Compellent Adds SAN Wizard

Compellent is claiming a breakthrough in SAN management with a new boot-from-SAN wizard for its Storage Center systems. (See Compellent Deploys Software.)

Like most SAN vendors, Compellent already had boot-from-SAN, which allows servers in rack or blade setups to be reconfigured from a SAN, rather than from other servers. Users can reduce the number of disk-based servers they need to support multiple server configurations for testing or disaster recovery. (See IP SANs Get the 'Boot'.)

Up to now, though, Compellent Storage Center users had to find available disk images or hardware manually, create a system image for each server or virtual server, and then load those images one-at-a-time.

Compellent says the new feature, Server Instant Replay, automatically finds available hardware and disk images. It takes six clicks to assign a common boot image across multiple disks, Compellent claims, and servers boot in about 10 minutes.

Server Instant Replay supports boot-from-SAN for Fibre Channel and iSCSI and supports virtualization from Microsoft, VMare, and Novell. No agent software is required.At least one user says the new capability is a big improvement. "I would say it's dramatically better," says George Smith, director of IT at Krieg DeVault LLP, an Indianapolis law firm. "It's easier, more convenient."

Smith's already gone on record praising Compellent's Data Instant Replay, which he uses for file restoral on his 10-Tbyte SAN. (See Krieg DeVault Picks Compellent.) Now, he's using the boot-from-SAN feature at no additional cost.

It all sounds great -- but how many customers reboot multiple servers every day from the SAN? After all, disasters aren't that common, are they?

Compellent's product marketing director, Bob Fine, says many Compellent customers use boot-from-SAN to load the operating system every morning, bring up patches, and swap in servers during software testing. For all these purposes, using boot-from-SAN saves the power and time required to do boot on a server-to-server basis. The new wizard streamlines things even more.

Fine says that over 90 percent of Compellent's 500-odd customers are already using the new feature.Competitors didn't have much to say at press time. 3PAR, EqualLogic, LeftHand Networks, and Pillar -- to name just a few -- offer boot-from-SAN capabilities, but none touts a wizard. And only 3PAR and Pillar support boot-from-SAN for FC as well as iSCSI. Clearly, Compellent's managed to up the ante in a small but interesting way.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch