Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Compellent - Taking On The Enterprise Challenge: Page 2 of 3

Just prior to the announcement, I had the opportunity to speak with Compellent's Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing. We discussed a number of items, including Compellent's approach to a persistent software design and architecture, the new Series 40 controller, newly added drive technologies, some back-end specifics, some new connectivity offerings and interoperability testing.

Compellent's approach to a persistent software design has enabled the company to provide a perpetual software licensing model. "Our approach essentially future-proofs our customers' investment in our software. For example, units shipped in 2005 are still in production today using our latest software. And there are no re-licensing fees." says Fine. No doubt this approach is attractive to buyers in today's cost-sensitive environment.

My October blog touched on controller technology, and said that the company had done well with low-end enterprise and cloud providers such as Savvis. I expected Compellent to take a leap into the future with more robust technology for the enterprise. The new Series 40 controller goes a long way in making the leap in to the broader enterprise space. Compellent has adopted an ongoing approach of technology independence within the controller design, essentially being able to support new host and back-end connectivity as the technology emerges and can be integrated into the controller platform. The new controller supports six PCI slots that enable greater scaling of the overall system, a protected battery-less cache approach and an on-line system software non-disruptive upgrade in a clustered environment-- an important element for enterprise-class storage environments.

Under non-disclosure agreement, Bob Fine and I talked about performance of the Series 40 controller. I do expect impressive performance results to be published at the turn of the year. Without getting into specifics, it is accurate to say that Compellent is on the march to provide whopping IOP capabilities over a very reasonable amount of time. If you are a Compellent customer, or interested buyer, I suggest you speak to Compellent under NDA to more fully understand its roadmap.

Drive technology now supported includes 2.5-inch SAS 2 drives at 6Gbps interface transfer rate. It's clear that SAS provides the next-generation interface for StorageCenter. Compared with the 3.5-inch drives, the new 2.5-inch drives are 70 percent smaller and, according to Compellent, their power measurements have shown the new drives eat up 30 percent to 40 percent less power. The drives supported are the SAS 15K RPM at 146GB and the SAS 10K RPM at 450GB and 600GB capacities. The new drive support enables a 2X capacity improvement along with a 2X IOPS per-rack-unit increase compared to the usage of 3.5-inch drives.