Compellent to Offer Automated Business Continuity with Live Volume

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn ., Oct. 13, 2008 – Compellent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE Arca: CML) today announced it will provide continuous, coordinated access to all data stored on Compellent SANs between remote locations with a new automated business continuity feature, Live Volume.

Live Volume will allow enterprises to manage their disparate storage sites around the world as one virtual data center. As customers move applications from one physical or virtual server to another for maintenance, local site issues or disaster recovery, Live Volume will enable IT managers to proactively and automatically migrate the associated storage volumes. By not requiring investments in third-party tools or mirroring of storage resources, Compellent’s live transfer of data will make it easier and cost-effective to manage all resources regardless of the physical location.

“Compellent is applying the same storage innovation that made automated tiered storage more affordable to next-generation technology like Live Volume and SSD that will not only deliver the highest levels of data performance and availability, but also minimize total cost of ownership,” explained Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing for Compellent. “We are enhancing our automated data movement engine to help ensure enterprises can achieve true business continuity and instant access to their data whether their IT infrastructure is on-premises or delivered by a cloud computing service.”

Automating Business Continuity for Enterprises

Based on Compellent’s unique patented Dynamic Block Architecture, Live Volume is designed to eliminate downtime for enterprises that need to migrate servers and storage for disaster recovery or onsite maintenance. Each data volume will be present and automatically available on Compellent SANs at either site at all times.

“The integration of a feature that could take my storage network from manual disaster recovery to automated business continuity without lifting a finger is a very exciting prospect,” explained Mark Lynch, senior data consultant of Synetrix, based outside London. “As a managed service provider replicating across nine Compellent SANs, our clients’ assets must be protected and online at all times – an outage in our headquarters cannot impact our clients throughout the UK. Live Volume promises to keep all of our data online – whenever, wherever – and ensures downtime is a thing of the past.”

Compellent’s Live Volume seamlessly integrates with the industry’s leading virtual server platforms, enabling servers to share centralized storage resources regardless of the actual location or OS virtualization platform. The new virtual storage technology will complement server virtualization to help further reduce costs and simplify data management.

“The introduction of Live Volume will enable customers to take a step up the ladder from reactive disaster recovery to proactive business continuity in the most cost-effective way,” said Mark Gluckman, managing director of Regal IT, a Compellent channel partner based in Sydney. “We believe Live Volume will eliminate the delays associated with data replication, and provide the ideal architecture for virtualization by migrating virtual machines between sites without any downtime. That’s a valuable commodity to our customers implementing server and storage virtualization in the data center.”

Delivering Performance of SSD for Virtual Data Centers

For enterprises requiring the fastest storage performance for data management, migration and processing, Compellent’s integrated suite of virtualized storage applications will also support solid state drives (SSDs). The Compellent SAN will reserve frequently accessed, active blocks of data for “tier 0” storage for applications like transactional databases that can take advantage of the significant performance gains of SSDs, and dynamically move inactive data blocks to lower storage tiers. Because the Compellent SAN is expected to be the first to automate tiered storage for SSD, customers will be able to accurately plan SSD purchases along with other drive technologies to significantly reduce total costs while maintaining optimal storage utilization and performance.

Availability

Compellent Storage Center with SSD is currently being evaluated by select beta customers. Compellent plans to offer SSD to all markets in Q1 and Live Volume in Q2 of 2009 exclusively through the company’s growing international network of channel partners. Additional product information and pricing details will be announced at launch. More information about Compellent’s Dynamic Block Architecture is available at www.compellent.com/products.

Compellent Awarded Gold “Best of VMworld 2008″ in “Hardware for Virtualization”

Compellent Awarded Gold “Best of VMworld 2008″ in “Hardware for Virtualization” Category from SearchServerVirtualization.com, September 19, 2008

Read more here:

http://www.compellent.com/News-and-Events/Press-Releases/2008/VMworld_Gold_Award_080919.aspx?ref=HPPR_0919

Cheap ESX test labs.

I have just had the pleasure of building a couple ESX test labs including features as VMotion, DRS, HA, Update Manager.

This requires two ESX server hosts and some kind of storage. Storage is not easy to come around for test environments, so I used a couple free tools for this. Xtravirt Virtual SAN and Openfiler.

One of the test LABs is created by using two older Dell 2900 servers which is sponsored by one of our customers. The servers had 2 Processors, 4 GB RAM and 216GB of diskspace on 4 discs. Now to the fun part. Using Xtravirts Virtual SAN (XVS) I was able to enable some of the local storage on each server and setup replication between the XVS appliance boxes and present the storage back as ISCSI storage to both ESX hosts. This way I can provision VM guest using the datastores from the ISCSI based “local” storage and still do VMotion of VM guests between ESX boxes. Pretty cool as an ESX test LAB.

The other test LAB was actually created on my laptop with VMware Workstation 6.5 beta 2, which now supports ESX servers 3.5 and running VM guests within them. This was a problem in prior version of VMware Workstation with ESX 3.5. I created another VM guest in VMware Workstation and installed Openfiler on this one and used this to present ISCSI based storage to the two ESX server hosts. All running fine in my LAPTOP.

Performance is not all that good - but its perfect as a test LAB for ESX.

Interesting business case on a Compellent and VMware solution

I have made a post before on Compellent’s storage solution because I think they have one of the coolest technologies in the storage market. Their whole idea is to save the customer on cooling and power costs - by offering a storage solution that is based in virtualization, thin provisioning and automated tiered storage (ILM) among others.

Compellent has more than 1500 installations worldwide and Comic Relief is one of them. Read this businesscase on Comic Reliefs implementation on Compellent and VMware.

Comic Relief, has implemented a Compellent storage area network (SAN) and VMware platform to create a virtual storage and server environment. As a result of deploying Compellent technologies such as thin provisioning, automated tiered storage and continuous snapshots, the charity has dramatically improved its IT asset utilisation. It has also cut the number of physical servers required by one fifth, while reducing the costs of powering, cooling and housing their servers – helping Comic Relief meet its environmental IT commitments.

Previously, Comic Relief’s backup data was held off-site on tapes and could take several hours to recover. Today, however, recovery has been reduced to minutes and just a few mouse clicks, using Compellent’s Data Instant Replay snapshots. In addition, the charity has deployed Compellent’s Automated Tiered Storage, called Data Progression, to automatically move less-frequently accessed data to lower-cost disks.

Comic Relief has also increased asset utilisation by deploying Compellent’s thin provisioning technology, called Dynamic Capacity, to eliminate allocated but unused capacity across the network.

The charity only uses physical disk space when data is written. This has provided a fast, affordable and environmentally sensitive way to scale its storage requirements in line with future data growth –enabling the charity to create virtual volumes of any size up front, and add new storage capacity as needed without having to shut down data access.

John Thompson, Comic Relief’s Head of IT, comments: “Compellent’s SAN has been instrumental in reducing our IT capital and operational costs. It also ensures that our systems are better protected from potential downtime and data loss. Compellent has provided us with an extremely cost-effective solution, ensuring that the maximum amount of profit is donated to our global initiatives. We herefore regard Compellent as an absolutely crucial partner in enabling us to adapt to rapid business growth and change – ensuring our long-term survival and continued success.”

Andy Hardy, Compellent Managing Director of International Sales, concludes: “Organisations like Comic Relief are building flexible virtual data centres founded on Compellent storage virtualisation technologies and VMware server virtualisation solutions. Compellent, together with VMware has enabled Comic Relief to move towards an environmentally friendly storage and server infrastructure.

Unlike in traditional SAN environments, the charity does not need to spend money on powering and cooling unused storage space.”

The installation was carried out by Fordway Solutions, a Compellent partner, and one of the UK’s leading enterprise management, data storage, IP networking and IT infrastructure specialists.

About Compellent

Compellent is a leading provider of enterprise-class network storage solutions that are highly scaleable, feature-rich and designed to be easy to use and cost effective. For more information, please visit: http://www.compellent.com

Storage Virtualization by Compellent

On last VMworld I spotted an interesting product from Compellent - called Compellent Storage Center. Compellent offers Automated Tiered Storage (Information Lifecycle Management ILM) on disk block level which automatically moves blocks of inactive data to cheaper disks. Sweet

Compellent offers several other features like Thin Provisioning, Thin Replication (remote, dedup), Continious Snapshots, Advanced Virtualization, FastTrack and Boot from SAN (one image). Read more on www.compellent.com

Take a look on this 5 minute demo on
Compellent FastTrack and other features

Read more on Automated Tiered Storage (ILM) see this article:
Compellent Review on Automated Tiered Storage

Also Storage Magazine Quality Awards - Compellent came out on top. Read more here:
Storage Magazine Quality Awards

Some quotes on Compellent:

“The Compellent Storage Center is the best SAN we’ve tested, with the broadest feature set and the greatest ease of use.”
“Compellent’s level of maturity, both in feature set and ease of use, places it alone at the pinnacle of midrange systems and even compares favorably with top-tier systems.”
“Superb scalability and excellent support, all at a very competitive price.”
InfoWorld, January 2008