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Storage solutions specialist Compellent Technologies announced the latest release of Storage Center, building on its Fluid Data architecture to scale storage resources and provide access to data while laying the foundation for a grid of Compellent arrays operating as one.
Storage Center 5.4 features improved storage hardware, integration with server virtualization technologies and flexible software designed to help IT departments automatically shift storage resources on-demand, non-disruptively to avoid downtime and maintain real-time availability.
Enterprise customers can scale up capacity and functionality with a new controller platform that supports a range of emerging technologies from FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) to 10Gb iSCSI and from 6G-bps SAS drives to a 2.5-inch 24-bay enclosure. New Live Volume software delivers scale-out capabilities and business continuity through the movement of storage volumes between Compellent arrays. Excluding maintenance and services, a typical Storage Center 5.4 configuration starts at $73,000 and includes clustered Series 40 controllers Fluid Data software licenses, including Live Volume, Enterprise Manager, Data Progression tiering and Remote Instant Replay replication and approximately 6TB of tiered 2.5-inch 6G-bps SAS storage.
The platform’s Live Volume feature is designed to allow businesses to architect a grid of shared storage that can be managed and optimized as one, providing storage agility and high availability. Live Volume acts as a storage hypervisor, actively presenting storage to two Compellent arrays at the same time, allowing organizations to shift volumes between systems to provide continuous data availability.
“Our research shows that in 2011, businesses will continue to seek ways to employ virtualization solutions to efficiently meet business demands,” said Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager for storage software at IDC. “Flexible infrastructures, like those built on the Compellent Fluid Data architecture and Live Volume, will be valuable in the coming year as an enabling technology to help reduce complexity, improve operational efficiency and deliver a scalable, persistent storage resource.”
When virtual machines are moved using technologies such as VMware vMotion or Microsoft Live Migration, Live Volume automatically moves the associated storage volume. Live Volume works with multiple hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer. As it is fully integrated with the Fluid Data architecture, every Live Volume is automatically thin provisioned and can be automatically tiered.
New hardware features designed to increase scalability include a Series 40 controller with Intel Xeon quad-core processors with six slots, 6G-bps 2.5-inch SAS drives (up to 24 2.5-inch drives fit in one 2U enclosure, with each drive providing four 6G-bps lanes) and FCOE and 10Gb iSCSI support, including the Cisco converged network architecture and Nexus multiprotocol network switches.
“As the industry continues its shift to cloud computing and virtualization, enterprises require a storage platform that can readily adapt to changes in their businesses by scaling with their growth while protecting their data and optimizing their major financial investments made today,” said Compellent CEO Phil Soran. “This launch is the first in a series of product innovations we believe will deliver exactly the scale-up and scale-out companies require as they grow and change.”