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Compellent: Rising To The Enterprise Challenge: Page 3 of 4

vStorage APIs for Array Integration (commonly referred to as VAAI support) is another area where Compellent was crystal clear on their plan to deliver features like Full Copy Offload, Scaleable Lock Management for enterprise environments and cloud  services providers.  In my opinion, and given the overall state of development for most storage providers, it would be reasonable to anticipate Compellent rolling out support for these functions in the first half of 2011 or sooner.

Another area of interest for me within Compellent is technical support. To be clear, I'm talking about the ability to provide global, 24x7xForever technical support to an end user who is banking their business--and perhaps their job--on a vendor's ability to support them when things go wrong and problems need rapid resolution. As technology companies come into existence and begin selling their wares, support tends to be a nagging problem and a competitive sticking point.

In many cases, support can be the chasm that inhibits a vendor from ever being considered to be an "enterprise" product provider.  Confidently, I can state that Compellent has crossed the chasm and has put the infrastructure in place to provide 24x7xForever support for its customers. Compellent's support infrastructure within its headquarters is simple in its design, yet powerful in its delivery capability. The companies 24x7 support engineers are physically located within the development engineering organization.  Why is this important?  The answer is simple:  Support engineers are an arms-length away from the engineering gurus who can provide the deepest level of support at a moments notice when required.  Most storage companies that have crossed the support chasm have organized there global support teams in such a fashion.  

In fact, Compellent reports that a prime decision making factor for customer Hieinken Netherlands was its support organization and how well it stacked up against its next closest competitor for the storage business. Clearly, Compellent has taken on the serious business of global, 27x7xForever technical support capabilities.

With regard to auto-tiering, Compellent has been a pioneer with this feature. There's no doubt they have a lot of experience under their belt with where it fits, where it doesn't, and how to fine-tune the functionality. There is much more to be said in this area, so I am taking a deeper look into this functionality and plan to release a new report this quarter addressing automated data tiering, or what I refer to as adaptive data optimization, and its impact on today's enterprise computing model.