Compellent to Offer Live Volume For Automated Business Continuity

Compellent Technologies, Inc. will provide continuous, coordinated access to all data stored on Compellent SANs between remote locations with a new automated business continuity feature, Live Volume.

Live Volume will allow enterprises to manage their disparate storage sites around the world as one virtual data center. As customers move applications from one physical or virtual server to another for maintenance, local site issues or disaster recovery, Live Volume will enable IT managers to proactively and automatically migrate the associated storage volumes. By not requiring investments in third-party tools or mirroring of storage resources, Compellent’s live transfer of data will make it easier and cost-effective to manage all resources regardless of the physical location.

“Compellent is applying the same storage innovation that made automated tiered storage more affordable to next-generation technology like Live Volume and SSD that will not only deliver the highest levels of data performance and availability, but also minimize total cost of ownership,” explained Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing for Compellent. “We are enhancing our automated data movement engine to help ensure enterprises can achieve true business continuity and instant access to their data whether their IT infrastructure is on-premises or delivered by a cloud computing service.”

Automating Business Continuity for Enterprises
Based on Compellent’s unique patented Dynamic Block Architecture, Live Volume is designed to eliminate downtime for enterprises that need to migrate servers and storage for disaster recovery or onsite maintenance. Each data volume will be present and automatically available on Compellent SANs at either site at all times.

“The integration of a feature that could take my storage network from manual disaster recovery to automated business continuity without lifting a finger is a very exciting prospect,” explained Mark Lynch, senior data consultant of Synetrix, based outside London. “As a managed service provider replicating across nine Compellent SANs, our clients’ assets must be protected and online at all times – an outage in our headquarters cannot impact our clients throughout the UK. Live Volume promises to keep all of our data online – whenever, wherever – and ensures downtime is a thing of the past.”

Compellent’s Live Volume seamlessly integrates with the industry’s leading virtual server platforms, enabling servers to share centralized storage resources regardless of the actual location or OS virtualization platform. The new virtual storage technology will complement server virtualization to help further reduce costs and simplify data management.

"The introduction of Live Volume will enable customers to take a step up the ladder from reactive disaster recovery to proactive business continuity in the most cost-effective way,” said Mark Gluckman, managing director of Regal IT, a Compellent channel partner based in Sydney. “We believe Live Volume will eliminate the delays associated with data replication, and provide the ideal architecture for virtualization by migrating virtual machines between sites without any downtime. That’s a valuable commodity to our customers implementing server and storage virtualization in the data center.”

Delivering Performance of SSD for Virtual Data Centers
For enterprises requiring the fastest storage performance for data management, migration and processing, Compellent’s integrated suite of virtualized storage applications will also support solid state drives (SSDs). The Compellent SAN will reserve frequently accessed, active blocks of data for ‘tier 0’ storage for applications like transactional databases that can take advantage of the significant performance gains of SSDs, and dynamically move inactive data blocks to lower storage tiers. Because the Compellent SAN is expected to be the first to automate tiered storage for SSD, customers will be able to accurately plan SSD purchases along with other drive technologies to significantly reduce total costs while maintaining optimal storage utilization and performance.

Availability
Compellent Storage Center with SSD is currently being evaluated by select beta customers. Compellent plans to offer SSD to all markets in Q1 and Live Volume in Q2 of 2009 exclusively through the company’s growing international network of channel partners. Additional product information and pricing details will be announced at launch.