Presentation attended with Datastor – Jeff Raffills and Gary Cullen.
The second topic covered another bleeding edge technology in the storage space. Compellent Storage Center. The box consists of a controller, intel processors on a Linux kernel, and multiple storage tiers – 15k, 7.2k and SATA disk. Rather than managing data sets yourself the box can self manage and move data, at the block level, between the tiered storage in an optimized way. Setting up storage for Exchange for example is as simple as allocating storage space for Exchange and pointing exchange to that set. From that point on the Compellent box allocated blocks of sectors to Exchange as required. In a normal environment emails, calendars, attachments etc start filling up Tier1 storage. It’s a fact that most email is never reviewed again after about 7 days – but this data is still being stored on primary storage – not a very efficient use of expensive disk. Compellent will move this unaccessed data onto 2nd and 3rd tier storage, block by block, opening up space on the primary storage.
I don’t know if this is making sense or not. I have been told this company has a great live demo if you contact them. I’ll wait for the presentation files to come through and see if there is anything else I can add here.
Hi;
We’d be happy to arrange a live demo for you to learn more about Compellent.
I just spoke with an end user this morning who has dozens of users with >10GB in their Exchange file, however 90% of the data automatically migrates down from their FATA to SATA drives making it affordable. They also store all their snapshots on the SATA drives while the frequently used blocks remain on (or move back up to) FATA. Drop me an email and we’ll set it up.
Regards,
Rob Davis
On behalf of Compellent Technologies
If you are looking into SAN technology then Compellent’s ‘Live’ demo is not to be missed. The guys at Compellent go out of their way to have you see a demo at a time convenient to you even though it makes them be up at all hours in the US. What happens in the demo is that they show you the web software interface of their Live system. Since the interface is directly linked to core functionality you get an introduction of the feautres of the Compellent SAN. Depending on what you currently use you may be blown away by the wealth of features.
If you are thinking of looking at a Compellent SAN you might be a bit mystified by the ‘vitrualness’ of storage blocks. I am sure someone at Compellent will correct me if I am wrong but this is the way I see it. You have a bunch of disks in tiers based on their technology (fast FC drives, SATA drives etc.). Then each teir can have volumes associated and each volume can have a different RAID group – RAID10, RAID5-5, RAID5-9 – within a tier. If a volume part within a tier is RAID10 then each data block stored is written in full to two disks in the tier. If it is RAID5-5 then a stripe of the block is written every 5th disk. If RAID5-9 then a strip of the block is written every nine disks. So a physical disk in a tier can contain data blocks from different volumes and different raid groups. No worrying about how to assign what disks to what volumes etc. – it is all just virtual with the compellent software working it out! And then of course you have data progression within a volume based on the RAID groups and tiers that you choose when you create the volume.
We implmented our first Compellent SAN at the end of March 2007 with 4.5TB of raw disk space. At the time of implentation it was busy but and after the initial data migration I did not have time to pay attention to the SAN in any detail – but I am happy to say that I don’t need to. Apart from fortnightly checks for data growth and performance it is truly a set and forget system. We use data progression which just works, out of the box, no extra software. And did I mention the snapshot capability? Out of the box snapshots which can be stored on any tier. Currently we take hourly snapshots that we keep for 48 hours – we use these above and beyond our regular backups for ease of recovering files in the case of accidental staff deletion etc.
I am yet to use for Exchange but that is because our installed exchange server currently has DAS that is performing fine. In a server refresh I would move Exhange to the SAN at the drop of a hat.
I like the Compellent SAN so much that we are planning a second box located offsite as part of an upgrade to our DR solution – for us being a research institute it is mainly the data to protect so we will be looking at housing a Compellent box offsite and pushing remote snapshots to it for long term storage. This is all possible (pending licences) out of the box.
The Children’s Medical Research Institute is a non-profit research institute located in the Westmead precinct in Sydney, Australia. Visit http://www.cmri.com.au for more information and to download our annual report. Also if you are in Australia please considering donating to Jeans for Genes, our major annual fundraiser http://www.jeans4genes.com.au.
Darryn Capes-Davis
ICT Manager
Children’s Medical Research Institute
We had a webex presentation from the guys in the State a couple of weeks back. Jono our storage specialist provided some feedback in relation to the NZ market and what’s possibly missing. I’ll post any reponses from Compellent as they come to hand.
…..Thanks for the WebEx last week, it was very useful and certainly reinforced Storage Center’s unique proposition. My overall impression is that it is a very complete solution and while not all features are unique to Compellent, e.g. EMC do thin provisioning and controller based IP replication in the latest CLARiiON FLARE, Storage Center could be a very good fit for many of our clients.
What would be useful to understand now is the Compellent roadmap for Storage Center, particularly around Automated Tiered Storage as I see this as a significant differentiator and very attractive to the NZ market. However it’s only part of the ILM story since (and I stand to be corrected) it isn’t file-system aware and so third party products such as Enterprise Vault are still needed to provide advanced data management functionality like policy driven data retention and deletion, compliance, content indexing and discoverability – while they also move data from one tier to another. These are the features needed to meet the requirements especially of our Government clients. If Compellent integrated Centera-like CAS functionality with Storage Centre, say with centrally managed host agents providing file system awareness then it would be a no-brainer.
So, areas of interest are:
*Full data management
*CAS style storage
*Automated file based tiered storage to non-disk media, e.g. tape, optical
*Virtualising other vendor SANs though Compellent (like HDS)
*Anything else on the horizon…….
wow
its very point of view.
Good post.
realy good post
thank you