White Papers: Bliss in black and white.
Whether you're in the early stages of your SAN research, putting together a business case for Compellent to present to your board, or just want to stay abreast of Compellent updates, you've come to the right place. Breathe deep. Then download to your heart's desire.
Designing a Persistent Hardware Architecture
By Compellent, May 2009
"Many enterprises looking to increase the flexibility, improve the scalability, enhance the availability and reduce the costs of data storage have turned to storage area networks (SANs). Yet traditional hardware vendors have failed to deliver on the promise of SANs. By relying on proprietary hardware designs, imposing restrictions on the types of technology that can be used and prohibiting customers from mixing and matching different drive and interconnect technologies, these vendors doom their products to early obsolescence and force their customers into costly forklift upgrades. In contrast, the Compellent® Storage Center™ SAN is designed for persistence, not obsolescence. Using an open, nonproprietary hardware architecture, the Compellent SAN enables businesses to continuously integrate new disk drive, switch and network interface technologies without having to replace existing hardware or software. Enterprises can use any combination of Compellent’s persistent hardware architecture, which is designed for flexibility, scalability and availability."
Compellent - Harnessing SSD's Potential
By Mark Peters, ESG, May 2009
“In the IT world, you’d have to be living under a rock to avoid the onslaught of solid state storage news and announcements occurring over the last 12-18 months. It seems that every vendor has seen the potential and is queuing up to add solid state to its offerings. And, certainly, the operational and economic attractions of the technologies are significant. But, like most things in life and data centers, just because something shares a generic name and some attributes—a country, a haircut, a car—it does not mean that all versions or implementations of that thing are the same. This Brief focuses mainly on how Compellent is bringing SSD to its storage systems and will therefore include no more than a quick summary of why solid state is so compelling.”
Seven Ways to Lower Storage TCO
By Compellent, January 2009
"Organizations of all types and sizes are under pressure to boost efficiency, radically cut costs and reduce power consumption. When measured by total cost of ownership (TCO), traditional data storage solutions are inefficient and expensive to maintain, manage, and expand. That makes these traditional storage paradigms increasingly harder to justify. Compellent Storage Center —a highly integrated, feature-rich data storage solution—was designed to lower data storage TCO. Compellent’s innovative storage platform helps organizations dramatically reduce both capital and operating expenses, while improving data availability and recovery. In fact, for every 10TB of storage capacity, Compellent Storage Center can save as much as $1.2 million in costs."
Three Must Haves for the Virtual Data Center
By Compellent, January 2009
These must haves include: Automated Tiered Storage, Thin Provisioning, and Space-Efficient Snapshots and Boot from SAN.
Disaster Recovery in GIS
By Kelly Laughton, Davenport Group, September 2008
"Today enterprise geographic information systems (GIS) are mission-critical for the data
center. As more and more organizations implement spatially enabled applications it is
increasingly important that these applications remain up, running and available under all
circumstances. Spatially enabled applications are often the applications most needed in an
emergency. Consequently, GIS being down for any reason is not an option."
A Compelling Green Message
By Mark Peters, ESG, April 2008
"Any organization has to have a ‘mantra’—a crisp focus—in terms of the products and services it delivers. No one company can be everything to everyone. For IT vendors, examples of such focus are cost-per-gigabyte, ease of use, sheer scale, and so forth. A review of Compellent’s history and growth shows that its modus operandi has always been to optimize utilization. Even before green was the ‘term-du-jour,’ Compellent was setting out to enable users to ‘get more’ out of its offerings by driving improved disk system efficiencies. Of course, such improved disk efficiency means offering solutions that either require less physical disk to fulfill a particular need (whether capacity or performance), or that package varying disk types to achieve the best operational advantage. In either case, the end result is a product implementation that requires less actual hardware consumption—and therefore less consumption of power, cooling and floor space. It is—in the current vernacular—a green path. The important point is that the company was already on this path, as it’s chosen differentiation in the market; the fact that this is now a path that is called ‘green’ makes little difference other than, notably, telling us that the green story Compellent has is not one of convenient ‘green washing’ or riding the latest wave, but rather a story that is foundational to the company."
Virtual Disaster Recovery
By Kelly Laughton, Davenport Group, February 2008
"Today’s data center has evolved into a complex, inflexible IT environment that can be costly to manage and difficult to recover in the event of a disaster. “Disaster” is a relative term and can mean anything from loss of an important file to loss of an entire site. A disaster can come in many forms, including but not limited to, operator error, malicious virus, hardware failure, or act of nature; and can result from system maintenance and planned downtime. The fact is, for one reason or another systems will go down, and for many organizations this can mean lost revenue and the inability to serve customers."
Seven Ways to Lower Storage TCO
By Compellent, January 2008
"Organization of all types and sizes are under pressure to boost efficiency, radically cut costs and reduce power consumption. When measured by total cost of ownership (TCO), traditional data storage solutions are inefficient and expensive to maintain, manage, and expand. That makes these traditional storage paradigms increasingly harder to justify. Compellent Storage Center - a highly integrated, feature-rich data storage solution - was designed to lower data storage TCO. Compellent's innovative storage platform helps organizations dramatically reduce both capital and operating expenses, while improving data availability and recovery. In fact, for every 10TB of storage capacity, Compellent Storage Center can save as much as $1.2 million in costs."
Data 393 Builds Bottom Line and Adds Client Offerings with Compellent SAN
By Compellent, 2007
"Compellent had the ideal combination of technical functionality, ease of management, and reliability for meeting our needs and our bottom line."
Steve Merkel - CIO, Data 393
Compellent's Storage Center Technical Specifications and Data Sheet
By Compellent, 2007
"Storage Center goes beyond the boundaries of traditional storage systems by combining modular standards-based hardware and intelligent, innovative software to manage your date differently."
By Unitrends, 2007
"This paper guides IT executives and system administrators in designing and implementing backup and disaster recovery systems that enable every organization to rapidly recover entire business systems including business data, server OS, applications, and user data in case of a system failure or disaster, without experiencing undue planning and management pains."
By Compellent, March 2007
"Compellent Server Instant Repay software works with the Compellent Storage Center storage are network (SAN) to provide a complete, integrated Boot from SAN solution that addresses the cost, complexity, and storage space requirements involved with managing boot images for numerous servers."
By Compellent, November 2007
"Compellent's feature-rich SAN produces tangible "green" results: Compellent believes companies using a combination of Storage Center's unique energy-saving features can cut power and cooling costs up to 93 percent when compared to traditional storage solutions."
Understanding How ILM is Evolving
By The InfoPro, Inc., 2006
"Compellent's Storage Center is the industry's ONLY SAN with Automated Tiered Storage, eliminating the manual data classification and manual movement of data between tiers associated with other ILM solutions."
Data Instant Replay: Feature Brief
By Compellent, August 2006
"The Data Instant Replay feature of the Compellent Storage Center storage area network (SAN) creates space-efficient snapshots - copies of volumes, which Compellent calls Replays - to provide extremely fast recovery from any type of threat to data."
Analysis: Raising the SAN Value Proposition by Automating Tiered Data Migration
By Jack Fegreus, Ph.D. - Strategic Communications Inc., July 2006
"To create a SAN environment that can provide the level of automated storage management traditionally associated with an ILM package, Compellent radically restructured the way storage is virtualized."
Compellent Remote Instant Replay
By TANEJA Group Inc - Technology Analysts, 2006
"We believe that Compellent's combination of robust storage software, modularly scalable hardware, and technology independence at the protocol and disk level, all wrapped with a central management interface makes it a clear winner in the midrange storage array category today and in coming years."
Thin Provisioning: Focus on Compellent Dynamic Capacity
By Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst - Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), October 2005
"ESG believes that one of the more important but often misunderstood advancements within data storage in thin provisioning. This report focuses in Dynamic Capacity, Compellent's implementation of thin provisioning."

