Live From C-Drive

When Compellent's PR folks invited me to attend their annual C-Drive user and channel partner conference, I thought I'd pass. As a native New Yorker, a trip to Minneapolis, even in May let alone February, wasn't nearly as attractive as, say, an all-expense paid trip to VMworld Europe in Cannes (VMware PR please note) or even Vegas. Add in that the last time I went to a vendor conference I wasn't allowed out of the press room without a minder and the whole thing didn't really sound like a day at the beach. When they promised that I would not only be able to attend the technical sessions like a real user but would also have full access to the attendees I thought it may be worth a trip.

Given that many organizations have slashed training and travel budgets, I was impressed that 400 partners and users, along with a handful of brave analysts including this intrepid reporter, braved the Great White North to drink the Compellent Kool-Aid and network with their peers. Given that Compellent only has about 1,300 customers, and that NetApp canceled their first annual user event due to lack of interest, 400 attendees is a bunch.

Equally impressive was how wide Compellent opened the kimono laying up their roadmap through 2010. It of course included the expected features like 10-Gbps Ethernet and FCoE support (which they'll implement using a CNA rather than writing their own stack), SAS 2 drive enclosures and 2.5" drive support, but also included a few unique cool features.

That's not to say the current Storage Center software wasn't already impressive. Compellent's automatic data progression that moves data pages between tiers of storage in a Storage Center and even between the faster outer and slower inner tracks of drives dynamically, based on how frequently the page is being accessed, is already the most sophisticated way to take advantage of SSDs in a SAN array. EMC is promising their FAST implementation starting on V-MAX at some point in the near future, but Compellent's been shipping for years.

Storage Center 5.0, due later this year adds several exciting new features:

-- Space reclamation for Windows servers returns the space consumed by deleted space to the free pool, solving the problem that NTFS, in order to support the recycle bin, writes to unused disk space before overwriting deleted files, consuming additional space even with thin provisioning.

-- Portable Volumes lets users use an external USB drive to jumpstart replication. When the system admin creates a replication pair between arrays, the primary array exports the data to the USB disk(s). The admin then drives or ships the USB disk to the standby site and plugs it into the array there. Now the link between the sites can be sized for the data change rate.

-- I was most impressed by the Live Volume feature that migrates volumes from one Storage Center array to another without interrupting server access to the volume. When an admin creates a live volume, it creates a "shadow volume" on the target array that proxies I/O requests to the primary array and uses Compellent's point-in-time replication to the standby server. The volume is now available through both arrays, although only one copy is being accessed at a time. The system will move the active copy and reverse the replication when it sees that more I/O to the volume is coming through the standby array than the primary. Great solution for management/maintenance when in 2010 they make it work with synchronous replication and allow servers to multipath to both arrays -- it will be a nice HA solution.

While the attendees are of course a self-selecting group, everyone I spoke to loves their Compellent arrays -- especially those that have used other vendor's storage. They're even begging for features like tiering to tape and data deduplication that aren't well suited to block storage. Compellent is profitable, just had their 14th consecutive quarter of growth (compare to EMC cutting employee pay 5 percent) to a $100 million run rate and has $100 million in cash.