Amerex Brokers With Compellent and VMware

Compellent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE Arca: CML), today announced its customer Amerex Brokers, LLC has automated disaster recovery, significantly improved IT efficiency and lowered its storage, maintenance and energy costs by implementing Compellent storage area network (SAN) and VMware server virtualization products. The implementation of a virtual data center has allowed Amerex Brokers to centralize data resources while reducing the complexity of managing both servers and storage.

Amerex Brokers LLC, a Houston-based wholesale energy brokerage, paired the Compellent SAN with VMware ESX Server 3.5 to better utilize resources across the data center and improve performance. Previously, when Amerex ran out of storage capacity, the IT department was forced to make unplanned purchases five or six times a year, averaging $10,000 per server. Amerex instituted a virtualization strategy which improved utilization and lowered overall costs by leveraging Compellent’s automated tiered storage, thin provisioning, thin replication and continuous snapshots. The Compellent SAN’s scalability and thin provisioning have boosted efficiency and eliminated the cost of purchasing an additional 14 terabytes (TB) to support projected storage needs.

By automating data protection with Compellent’s space-efficient snapshots and asynchronously replicating them to a secondary site over an IP network, Amerex is achieving disaster recovery at a fraction of the cost of other replication solutions. The efficiency of Compellent’s virtualized storage allows Amerex to avoid the excess costs of purchasing identical storage configurations for replication, and provides the affordable protection previously missing from the company’s data center.

“Virtualizing our data center from end-to-end using Compellent and VMware enabled us to eliminate nearly 40 physical servers and save almost $67,000 in annual hardware, service and power costs, while giving us an ironclad business continuity plan,” explained Brian Trudeau, chief information officer, Amerex Brokers, LLC. “The flexibility of Compellent’s thin replication technology will also allow us to easily test solutions such as VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for potential adoption to further simplify and automate disaster recovery management.”

“Virtualization has become the defacto strategy for increasing efficiency and reducing costs,” said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent. “Compellent’s storage virtualization technology is the first to manage data inside the volume, making it very easy for customers to implement virtualized server platforms like VMware and its SRM suite. With SRM, our customers – more than others – are experiencing an integrated virtual data center where information can always be accessed regardless of its physical location.”

Compellent and VMware SRM Advance Disaster Recovery
Combining Compellent’s thin replication technology and VMware SRM accelerates successful data recovery by simplifying the process of managing, executing and testing disaster recovery plans. The virtualized server and storage automation eliminates complex manual recovery steps and removes the risk and worry from disaster recovery.

The Compellent SAN seamlessly integrates VMware SRM through the Compellent-developed Storage Replication Adapter software. Customers can download the Compellent adapter software from the VMware SRM Web site. The Compellent Storage Center SAN adheres to the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) to ensure supportability, and is certified for VMware ESX Server 3.5.