Storage Center Grows As Needed

Compellent's Storage Center is an integrated hardware and software platform that allows storage capacity to scale across one or more operating systems using a mix of storage technologies, said Phil Soran, Compellent president and CEO.

Unlike traditional arrays, the Storage Center does not force customers to purchase capacity ahead of need. Instead, customers can overallocate their storage-capacity requirements so they can have it available when needed, without having to pay for the excess capacity ahead of time. Customers are alerted to the need for more capacity as data approaches its limit.

The Storage Center can be used as primary storage or for disk-to-disk backups, and can have any combination of Serial ATA, Fibre Channel and SCSI drives on the back end. Both iSCSI and Fibre Channel can be used on the front end.

The system helps users plan for disasters and instantly recover data to within a few minutes of the event if a disaster does occur, Soran said.

Administrators can also set policies for e-mails to migrate seldom-used data such as presentations to lower-cost storage devices.

For John Dusek, president and owner of Convergent Storage Solutions, an Apple Valley, Minn.-based solution provider, the Compellent system offers such promise that he set up a new company, separate from the services company he owns, just to sell it.

"I'm pretty excited about this," Dusek said, adding that the channel loyalty shown by Compellent is rare in the industry. For instance, Dusek points to the Compellent Customer Council, a group of end users and solution providers that provided feedback to the vendor before the product became available.

"They asked what we want, what our customers want," Dusek said. "We've seen changes in their software based on customer recommendations. %85 Well over 70 percent of what we asked for has shown up in the software."

Compellent's commitment to being 100 percent channel-based is also important, Dusek said. "It's very nice when you are not competing with the manufacturer of the hardware and software," he said.