Compellent: virtualized storage, virtualized company

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.