by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — May 6, 2008

At C-Drive today our channel partners had virtualization on their minds and how customers can eliminate hardware, reduce costs and power consumption. Take a look at these videos.

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 Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — April 18, 2008

I had a great chance last week to present my view of the green data center at the New York Stock Exchange along with representatives of VMware and Riverbed to several hundred prospective customers. I was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest these individuals expressed in converting their data centers into more efficient operations through server and storage virtualization. It dawned on me, that as a company, Compellent can do more to quantify both the green and economical benefits of our storage solution. I scratched out the following chart in an attempt to visually quantify at least some of the benefits. Please keep in mind that this is a work in progress. I would love to hear your feedback.

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by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — April 9, 2008

BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm recently wrote a story on the growing issue of powering and cooling data centers, and what he calls the tech industry’s energy crisis. The article looks at the issue of energy efficient data centers on a very large scale and explores drastic measures, like relocating your company’s data center to Iceland. That's not the right solution for every company; in fact, the article concludes that this won’t be enough to solve the tech industry’s energy issues. Hamm makes a very valid point: every company, regardless of size, needs to start planning and implementing "greener" data center practices in order to stay competitive.

Here at Compellent, we’ve been addressing this issue since we first started developing our SAN. We know that everyone has to work with smaller staffs and budgets. They have to get their costs for purchasing, powering, cooling and managing data storage under control. We think the best way to do this is to get rid of unnecessary hardware from the data center — reduce disk drive counts and consolidate servers. One of our federal customers recently told me he needed to increase storage utilization and capacity to keep up with data growth but could neither expand the physical space nor increase the amount of electricity or cooling to support more resources. So he decided to virtualize his storage, use thin provisioning and automated tiered storage, and virtualize servers. We feel customers can green their data centers with technologies and techniques available to them today without having to go as far away as Iceland (though I'm sure it's a beautiful place)! We’d like to hear what you think – what are you doing to green your data center?

by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — April 9, 2008

I just returned from a family spring break vacation to Washington D.C. The hotel in which we were staying was located a block and a half away from the Department of Energy building. This government building was actually built on stilts over a road which runs directly below. This particular road was lined with streetlights which were burning 24x7, day and night. For some reason, this really bugged me, given my focus on green technology. After a couple of days I noticed they had fixed this problem and sudddenly I was OK again. I have to remind myself that everything is not perfect in this world and that we all need to strive for improvement on energy conservation.

I am getting ready to board a plane to NYC for a speaking engagement at the NYSE--with our partners VMware and Riverbed. As you might have already guessed, the topic is green. While reading from the list of attendees and noting the companies they represent I feel very good about the discussions we'll have on data center energy conservation.