Compellent SAN – Why InfinIT Consulting Backs One Of The Hottest Up-And-Coming Storage Devices In the Market
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The following is a textual translation and summary of InfinIT’s podcast: Helping Small Businesses Grow Using Microsoft Small Business Server.
INTRODUCTION:
Welcome to the second edition of InfinIT Consulting’s podcast series. Our goal is to provide insight on the best IT solutions in the marketplace and address some of the most common business challenges small businesses to enterprise companies deal with.
Today we will be talking about Compellent’s Storage Area Network solution, InfinIT Consulting’s strategic partnership with Compellent and why we back such a key up and coming product in the market.
We have two speakers with us today:
Marcos Barrera, one of our senior engineers who has architected and implemented Compellent’s SAN devices across a number of different networks.
John Mallory, Compellent’s business development manager for the Northern California and Northern Nevada regions. John will be giving us an overview on the key features of Compellent and why their product has been awarded best “SAN of the Year” for the second year in a row now.
QUESTION/ANSWER SESSION:
Question:
Based on your experience, what are the strongest needs companies today are looking for when it comes to a SAN solution? What are the key elements that helps make Compellent a good fit for their business?
Answer:
[John Mallory]
There are a number of benefits. Today, the key benefit being the consolidation of servers and storage with products like VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server. We’ve seen a big increase in the use of those products, all of which require the use of a SAN. Customers then need to consolidate their storage as well as their servers. To take advantage of some of the disaster recovery components of disaster recovery, you need to implement a SAN as well.
Another area is tiered storage. You’ve been hearing a lot lately about ILM – Information Lifecycle Management. That’s fine on the file level, but what Compellent does differently is we do it on the block level, which means that we can start to extract inactive data and move it downstream to lower, more cost effective tiers of storage. Whereas, other companies lock you into volume tiering or file ILM at the file level which provides less storage utilization than what Compellent does.
A third area I see quite a bit is once you’ve stored the data, how do you protect the data? You can take advantage of snapshot technology for your quick and easy data recovery. You also have features like CDP – continuous data protection – which we can handle through our snapshot technology as well as disaster recovery, whether it be synchronous, asynchronous, campus-wide or across the pond. People are looking for ways to their data away from their primary location where it could fail or be disruptive for their business and find alternative methods of protecting that data. So, once you’ve stored it that’s one thing, but how do you protect it that’s another.
[Marcos Barrera]
We’re seeing similar trends throughout our customer base and in the market. People are looking to get away from direct attached storage in general. With the advent of virtualization and for people trying to form solutions with better DR (disaster recovery), it just makes sense to not have everything stuck to your system. You want to try to ship that data off – there have been a lot of products developed to try and do just that. Everyone wants to have their servers connected to some type of central storage and really be able to manage that as opposed to having all this disparate systems. This has been a big problem so far for a number of our customers as well.
[John Mallory]
When you look at how storage is today, some systems are going to outgrow other systems, but yet when we buy servers and we buy storage internal to those servers, we have a tendency to plan for five years or more in the future. However, those plans can change. You find that you have islands of storage that sit there, idle, some cases even drives that aren’t spinning. This idle storage and pre-purchasing and pre-allocation is a problem. Then you find yourself wishing that you can have some of that storage back. One of my customers I just spoke with not too longer ago had over 400 servers in their data center and 40% of their disks were fully utilized – which means 60% was not being utilized. You take into account what systems are outgrowing other systems – all of this you can improve with a SAN.
[Marcos Barrera]
That’s one of the big differences we’ve seen with Compellent versus other SAN manufacturers. One of the reasons we got so excited about the product when we first saw it was for that reason alone. You have these customers with monster servers that may be storing huge amounts of data sometime in their lifespan. They are essentially pre-allocating that space in anticipation for what they may or may not need, essentially using their SAN like direct attached storage.
[John Mallory]
That’s an interesting point. When you look at direct attached storage, you have a plan well in advance and buy more than what you’re going to use because you have to plan for those points in time where you are going to grow and scale, what if you miss mark?
We’ve taken advantage of a technology called thin provisioning and we’re one of a very few companies that really do true thin provisioning. There is no pre-allocation of space – that’s important. Why go back to the model of direct attached storage and buy more than you really need? What thin provisioning allows you to do is not have to over pre-allocate space. We only recognize data when we write it and that’s more important. I could have a physical amount of capacity be a terabyte and create a 2 terabyte volume. I could create a volume and not have to pre-allocate that space. Customers like that in the fact that they can pay as the go or pay as they grow. We do everything at a block virtualization, not at a disk virtualization, which is what all the other companies do.
[Marcos Barrera]
One of the things that we always demonstrate for our customers when we’re showing off the functionality of Compellent is provide the example, let’s say I have 500 gigs of storage in this SAN, but allocate a volume that is 10 terabytes. When they ask ‘but you don’t have that much space available’, we say ‘well you’re not using that much space either – so we’re not going to blindly fill it with ones and zeros.
[John Mallory]
As you know, I’ve been in this industry for a long time, selling storage for about 18 years now. In that time, I’ve never once had anybody tell me that they can’t wait to go to work and work on their SAN all day. There’s not much more that can be done with benchsheet, power supplies, fans and drives. What’s different about Compellent is the software – it’s what you do with those zeros and ones, the blocks, once
you have it store. The compelling difference that Compellent has over its competitors is what we do with the data once it’s stored. How we protect it, how we access it, how we utilize it and what are some of the tools that make our lives a lot easier. For the most part, you set it and forget about it. There are enough controls so that administrators and managers and directors don’t have to sit there and manage their SAN all day. What you want to focus on is using your internal IT resources for other projects that keep your business sustaining and moving forward – not to sit there and babysit your SAN.
So, I think we’ve got a number of great tools out there, the thin provisioning just being one of them, the virtualization at the block is another. Some of the accolades that we have is the data progression and the automated-tiered storage, which no one else has in the market. According to Gardiner, 70-80% of data is inactive data. So, moving that data to a lower tier becomes a lot more cost effective and a lot more beneficial. If I don’t have to buy a ton of fiber drives for inactive data and snapshot that data at the highest tier of storage, it makes sense to move it downstream and let most frequently used data be quickly and easily accessible. It also helps the performance of your applications as well to move your active data up to the higher tier where you want it and keep the inactive data at a lower tier.
[Marcos Barrera]
It also proves to be much more cost effective in the long run is what our customers have begun to realize. With some of our customers dealing with legal compliance, they need to store years and years of data, emails and files. They may have scanned a document to PDF 3 years ago, but need to store it for compliancy reasons, but never access it. That’s a lot of data that doesn’t need to be placed on high-speed fiber drives. It’s not cost effective for the business.
[John Mallory]
Even with the snapshots, we have tons of customers who say that they have a tendency to take fewer and fewer snapshots if it resides at a higher tier. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could move all the snapshots to a lower tier and get back to CDP – continuous data protection. If I could take a snapshot every minute to protect the data, that would be ideal. Most of your recovery is not your catastrophic recovery, it’s usually help desk, fat-finger delete, accidental delete, a corrupted database or something to that effect. Or even patch work. You install a patch and realize that not only does it not solve your initial problem, but presents an entirely new problem. To be able to recovery from a snapshot to the granularity of a minute is more cost effective on a SATA RAID 5 than on a Fiber Channel RAID 10, so you’re more inclined to take more snapshots, improving your disaster recovery plans.
Question:
What would you say are the key features that make Compellent different than the other solutions in the marketplace?
Answer:
[Marcos Barrera]
I can talk about a customer of ours who has just recently implemented a Compellent SAN in their network. They are doing Boot-to-SAN and we were in the middle of doing a rollout of a Citrix based solution for a software provider that they were using and we kept running into these problems with performance. As their IT consultant, I need to look at all the different facets. So, I looked at the performance of the SAN and the performance of the servers and make sure everything is stable with Citrix. So, I took an image, since we were utilizing Boot-from-SAN, which means that we have a bunch of diskless servers, and were able to roll back the servers to immediately determine which application was causing the performance errors. This allow for an unprecedented amount of DR capabilities and an
improvement in patch management. This entire process took an astonishingly short time of only five minutes from imaging to recovery.
[John Mallory]
What’s different with Compellent from the other manufacturers? I think it’s the level we’ve taken our product and taken the market. You’ll find with a lot of companies that there are a lot of add-ons. Everything that we do is all of our own intellectual property. We’ve designed it, we’ve developed it. We’re not putting a lot of focus on the hardware side because there’s not a lot you can do that hasn’t already been invented. What we do is focus on the software side, the tools that are there to make your life a lot easier.
Some of the things we’ve already talked about such as block virtualization versus disk virtualization, which is what everyone else does. Everything that we do is on the fly. We’re the only company that truly automates your tiered storage down to the granularity of the block, no one else does that. Again, thin provisioning. We’re one of the few companies that really do true thin provisioning. What that means is they may do something on the base volume, but you have to pre-allocate for the snapshots and the reserve space, so if you don’t use that space it’s wasted. Only we offer proper disk and store utilization and true thin provisioning.
Something else that we do on the hardware side – you may notice this in our marketing brochures and datasheets – nothing is ever mentioned of model numbers, unlike other companies where they have model X, Y, XX, or ZZ. Their low-end models may lack features that the mid-range or high-end features have and if you want those features you have to put up the cash to scale up to the highest grade model. What we do is every customer has the same basic hardware, features and set of functionalities. Each solution scales with the customer as they grow. If a customer wants more performance, he can get that in the form of more ports or more spindles and we can tune their system to accommodate any changes in their data center. Nothing is thrown out, nothing is ripped and replaced, everything is just added to the existing system. We use industry-standard hardware so it’s not overpriced and there’s not twenty different software features that you have to buy to get all of the different functionalities of the raw system – we make it real simple for our customers. Customers today are fearful about buying the wrong product, fearful about making a mistake. This is an error-free SAN. You can’t make a mistake here. If you do, you just modify the existing product and you fix that error. With our product, you buy what you need and you modify it as you grow.
[Marcos Barrera]
With people using MPLS networks, WAN compression devices, with all these becoming industry standard. Many have branch offices or manufacturing offices is Asia, it makes it really easy for your SAN to do replication. Mount your iSCSI connectors to the data that’s in your replication site and through MPLS you can access your data instantly.
[John Mallory]
You can also reduce the costs of DR with Compellent because you don’t have to have like technology at the other side. For example, I could have Fiber Channel disk and Fiber Channel connectivity at the primary site and have an IP connection across the long haul to a single controller, not dual controller. You can have iSCSI controllers at the DR site and be up and running in no time. It’s also very important, and I see this with a lot of companies is that they move the data off to the DR site, they can promote it to allow you to use it at the DR site, but they don’t make it easy to fail back. In some cases, you physically have to move the data from the DR site back to the primary site to recover it and that can be painful. So, with Compellent, if it’s a true catastrophic event or natural disaster you can easily recovery it from your DR site and restore it at the primary site.
Question:
Compellent has just recently joined the ‘green grid’ and published a whitepaper on ‘The Green Advantage’ Are you seeing a shift in the industry and a new desire to be aligned with these green technologies?
Answer:
[Marcos Barrera]
A good percentage of people joining this green movement are looking to save money. With true disk utilization, you no longer see this 20% of disk utilization or 40% of disk utilization. Compellent allows for true storage utilization – only use the power that you need to keep it running. The cost is coming down significantly for systems that are low voltage. You get quad-core servers that get 1.6 gigahertz processors in them that are using practically nothing. What I’m seeing is a lot of people buying low voltage servers with dual quad core low voltage servers and just stacking those because they’re sucking less power than that one blade center
[John Mallory]
Or, you can do Boot-from-SAN. With true diskless servers, you’re saving the power from all those spinning disks and the power and cooling to maintain all your servers. With VMWare, you’re seeing a lot of consolidation of servers – that’s the whole argument we just made earlier for direct attached storage versus SAN. If your CPU has only 10% utilization, you’ve got a full 90% just sitting there. VMWare is growing at a very rapid pace.
There are initiatives here in the Bay Area with PG&E where you can get a rebate for reducing the amount of power that you’re using in your data centers by replacing some of the older technology with newer more energy-efficient systems and utilizing them more efficiently.
Yes, we are a green company in more ways than one. Our building is completely green as well so we stand behind the green initiative in more ways than one. The tiered storage, thin provisioning, data progression software that we have and have embedded into our product means that we’re using fewer fiber drives and now can involve more SATA drives into our data center, using less power and less cooling. Compellent talks to companies about the ability to help them reduce their capital expenditures by 74% and operational expenditures by 50%. Most of that is in the power and cooling parts.
Question:
What does the future hold for Compellent and the SAN
Answer:
We continue to innovate and lead the charge. We are starting to see our market share is growing. People are realizing that the old days of buying traditional storage isn’t the way to go. Other companies aren’t as innovative and we are uniquely positioned to offer a new solution to improve performance and lower costs. We are leading the cutting edge, bleeding edge charge of storage technology.
CONCLUSION:
Thank you for joining us for today’s podcast. You can access our entire podcast series anytime on-demand through our website at www.infinITconsulting.com.
Be sure to join us for the next topics in our podcast series. We will be covering the hottest topics in the industry including virtualization, SAN storage solutions as well as key products including MOSS 2007, Exchange Server 2007, SQL Server and the newest Windows Server 2008 – Longhorn.
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About InfinIT Consulting - Bay Area IT Consulting Service Provider
InfinIT Consulting, Inc. specializes in high end IT consulting, database management solutions and web optimization to empower businesses to embrace the real potential of IT.
InfinIT Consulting focuses on helping small, midsize and enterprise companies resolve their IT challenges and ultimately facilitate their daily business operations.
Their most demanded expertise includes IT managed services, IT integration for mergers and acquisitions, Sarbanes Oxley compliance, web portal design and implementation and IT infrastructure support and optimization. In addition, they offer a wide range of IT services including ERP project management, IT staff augmentation, data mining, database administration and web services including SEO, PPC campaign management, custom web design and web development.
Their customers are located across the nation with worldwide branches allowing them to cover areas from coast to coast, Asia and Europe.
For more information, please direct all press inquiries to:
Audrey Olsen
InfinIT Consulting
aolsen@infinITconsulting.com
408.439.9596
Kirsten Burkhardt
InfinIT Consulting
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