SSD Being Priority for Compellent Customers and Channel Partners

Compellent Technologies, Inc. announced results generated through attendee polling conducted at its annual customer conference and business partner summit, C-Drive 2009. Compellent gathered live attendee responses during keynote presentations and general sessions throughout the five-day event to help forecast technology trends and explore the future of storage technology.

"The results of our polling gave us direct insight into the needs of IT organizations around the world, and will certainly help shape our product and support offerings as we continue to enhance the industry’s most efficient SAN," said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing at Compellent. "It’s no surprise that most IT professionals are acutely aware of the need to balance budget requirements with technology innovation – we believe that our SAN architecture enables them to do just that."

Data highlights generated at C-Drive 2009 Business Partner Summit and Customer Conference include:

• 91 percent of business partners and 78 percent of customers responded important, very important or critical when asked, "What is your level of interest in evaluating SSD in your environment?"
• 70 percent of customers said balancing budget requirements and technology needs was the top challenge facing IT today.
• When asked "What are the barriers to adopting a virtualized environment?", 27 percent of customers said cost/budget, 22 percent said staff and training and 26 percent said internal politics.
• 62 percent of customers said that the economic climate has impacted their storage spending.
• When asked, "Are you able to measure power consumption in your data center?", 40 percent of customers said they can today, 17 percent said they will have the capabilities within one year, 5 percent said they are between one and two years away from being able to measure power consumption, and 35 percent said they have no current plans to do so.

"As the moderator for the technology partner round table, I was excited to not only interact with representatives from Cisco, Microsoft and Intel, but also to discuss the future of technology and innovation in the data center with the end-users in the audience," said Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager, IDC. "We were able to explore topics important to everyone in attendance, and the round table offered a valuable, exclusive look into the minds of some of the largest companies in IT."

C-Drive 2009 took place May 3-7, 2009 in Bloomington, MN. Attendance for this year’s event increased more than 30 percent over 2008, with attendees traveling from as far away as China and Australia.