Two Customers of Compellent SAN With SSDs

Compellent Technologies, Inc. announced mid-sized enterprises are among the first to have successfully implemented solid state drive (SSD) solutions to significantly improve application performance and business efficiency. Organisations such as the London Borough of Hillingdon and Marketing Architects have boosted performance by each adding two Compellent SSDs for substantial cost savings.

Their implementations automate movement of inactive data and require less hardware than other SSD solutions to achieve equivalent or better performance.
 
“Compellent offers SSD technology at a tenth the cost of competitors, providing the lowest cost of entry and considerably improving ease of management with our unique block-level intelligence,” said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent. “Our Data Progression is the killer app for SSD because users can add drives to existing systems and then let the automation take over. This hands-off approach to managing active and inactive data is why our mid-sized enterprise customers are leading the industry in adopting SSD for their business-critical applications.”
 
Data Progression: the ‘Killer App’ for SSD
Roger Bearpark, assistant head of ICT at the London Borough of Hillingdon, said: “Deploying SSD into our live infrastructure was as easy as choosing the Compellent SAN solution in the first place. This deployment gives us the ability to manage blocks of data from the same application source on SSD, Fibre Channel or SATA as is most appropriate. With Data Progression, only active data, which can be as little as a few megabytes, are assigned to SSD making the utilisation phenomenally cost effective. We can also report powerful environmental and performance benefits that will support future business cases for further SSD deployment.”
 
Combining SSD with Compellent’s patented Data Progression software helps increase application performance while reducing storage costs. Leveraging Compellent’s Dynamic Block Architecture, which tracks the characteristics and usage of every data block, Data Progression automatically moves inactive data from SSDs to lower tiers of less-expensive, higher-capacity drives such as Fibre Channel or SATA. Automated tiered storage keeps business data online yet removes the need for administrative intervention or data classification software, saving time and money.
 
For Marketing Architects, a direct marketing agency specializing in radio and television, the improved performance and cost savings over Fibre Channel disk has made a big impact for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system used by employees, media partners and clients.
 
“The ERP database is the lifeblood of our business. People used to be challenged with the ability of the old system to respond quickly; since we’ve implemented the Compellent SAN with solid state drives, we have the performance power we need to be timely and efficient,” said Bill Konkol, vice president of technology, Marketing Architects. “We would have needed to buy nearly 28 Fibre Channel drives to produce similar results, a difference of nearly £46,000.”

Compellent’s Efficient Design Delivers Value
For Mid-Sized Enterprise SSD Applications
Compellent’s SSD solution is designed for enterprise applications such as online transactional databases and business intelligence software that demand higher performance and lower latency than traditional spinning disks.

Additional SSD product features include:

• Compellent automatically spreads volumes across multiple tiers and intelligently moves data to and from the SSDs to help reduce capacity requirements by as much as 80 percent, and significantly lower storage hardware and management costs.
• Starting configuration of two STEC enterprise-class 146GB ZeusIOPS SSDs is capable of supporting IOPS of 30,000-50,000 and reducing latency to 20-120 microseconds.
• On-the-fly installation in Compellent Fibre Channel disk enclosures does not require investment in a dedicated SSD system.
• Current Data Progression customers can install SSDs in their existing enclosures without having to incur additional software licensing fees.
• Data Progression software automatically recognizes the SSDs and places them into the proper tier of storage, allowing multiple applications to share SSD performance.
• Thin Provisioning only consumes SSD capacity when data is actually written.

Pricing and Availability
Compellent is immediately offering its SSD solution exclusively through the company’s international network of channel partners in more than 30 countries. Existing Compellent customers can purchase SSDs priced at £10,500 per drive for a two-drive minimum starting configuration. An additional SSD is required as a global ‘hot spare.’ Compellent SSD configurations require Storage Center release 4.5, available for download to customers with current support agreements at no additional cost. A Compellent SAN with automated tiered storage and SSD starts at £52,500, which includes three 146GB SSDs and 4.5 TB of FC storage with Data Progression, Dynamic Capacity, Data Instant Replay and Enterprise Manager applications. All pricing excludes maintenance plans and professional services.