Compellent Serves Up ‘Fluid Data’ Deal with Heineken

We couldn’t resist this. Compellent, the Minnesota-based storage maker that has made its reputation by providing good, solid, fast storage area network systems for U.S. midrange and small business systems, is branching out internationally.

At VMworld on Sept. 1, CEO Phil Soran announced that his company has landed a major European customer, Heineken Netherlands, which is in the process of creating a new private cloud environment using Compellent storage and VMware’s virtualization layer.

Compellent calls its topline storage product Compellent Fluid Data. It’s not difficult to connect that term with the product Heineken makes, and it makes a lot — about 200 million liters per year. Thus, the partnership obviously is a natural.

During the press conference, Heineken Netherlands IT Supply Manager Onno Donkervoort said, “Fluid Data storage and server architecture has increased performance for IT applications that support production and reduced disk requirements by nearly 60 percent for better storage efficiency.”

Donkervoort added that his IT team was able to consolidate 12 server rooms down to one larger data center, using HP blade servers, Compellent storage and VMware middleware.

Soran told The Station in a separate discussion that Compellent is now up to 2,100 customers — 16 to 18 percent of those being international — so the word about the company’s scale-out, automated-tiering systems obviously has crossed the borders of the United States.

(Note to Dell: If that 3PAR deal falls through … )