What's in Store for Compellent?

More to Store

Data-storage devices—from big stacks of disk drives to tiny iPod nanos—are vital commodities for holding data ranging from e-mail and documents at work to personal photos and videos. “The market has big needs and they’re not optional needs,” Soran notes. Gigabytes, or a billion bytes of storage space, are so mid-’90s. Many companies now measure their data-storage needs in terabytes (a thousand gigabytes, or TB) and even petabytes (a thousand terabytes) of information. According to the San Francisco–based Storage Networking Industry Association, storage needs are growing at a rate of nearly 80 percent per year. That’s due not just to growing gobs of data, but also to new accounting and privacy rules that require companies to archive data for longer periods of time.

Once upon a time, it was enough just to keep adding more disk space to accommodate growing data. But as the amount of storable data has grown, so too has the need to manage it—or to dictate which information needs to be easily accessible to users, and which gets tucked away in archives. Imagine your entire house stuffed from floor to ceiling with look-alike boxes of your possessions. Perhaps you’ve come up with a way to separate your toiletries from your tax records. But doesn’t it always seem that, somehow, that tape you need right now ends up in a box of old letters you didn’t know you still had? Multiply this scenario by 1,000, and you get some understanding of what IT administrators are up against. Data growth has all but outpaced the ability to make data conveniently accessible. IT administrators find themselves adding more staff to keep up with the task of classifying and prioritizing which information gets stored where, and clamoring for tools to help them automate such tasks.

That’s where a company like Compellent comes in. Compellent competes in the storage area network (SAN) space, a market that venture capitalists have poured money into during the past six years. A SAN is a collection of computers and storage devices connected over a high-speed optical network. The network creates a shared pool of storage that is accessible to all servers in the SAN. The servers can share storage as easily as networked computers can exchange e-mail or Web pages. Without a SAN, the office’s stored data remains trapped in individual servers.

Compellent’s targets are not the Microsofts of the world, which went the SAN route long ago, but rather midsize companies that require an easy, inexpensive storage and management system. “The needs of the mid-tier market are growing faster than the ability of the storage industry to commoditize them,” says Dan Carr, founder and president of The Collaborative, a Minneapolis-based entrepreneurial networking organization. “If you’re a business, the Compellent product is fairly price competitive and takes a big business pain out of your way.”

Without a SAN, IT administrators might have to meet with all departments in a company, over weeks or maybe even months, to figure out whose data gets what kind of storage priority. They run yet another piece of software that classifies all that data based on the priorities established in the meetings, matching it to the physical tiers where it will be stored. Then they run another piece of software to move that data to those tiers, or else manually move it. With massive amounts of data, this process needs to be repeated frequently. But with technology like Compellent’s automating that process, IT administrators can simply move data and add space as needed.