best approach is to offer customers a choice of interface and disk technologies. In fact, the majority of our customers employ both technologies in their Compellent Storage Center. With this hybrid approach our customers can maximize the benefits that each of these connection technologies provide.

Marc's post and today being Earth Day made me think about our "design for persistence" mentality. We offer one product which scales from the smallest entry level usage to the maximum configuration using the same platform in the field, often without having to throw anything away. This not only includes the hardware, and different interface and disk types, but also the software, thus preserving our customers' investment. The next time your storage vendor tells you that you need to buy new software and hardware to replace a previous offering, you should ask why.

We also believe in the following environmentally responsible technologies — providing them in one solution probably makes us unique in the market:

1. Thin provisioning — Up to 75% less physical storage required
2. Automated ILM — Hybrid approach utilizing multiple types of storage devices to slash energy consumption, compress footprint and equipment costs
3. Fast Track — Higher drive performance permitting a reduction in the number drives required

Choice is something all customers demand. Compellent will continue to offer fiscally and environmentally responsible technology choices in one product, whereas our competitors seem to be offering technology choice through multiple product lines. Both approaches have clear characteristics and customer benefits, and customers will continue to decide what's right for them. As it should be.

by Bob Fine, Senior Product Marketing Manager — February 22, 2008

We hope you’ve all been following the launch of Compellent's Storage Center 4.0. We’re excited about all of the upgrades we've made and the potential the product has to impact the storage market . We've noticed from some of the articles that have run have compared one of our new features, Fast Track, to solutions already on the market, like this article. And to that, we’d like to take a couple of moments to provide some additional clarity on our Fast Track feature:

• Fast Track provides benefits far beyond short stroking. Fast Track does provide performance benefits similar to short stroking since data is written to the outer zones of the drive. However, Fast Track goes beyond short stroking by utilizing the full capacity of the drive as inactive data is placed on the inner tracks. All the benefits without the high cost of short stroking.
  
• Fast Track is fully automated and dynamic. The storage admin sets up the volume once through a few clicks and never touches it again. All blocks are analyzed daily to determine frequency of access. The most active blocks are moved to outer zones and inactive blocks are moved inward, automatically.
  
• Fast Track operates at the block level rather than a volume level. By working inside the volume, only the small portion of a volume that has the highest activity will be moved. Other storage products operate at the volume level, which requires movement of the entire volume.
  
• Fast Track leverages Thin Provisioning. This is very important since only the actual data is committed to the disk. Some vendors that lack thin provisioning must write the entire volume to the outer edge of the disk. Since only 20% of the total capacity provides the highest performance, a thick provisioning volume will typically consume more than just the outer zones, eliminating any potential performance gains.
  

Let us know what you think about Fast Track, Thin Import and other features of the new release.

by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — February 5, 2008

Today’s the first day of the Green Grid Technical Forum conference (Compellent is a member), so it's appropriate to think about how companies can reduce data center costs while also reducing the carbon footprint of their data centers. Through some new ways of thinking about storage you can reduce the overall number of disks needed and reduce physical space needed. That might sound odd coming from a co-founder of a SAN company – after all I'm rewarded for the amount of storage systems our company sells – but reducing your storage usage is the best, long-term approach to the problems many businesses are facing now.

So what’s the recipe for an energy efficient SAN? Here are five key ingredients:

1. Thin provisioning – It’s a must have for a cost-effective, “green” data center. Remember, by increasing the amount of utilization – the percentage of the drive that’s taken up by actual data, not just allocated space – you’re going to lower the number of overall drives required. You’re no longer pre-allocating storage capacity to volumes before that capacity is used.
2. Automated tiered storage – Distributing data across a combination of disks by continually tracking usage and automatically moving data between tiers based on predefined rules and frequency of access. By automatically moving infrequently used data from tier 1 storage, which is almost always power-hogging 15K RPM Fibre Channel drives to energy-efficient, higher-capacity SATA storage, you can greatly reduce the number of high-energy drives. And as a result, cut down on the cost of powering your storage system.
3. Storage virtualization – You need to merge all your disks into a single pool of storage, allowing any volume to use all disk drives simultaneously to access data. That way, you can separate applications from physical storage devices to get the same performance with fewer drives compared to a non-virtualized storage environment.
4. Boot from SAN – By putting an OS boot volume on a SAN rather than on the server, you don’t need internal server disks. You can rack up diskless blade servers to save space, power, cooling, and cabling costs. You could save thousands of dollars per server by going diskless, too. But beware the fine print. Not all boot-from-SAN solutions are equal. Make sure that you don’t need third party agents or apps (which means internal server disks!) to point your servers to the "gold image" stored on the SAN.
5. Continuous snapshots – Using a multi-tiered storage system lets you store read-only data such as snapshots on cheap disks. Some snapshot technologies are more space-efficient than others – with pointers to changed data instead of mirrored data. That way, when a snapshot is taken, the storage within that volume becomes read-only, so that it doesn’t need to be written again. That means instead of RAID 10, you can use RAID 5 and save yourself some drives, and just as important, use less power and cooling than the RAID 10 configuration for active, read-write data.

Like I said yesterday real estate is a prime commodity and many businesses don’t have space to spare for larger data centers. If your IT initiative for 2008 is to reduce the number of disk drives required – and therefore reduce the amount of space and energy you’re consuming – take a look around at the innovative technology available today. I don’t believe we need to compromise data storage functionality for energy efficiency, any more than we’d compromise our favorite family recipe -- we're just updating it. Let me know if you agree there is such a thing as an energy efficient SAN. In a future post, I'll analyze the positive impact on disk drive and energy usage using the above storage technologies in a data center.

by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — January 30, 2008

I know what you're thinking - the blogosphere is already full of 'not just another storage blog' blogs – but I’ve looked around and come to the realization that there is a need for straightforward thoughts on storage. Having a place where we can gather to share these thoughts with our end users, partners and the rest of our IT community is pretty important. That’s what I and Phil Soran, CEO, and John Guider, COO, have always thought. I first met Phil when he moved next door to me over 15 years ago. John and I go back even further, having met when our kids were in elementary school. We co-founded Compellent from Phil’s basement, and soon started asking for feedback from the industry on how data is stored, managed and used. The sense of community is pretty strong around here. But what you might not know is that Minnesota has long been a hotbed for storage.

All of the team members at Compellent continue to meet constantly with end users and partners and attend events where we hear what is on the mind of folks working with data every day. It's the spirit of community that drove the inception of our customer council, called C3. And it's this spirit that has led to the creation of this forum, which will be dedicated to sifting through storage issues, sparking interesting debates and answering questions.

Around this blog, you'll find plenty of commentary about all things related to network storage – from automated tiered storage to virtualization, replication to green issues. You'll hear from other team members at Compellent, our end users and partners because we know that each of them will weigh in with interesting perspectives, each a little different. We’re excited to get started, to get this conversation rolling and to do our part in defining this changing space.

So welcome! We’re glad you're here.