Compellent Upgrades Its Storage Center SAN

Compellent announced Jan. 14 that it has upgraded its front-line storage area network, Storage Center 5, with advanced features.
Building on Storage Center’s dynamic block-based architecture, the new features are designed to simplify data recovery duties and provide an automated, secure and tiered environment to enterprises of any size.
These new features, as described by Compellent, are:
Portable volumes: This uses external hard drives and Compellent’s management software to reduce the “time, cost and complexity” associated with initiating data replication for disaster recovery-no training or services are necessary.
Replicated data is stored on portable drives protected by 128-bit encryption and that “can be shipped overnight to remote sites, which is less expensive and faster than shipping entire arrays or leasing high-performance bandwidth.”
To simplify administration, Compellent’s Enterprise Manager software automates the data synchronization, and the device is connected via standard USB.
Scalable SAS drives: These provide cost-effective, high-performance configurations for remote replication and automated tiered storage. “Storage Center 5 can scale from as few as six SAS drives up to 384 SAS drives with a mix of capacities and speeds within the same enclosures, supporting FC [Fibre Channel] or iSCSI front-end server connectivity.”
Using “Compellent’s persistent, scalable design and block-level virtualization … [storage administrators] can mix” SAS, SAA, FC and SSD “in a single, virtualized pool of storage.”
Virtual ports: These increase data availability and cost-effectiveness for end-to-end virtualization by sharing, moving or reassigning multiple virtual I/O ports with or to any physical port.
Because they support both FC and iSCSI connectivity, virtual ports also eliminate the need for dedicated I/O hardware and ports to expand failover options “for both entry-level and enterprise configurations.”
Server mapping: This “automates deployment of virtual servers and clusters, combining the power and precision of scripting with the convenience of a GUI. Server mapping enables simultaneous setup and configuration of identical thin-provisioned volumes for many physical and virtual machines.”
Not only does it perform OS-aware mapping and automatic multipathing, but it also supports “adding and removing servers on the fly.”
Consistency groups: These “enable fast, accurate data recovery of enterprise applications such as databases.” The implementation-“without requiring special planning or system tuning”-will support “snapshots of up to 40 separate yet related volumes at the same time.”
The upgrades are available now. For more information, go here.