News

posted on 19 February 2008 18:19

Compellent has announced a major release of its storage area network (SAN) product, Storage Center 4.0, which can reduce disk drive requirements by up to 80 percent.

The company claims that Storage Center 4.0 is the first networked storage system to manage data inside the volume to automate tiered storage within every drive, amplify the storage utilization benefits of thin provisioning and reclaim unused disk space. New software applications like Fast Track, Thin Import and Free Space Recovery help eliminate disk drives from the data center, effectively reducing total cost of ownership and energy consumption for mid-sized enterprises.

A Pillar Data-like method of placing data on specific track areas of a disk is used to accelerate performance.

New features in Storage Center 4.0 include:

- Fast Track: Dynamically placing active data on the outer tracks of a disk drive can speed access to information while decreasing costs as fewer high-performance drives are needed. Unlike competitive offerings that only place entire volumes on perimeter tracks, Fast Track only moves frequently accessed data from the entire system to these tracks. As a result, performance is accelerated and disk drive requirements are reduced by up to 30 percent.

- Thin Import: As existing data is copied to a Compellent SAN, Storage Center 4.0 converts the data into thin-provisioned volumes. This feature can reduce disk drive requirements by up to 50 percent and help IT departments reclaim storage resources previously wasted in their legacy systems.

- Free Space Recovery: After Windows files are deleted from a thin provisioned volume in other SANs, the operating system will continue to report that the space is unavailable. Free Space Recovery enables this unused space to be utilized again, thereby making Compellent’s advanced thin provisioning technology one of the most efficient in the industry.

- Application Optimizer: Typically not available with traditional SANs, Application Optimizer tunes storage performance depending on the application being used. End-users can set the size of data transfers within the SAN to match I/O performance for different applications such as video imaging, e-mail and databases.

- Third-generation Controller: The new Series 30 controller offers increased performance for enterprise applications and is backwards compatible, eliminating the need for “forklift” upgrades.

Steve Duplessie, founder and senior storage analyst at Enterprise Systems Group, lauded the thin import concept, saying: "Thin Import might be one of the coolest applications of storage technology I've ever seen. Imagine being able to pull all the over-provisioned, over-allocated and under-utilized capacity off of your old expensive arrays and instantly apply just-in-time thin provisioning to those volumes. It is tantamount to taking your 25 percent utilized storage infrastructure to 80 percent in one fell swoop. Think of what that would mean for everything from footprint to backup -- the ramifications are staggering."

(Compellent SAN product pictured above.)

Compellent’s data movement engine with Fast Track can optimize performance based on actual usage patterns. This feature influenced the decision of Ares Management LLC, a global investment management firm.

“When we sat down with the Compellent team and did the I/O calculations for Fast Track, our engineers were just blown away,” explained Ping Ooi, associate vice president, Ares Management LLC. “The expectation is once the active data is on the outside edge of the drives, any large-scale report we access will run in under 20 minutes, down from 30 minutes. We’re talking about a 33 percent reduction in time and we’re only going to continue to see improved efficiency as we fully utilize Fast Track.”

Compellent Storage Center version 4.0 is immediately available through Compellent’s international network of business partners. A richly configured Storage Center 4.0 QuickStart ILM Bundle starts at approximately $57,200 with 7.2 TB of storage, a single controller, Fast Track, Thin Import and Free Space Recovery, among other software licenses and standard three-year warranty (maintenance and service are not included).

End-users can purchase the new Storage Center 4.0 applications and controller as individual, modular upgrades.