Compellent adds virtualization, upgrades to its SAN

Compellent Technologies today announced the availability of the latest version of its storage area network (SAN) technology, Storage Center 5.4 SAN, which incorporates several hardware upgrades as well as adding storage virtualization .

Compellent’s new storage hypervisor, Live Volume, allows data volumes to be migrated between two Compellent SANs non-disruptively. Each of the SANs is capable of scaling to about a petabyte of capacity, the company said. Previously, Compellent’s technology only allows volumes to be moved within a single SAN.

“Now, instead of a single Compellent system that scales up, were giving users tools to scale out,” said Bob Fine, director of product marketing for the company. “Live Volume is the critical software that allows us to have multiple systems virtualized between them. You can move a volume to the best system based on performance, utilization and availability requirements.”

Compellent also added support for VMware’s vCenter, which allows administrators to provision, monitor and manage both their virtual server and storage infrastructure through a single interface. Compellent’s own Enterprise Manager software offers storage administrators a single user interface to control Compellent’s multiple SANs. “So customers can continue to use vCenter software to manage their storage or Enterprise Manager,” Fine said.

The company also announced its fourth generation controller, the SC040, which moves from a dual-core, 1333MHz Intel processor in the previous model to a dual-core Nahalem processor.

The new controller now also offers six PCI slots, one more than the previous model. The slots additionally provide support for multiple storage interconnect protocols including Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), serial SCSI (SAS) and 10Gbit/sec. iSCSI.

Storage Center 5.4 also adds support for Cisco‘s Nexis line of switches, which support FCoE. The new SAN also supports 6Gbit/sec. SAS drives in both 2.5-in. and 3.5-in. form factors.

“Before, each drive bay had 16 drive slots. Now we’ve more than doubled that by going to 72 drives in same amount of rack space,” Fine said. “It’s an additional 200TB a customer can add on through this new controller, just from a storage capacity standpoint.”