The current model controllers from Compellent have done well in the mid-range and low-end enterprise computing space, as well as providing good experiences for cloud providers such as Savvis who have selected Compellent as its storage vendor for its Savvis Symphony next generation cloud infrastructure platform. In my opinion it's time for Compellent to take a bigger leap in the enterprise space with a more robust and higher performance controller technology. My gut sense is that the company may be very close to doing just this and it could very well extend their reach further into greater enterprise opportunities.
I had a few questions for Compellent revolving around storage management and enhancements to Enterprise Manager that Compellent customers have suggested, but which I hadn't had opportunity to review with the Company. One question I had was how have they integrated Enterprise Manager with VMware? I was surprised to learn that Enterprise Manager is now integrated with VMware vCenter and appears as a tab within vCenter.
Also, Enterprise Manager can now manage VMware data stores, adding, deleting, and recovering storage space as required for specific virtual machine requirements. This makes managing Compellent storage within a VMware environment much easier for a VMware administrator, or for a storage administrator in the VMware environment.
One Compellent customer, BioWare, a gaming company, recently termed Compellent's Enterprise Management enhancements for vCenter as "bad a**." Clearly, this customer is an Enterprise Management power user and is enjoying the enhancements to the product.
With regard to vSphere and vStorage, we spoke candidly. I asked Compellent about the plan for plug-ins for vSphere 4.1. and vStorage support. Essentially, the company fully intends to be firmly in the loop with VMware and has publicly stated its intent to deliver the vSphere client plug-in in Q4 of this year.
