Interviews

posted on 09 May 2008 07:19

Phil Soran is Compellent's CEO, president and chairman and a bit of a serial entrepreneur. Having helped found and then sell Xiotech to Seagate in 1995 he is now leading Compellent to a prominent position in the storage array market with a successful IPO under his belt.

Compellent is head-quarted in Minneapolis, in the USA's mid-west where the bitterly cold winter weather pours down from Canada's northern wastes. There is a historical tradition of disk storage expertise here. Seagate's technical development centre is located here, as was its Advanced Storage Architectures group sold to spun-off Xiotech recently. Control Data probably started the disk storage expertise tradition in MInnesota with its systems work.

In a way Minnesota's disk drive tradition parallels Colorado's tape drive tradition; two ends of a storage dumbell as it were.

Soran started up Compellent with two fellow founders: John Guider, the COO; and Larry Aszmann, Compellent's CTO, and Soran's next door neighbour. Both were involved with Xiotech as well as having founded other four businesses in the past. Soran says: "We liked working as a team. ... We started Compellent in my basement; in Minnesota it's too cold to do it in the garage - you'll freeze to death."

The three created a precursor of virtualised SAN storage at Xiotech. Compellent represents a second bite at that cherry. The way Soran describes it the background to Compellent's founding was 9-11, the north eastern USA power outage, extreme weather events, and the extension of corporate governance after Enron's financial chicanery.

These events led to a business mood shift, to the establishment of a corporate mindset that wanted better disaster recovery, lower cost storage, through tiering for example, and all-round better storage management. These things were available on expensive enterprise arrays, like Symmetrix, but not on the arrays that the great mass of mid-range businesses - small and medium enterprises and the lower rungs of the upper enterprise tier - could afford. Yet they needed them too. They became in Soran's words: "not nice-to-haves but must-haves."

The storage product to satisfy these needs didn't exist, so they invented it, a virtualised SAN, using performance-centric Fibre Channel drives and capacity-centric-SATA drives, accessible by Fibre Channel or iSCSI, with thin provisioning, block-level meta data tracking leading to automatic movement of blocks among tiers of storage based on activity levels, extremely simple management, and replication for disaster recovery.

Soran says: "That became our business plan. We've executed on that." The three raised $50 million in venture capital funding and started work developing the product and the business.

Storage Center is now on its fourth major software release and Compellent reckons it is the fastest-growing storage company in the world.

Virtual Manufacturing

They were canny and didn't waste money; $7 million of the $50 million funding was still unspent at IPO time in October, 2007. The founders' experience in having funded several businesses showed up in the business model For example, despite Compellent shipping a hardware and software product there is no factory, no manufacturing facility. Soran describes it as virtual manufacturing.

The product hardware uses industry standard components: standard racks, Seagate 3.5-inch Fibre Channel and SATA drives, and x86 server-based controllers running a Linux-based O/S. Shippers collect 'burned in' components from the orginal equipment vendors, part assemble them and then ship them to the customer's site where the components come together for the first time and are installed in the rack, plugged in and started up. This is just in time assembly to order at the customers' premises; it can hardly be called just-in-time manufacturing. Compellent doesn't take on financial ownership of the product until late in the day; it is very budget-efficient.

Asked if it's risky because there is no check that the pieces will work together properly until installation time at the customer's site, Soran says, no, it's safer. The more you can reduce the number of times the to-be-built product, based on proven and industry-standard components, is touched, the less risk there is to it working properly on installation. This is an extreme case of low-touch manufacturing.

He is not wrong as Compellent is highly-rated for product quality and has won quality awards.

There is no direct sales force, Compellent being 100 percent channel-focussed. That removes another element of cost and potential conflict between parts of the sales channel. It also takes advantage of existing trusted relationships between storage and system integrators and their customers.

Looking Ahead

We asked Phil Soran about possible technologies that might be added to the Storage Center product.

- Solid-state drives (SSD) - Soran is positive, saying: "We view it as (just) another disk technology." There are concerns about write cycle life, I/O speed of different types of flash, and price, with Soran saying: "We want to make sure it's ready for prime time. ... When it's right we'll do it." The big challenge is the price. but Compellent has already shipped Storage Centers with an SSD tier of storage to customers with special application needs.

- De-duplication - Soran says Storage Center doesn't use sub file-level de-duping as Data Domain and others offer but it does lots of single file instancing - the ability to boot multiple systems from one SAN boot file being one. He calls it de-dupe boot. He also says: "Thin provisioning is a form of de-dupe - we remove all the zeroes." Compellent is looking at the possibility of de-duplication for archive-class storage but there is no committment to implementing it.

- Spin-down to save power when drives are not being accessed - referring to JBOD supplier Xyratex' development work in this area, he said: "When they're ready, we're ready." It's also dependent on Seagate's advanced power management efforts: "Seagate is a pretty strong partner for us. They span the whole disk area, they understand enterprises, and their product development is in Minneapolis too."

Soran thinks: "Spin-down is a tweak," though as other Compellent product features can save up to 90 percent of the power, space and cooling costs associated with competitor's arrays. He says: "I think you have to fundamentally attack the storage management problem to make big changes here."

- 1TB drives will be coming around the end of June.

- SAS support is waiting on Xyratex work on SAS expansion trays; "It's a technology we will support."

- Encrypted drives - optional encryption on USB removable drives will come in the next two to four months. Full disk encryption, as used on Seagate's FDE drives, is being looked at; again there is no committment to implementing it.

The end of the interview confirmed a realisation Compellent is a very disciplined company and one brimming with positive energy. It's not a rah-rah company, such exuberance and excess not being its style. It is a serious company and it has supportive partners and supportive customers. They all believe that there is a seriously good product here that is going to get better and better.

The signs are that Compellent could become a very significant storage array supplier indeed.

^{[Chris Mellor, editor.]}