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 Compellent Technologies, — May 6, 2009

Most organizations share the same data recovery needs as large enterprises. The trick is to meet large-scale needs on a small-scale budget. Kyle Berger of Alvarado Independent School District took a different approach to remote replication, a multi-site, multi-customer strategy that nearly pays for itself, and shares his strategies with attendees at C-Drive.

3:17: Kyle Berger of Alvarado School District kicks things off with a summary of his title, responsibilities and the IT needs of his school district.

3:18: First audience response question: What is the number of end-users in your organization? 58 percent answered 1-1,000, while another 37 percent answered 1,001-3,000 end-users.

3:20: Alvarado School District grows by about 100 kids a year, which is slow and steady.

3:21: Kyle’s IT challenges:
- Funding is never guaranteed and is always changing
- Reliability and accessibility are required for data protection, recovery and data integrity

3:22: “What we were looking for was reliability in a SAN environment…Disaster recovery is never top of mind, but I always know I have to deal with it,” said Kyle. “Overhead and ROI are critical. I need to really stretch that dollar and justify it back to the public, whose taxes pay for this technology.”

3:23: “Our solution is a DR consortium between K-12 school districts,” said Kyle. “We came up with a way to connect districts through the Compellent SAN. We have multi-site replication without added overhead or cost.”

3:27: Kyle points out that with the Compellent product, it’s very easy to implement this DR solution.

3:29: Kyle lists out the parameters of the Disaster Recovery Consortium (DRC) and testing include:
- DRC is user-driven with a user group board of directors
- Quarterly health checks of the Compellent device
- Two annual enrollment periods into the DRC
- Data Integrity tested twice a year between sites
- Replication is encrypted between sites for security

3:32: The benefits of the overall solution is a leveraged current investment in the SAN, added remote survivability at zero cost, lower data center footprint, no added energy cost, no need to learn a new system, support and compliance, according to Kyle.

3:33: In terms of ROI, it’s easy to establish, the flexibility to leverage the investment for a ROI that goes beyond the initial investment with no added costs.

3:35: Kyle lists out his lessons learned, which are:
- The time and coordination of initial connection
- Limited site connectivity
- Initial sync, available bandwidth and data push
- User adoption – beyond technology departments
- Different SAN versions?
- Remote site downtimes?
- Bandwidth throttling and expectations
- Replication software not frequent purchase first SAN

3:36: “Portable volume can do in one day what used to take 12 weeks,” Kyle proclaims. “I’m looking forward to how it will help us in the DRC.”

3:39: Kyle looks at the future of the DRC, which will include five school districts across Texas by tht ened of 2009, additional states in January 2010 and eventually move cross county for multi-site DR for K-12 mission-critical applications.

3:40: “The end-users are really driving this program forward,” said Kyle.

3:41: Another audience response question: What would you like to hear more about? 58 percent of the audience wants more technical information. Kyle introduces Pablo Coronado of EST Group to get granular on the technology.

3:43: Pablo stresses that these are not hot-sites. He also used Enterprise Manager to connect from one system to another.

3:49: Pablo continues to offer up some technical information on the DRC.

3:55: Pablo states, “Most of the school districts in Texas have adopted virtualization.”

by Justin Braun, Microsoft Product Specialist — November 5, 2008

Compellent is participating in the Microsoft Failover Cluster Configuration Program (FCCP), which is a vendor partnership program that promotes validated hardware configurations for use with Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering. Instead of having to search Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List and select individual components that have been tested, simply select a solution that we've validated through the Failover Cluster Configuration Program.

As we validate different failover cluster configurations, we'll post them on our Qualifications and Validations page.

by Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing — October 14, 2008

This week at SNW we announced a new business continuity automation feature we’re working on here at Compellent: Live Volume. Live Volume provides coordinated access to data stored on Compellent SANs – and it doesn’t matter where the data is actually housed or how far the sites are from each other. We believe this new technology will complete the server virtualization story by enabling storage to automatically follow the application wherever it is migrated.

Since Live Volume is fully automated, the setup is a simple process. In a virtual server environment, you configure VMs and map volumes for replication, and then you migrate virtual servers using an OS virtualization platform. (Compellent doesn’t require host-based agents or third-party software to support the virtualization platforms.) Following setup, Live Volume provides continuous data connectivity and automatically handles storage migration and connection optimization – all with no changes to the original applications.

Live Volume detects when the application has moved to another server located at the same site or to a different site and, if needed, automatically swaps the data access from the primary to secondary SAN. Here’s a screen capture of the beta version of the Live Volume GUI, which shows the storage migration underway. In the screen shot you can see Live Volume (shown with some development codenames) in the process of swapping the roles for two SANs. The Primary SAN (#908) is becoming Secondary while the Secondary SAN (#909) is becoming Primary. In normal operation, this will happen automatically when a major topology change has occurred, requiring no user intervention and a minimum amount of time.



We think the Live Volume technology fills a large void in the virtualization world and addresses the promise of the virtual data center: that data is available regardless of its physical location. Our development continues at a fast pace and Live Volume will evolve and improve as we work closely with early access customers and partners. Their feedback on operation, user interface options and best practice usage will all combine to a great launch of this product in Q2 2009. Stay tuned to this site over the next few months for more updates from industry voices, and to learn more about our technology innovations.

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?