Compellent’s success is about more than their technology
My first clue that Compellent is different came in the lobby bathroom. In their LEED-certified corporate HQ (the first in Minnesota), the urinals use no water.
Compellent is getting rave reviews from their fast-growing customer base, not just for their storage solution, but also for their “thin provisioning” approach to delivering and supporting their solutions. I had an eye-opening visit to Compellent and talked with Larry Aszmann, their CTO.
The product: virtualized storage
In a nutshell, Storage Center is tiered storage in a box, able to store and migrate data across different classes of storage: 15K rpm FC, 10K rpm FC and 7200 rpm SATA. It all happens without the user having to classify data – the system figures out where data belongs based on how frequently it’s used, and rebalances the data periodically to maintain the right data on the right storage.
The result: easily scaled, easily managed storage that costs a lot less per terabyte.
The key to making this work is block-level virtualization, giving them the resolution below the volume level needed for real-time, activity-based data migration.
Compellent is seeing a lot of interest as storage for virtualized server solutions from VMWare, Microsoft, Virtual Iron and others.
The company: a virtualized business
While I’m impressed with the technology, the way the company gets things done was even more unique:
Virtual manufacturing – 3rd party hardware for everything, tested and integrated by their vendors. The first time the system comes together is at the customer’s site. Evidence of this is their stock room – not much bigger than the office supplies room at my office.
All-channel strategy – 100% of sales go through channel partners, eliminating channel conflict. They make this work with “Channel Assist” – supporting the heck out of their partners. It seems to be working, with a 98% customer satisfaction rating.
Server virtualization is just the beginning
Compellent’s CTO Larry Aszmann sees their solution as serving a greater need than managing data. Today’s data centers are woefully inefficient. Server virtualization is taking off in part to address this problem, but he believes more than 50% of data center power is being consumed by storage. Storage Center’s virtualization cuts this waste dramatically.
Save money and save the planet. Not a bad message! Compellent seems to be practicing what they preach.
[…] in Uncategorized. Tags: Compellent Technologies trackback Check out the post by StorageEffect here on an experienced storage company: Compellent Technologies, below the […]
[…] familiar are you with virtualization-friendly storage solutions like Compellent? Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Greening storageFacilis Technology’s Storage […]
[…] in storage efficiency. Deduplication, auto-storage tiering, low-power disk drives and MAID are going mainstream, dramatically increasing the ratios of usable […]
[…] « Previous Post Next Post » […]