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 — March 31, 2008

Every so often, we have the opportunity to tell some of our customers' great stories about the positive results they've realized by implementing a Compellent SAN. Recently, we sent a few of our customer case studies to the folks at Storage Networking World to be considered for the 2008 SNW Best Practices Awards. Two customers, the University of North Texas and Gaston County, SC, were chosen as finalists for the awards

UNT was selected as a finalist for the "Innovation and Promise" category, which recognizes successful "pioneering" of leading storage networking technology. Gaston County was chosen as a finalist for the "Storage Reliability and Data Recovery" category for implementation strategies and programs that ensure highly available information and data access.

The awards will be announced on Wednesday, April 9, at SNW in the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando. If you are going to be at SNW, we’d love to chat with you. We will be located at booth #709. Hope to see you there!

by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — March 21, 2008

As you may have read, last week IDC revealed the results of a study that found that the amount of digital information created, captured and replicated in the world as of Dec. 31, 2007, was 281 billion gigabytes, as reported by Brian Womack at Investor's Business Daily. According to IDC’s report, industries responsible for the data aren't always the same ones driving the economy. Financial services are about 6% of the economy and take up that much of the digital "universe," IDC says. But while manufacturing and utilities are responsible for roughly 30% of the world's economic output, they produce about 15% of the world's digital information and the communications, media and entertainment sectors make up less than 10% of the world's economic output but almost 50% of the digital universe, thanks to all those beefy video and music files.

There is certainly room for discussion about how storage vendors can – and should – be helping enterprises in all fields manage the exponential growth of their data. Compellent prides itself on not only being a storage vendor, but an IT partner to our customers. We have worked closely with our customers to develop technologies that make the most of limited physical and economical resources, and know the solutions we are delivering – from the media industry to the healthcare sector – are best in class.

So how is your organization coping with its growing data?

by Lawrence E. Aszmann, Chief Technology Officer — February 4, 2008

Outside my office window there’s a small lake, one of the 10,000+ in Minnesota. Recently, one of our corporate neighbors beyond the lake spent more than $1 million dollars to upgrade their data center. I wish they would have talked to us first about some strategies to deal with their storage needs before they took that expensive but not so extraordinary step in today’s climate of rampant data growth.

When your data center was first constructed or last remodeled, someone had to estimate and specify within a reasonable budget one or more of the following capital intensive resources:

• Total square footage required
• Sizing of computer room air conditioning/humidification equipment
• Sizing of Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)
• Amount of backup generator capacity and associated switchgear
• Amount of utility power with associated power distribution equipment
• Above items times two when DR is implemented

As each resource is used up, for example power or space, a major expenditure is required to replenish that resource. Data storage plays a very significant role while impacting the data center. As businesses race to implement additional applications to meet the challenges of competition, the impact on storage resources continues to increase. Regulatory compliance also plays a major role in driving these increases.

So CXOs have some tough choices to make. Gartner says that by 2008 one out of every two data centers will have insufficient cooling and power. Expanding a data center requires serious planning for adequate space, power, backup generators, chiller units and much more. That means to keep up, IT managers have to decide to pay for more equipment like more disk drives, update their data center at a huge cost, like our neighbor did, or lease or pay for a whole new facility. Or they can think differently about their existing power, cooling and space infrastructure and maximize what they have by taking initiatives to install systems that actually decrease not increase the need for storage, while lowering the costs for cooling and powering their existing IT assets. In my next post I’ll look at some technologies that exist today that could allow you to avoid paying the steep bill that our neighbors across the lake got.