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Live From C-Drive: Page 2 of 2

-- Space reclamation for Windows servers returns the space consumed by deleted space to the free pool, solving the problem that NTFS, in order to support the recycle bin, writes to unused disk space before overwriting deleted files, consuming additional space even with thin provisioning.

-- Portable Volumes lets users use an external USB drive to jumpstart replication. When the system admin creates a replication pair between arrays, the primary array exports the data to the USB disk(s). The admin then drives or ships the USB disk to the standby site and plugs it into the array there. Now the link between the sites can be sized for the data change rate.

-- I was most impressed by the Live Volume feature that migrates volumes from one Storage Center array to another without interrupting server access to the volume. When an admin creates a live volume, it creates a "shadow volume" on the target array that proxies I/O requests to the primary array and uses Compellent's point-in-time replication to the standby server. The volume is now available through both arrays, although only one copy is being accessed at a time. The system will move the active copy and reverse the replication when it sees that more I/O to the volume is coming through the standby array than the primary. Great solution for management/maintenance when in 2010 they make it work with synchronous replication and allow servers to multipath to both arrays -- it will be a nice HA solution.

While the attendees are of course a self-selecting group, everyone I spoke to loves their Compellent arrays -- especially those that have used other vendor's storage. They're even begging for features like tiering to tape and data deduplication that aren't well suited to block storage. Compellent is profitable, just had their 14th consecutive quarter of growth (compare to EMC cutting employee pay 5 percent) to a $100 million run rate and has $100 million in cash.