What's in Store for Compellent?

Compellent’s storage innovations stem from programming that it calls “Dynamic Block Architecture,” which the company says breaks storage down into much smaller units than its competitors can. For example, instead of resaving an entire document when only a bit of address information has changed, Compellent’s product saves just those new lines of text. It also automatically moves data from slower to faster storage media and connections, based on user demand. Each little data block—which might be a sentence, for example—is tagged with a piece of “metadata” that identifies what kind of information was written, when, the time it was accessed, and the frequency of access. The tag continues to track frequency of access and gradually moves little-used data—say, a two-month-old e-mail that’s only been viewed once—down to “slower” storage.

“How storage has worked historically is you guess how much you need, you buy it and allocate it, and wait to fill it up,” Soran says. “We learned that a big frustration was [administrators] had 60 percent of their storage just sitting idle.” Active but unused storage can be a cost headache. “Our system won’t physically grab that storage until you actually use it,” Soran says.

To see Compellent’s product in action, take the case of one of its customers, St. Paul–based Gillette Children’s Hospital, which also has clinics in Minnetonka, Burnsville, New Brighton, and Duluth. Gillette, which specializes in treating disabled children, has a very busy “gait lab” (a facility that analyzes human motion for diagnosis and treatment of neurological conditions) and needs to store all of the videos it generates of patients’ movement, walking ability, and oxygen consumption. It also needs to keep its digital radiology scans—now at 1.5 terabytes and growing—on line and always accessible by medical personnel.

Dan Viskoe, Gillette’s network administrator, says his system has nearly maxed out its 9 terabytes of storage and needs more space. Before he purchased Compellent’s storage-management product three years ago, Viskoe had to manually manage the space on multiple servers, with no easy way to tell how much space he had on each, and no way to reallocate free space to another server. “I might have a terabyte on one and several hundred [gigabytes] on another,” he says. “It was all over the place.”

Compellent’s system has united all of those once disparate servers, and lets him see and manage them as one. At the time he bought Compellent’s SAN, Viskoe says, the product, then on the market 10 months, offered him features he couldn’t get from other vendors at a price he could afford—about $150,000. (At that time, a price of about $500,000 would have been more the norm.) “It has definitely allowed us to keep up with growth I otherwise would have needed staff for,” Viskoe says. “The thing I like best about it is I don’t have to baby-sit it. It just runs without me having to do a lot of day-to-day management of it.”

Saving data in much smaller blocks also makes it possible to restore data—using features that Compellent calls “data instant replay” and “remote instant replay”—much faster than with traditional tape drives. This is a boon for smaller companies who want disaster plans, says John Dusek III, CEO of Apple Valley–based Convergent Storage Solutions, a Compellent reseller. Typically, to remain up and running in the event of a disaster, you must copy your entire system to a location that’s physically remote from your headquarters.