Partners

Compellent

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Compellent is a leading provider of enterprise-class network storage solutions that are highly scalable, feature rich, and designed to be easy to use and cost effective. The Storage Center solution from Compellent is a storage area network (SAN) that helps significantly lower storage and infrastructure capital expenditures, reduces the skill level and number of personnel required to manage information, and enables continuous data availability and storage virtualization.

Compellent and Microsoft Virtualization

Microsoft and Compellent deliver end-to-end server and storage virtualization technologies that enable you to amplify the cost savings and flexibility benefits of server virtualization.

The combination of end-to-end server virtualization and management tools from Microsoft and advanced storage virtualization technologies from Compellent enables you to create highly efficient, flexible, and easy-to-manage data centers that can adapt to changing business conditions. Your organization can realize significantly lower total cost of ownership by using green virtual storage to consolidate servers, maximize utilization, reduce the data center footprint, and cut power and cooling costs. The resulting virtual data center ensures continuous availability and improved disaster recovery through instant local virtual machine recovery and simple replication of virtual servers and storage.

  • Highly Green Virtual Storage: Reduce the data center footprint and cut power and cooling costs by up to 93 percent. Consolidate servers, increase storage utilization by 90 percent (saving U.S.$1.2 million for every 10 terabytes of data stored), maximize server utilization, and use the most cost-efficient hardware.

  • Simplified, Flexible Data Center Management: Combine robust server and storage virtualization technologies that simplify and automate key processes, with advanced tools that unify management of physical and virtual resources.

  • Improved Business Continuity: Architect for continuous availability and improved disaster recovery by enabling instant virtual machine recovery and easy replication of virtual servers and storage.

Customer Scenario

Many organizations implement server virtualization to reduce data center costs, simplify management, and enhance business continuity. Over 85 percent of virtual server environments access data over a SAN for larger amounts of high-performance storage and to more easily protect and manage data across pools of virtual servers. However, many existing SANs are complex, hard to manage, and inflexible, limiting the number of volumes, wasting storage capacity, and requiring expensive hardware configurations. As a result, virtualization initiatives can encounter storage challenges that require organizations to either compromise flexibility or reengineer the storage infrastructure.

Compellent + Microsoft Solution

To eliminate these challenges—and realize the benefits of server virtualization—organizations need to combine server virtualization with storage virtualization technology. If an organization has not already implemented server virtualization, Microsoft and Compellent recommend that they start virtualizing their storage. This is because deploying virtual servers on a traditional SAN will not provide the flexibility or advanced features to overcome the new complexities.

Organizations can achieve the full promise of a virtual data center by taking advantage of a storage platform that nearly eliminates storage management for any number of virtual machines, easily provisions storage for multiple servers, automatically classifies and migrates storage to the appropriate tier, and provides continuous data protection. With automated tiered storage, users can optimize performance and cost by dynamically placing blocks of data on the preferred—and most cost-effective—storage disks. Organizations can use thin provisioning to improve utilization and simplify provisioning by creating storage for any number of virtual servers, without wasting physical capacity. And by booting virtual servers from the SAN with an automated wizard, users can roll back to a previously known state for fast, accurate recovery and improved deployment times and availability.

Microsoft and Compellent provide end-to-end server and storage virtualization technologies for a robust virtual data center:

  • Compellent Storage Center is the first SAN to manage data inside the volume, reducing the required number of disk drives, maximizing utilization, automating tiered storage, simplifying replication, and speeding data recovery.

  • Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables centralized management of physical and virtual IT infrastructures, increased server utilization, and dynamic resource optimization across multiple virtualization platforms.

  • Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V consolidates multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical machine so that users can efficiently run multiple operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and take advantage of the 64-bit operating environment.

Solution Briefs

Data sheets

  • Do More With Microsoft
    Find out how you can automatically improve storage use and increase performance in Microsoft Server environments.

Webcasts/Podcasts

Demos

  • Compellent + Microsoft Demo
    See how Compellent’s easy to use, reliable storage area network (SAN) helps automatically improve storage use and increase performance in Microsoft Server environments.

Videos

Press releases

Case Studies

Testimonials

  • Munder Capital

    "Using Microsoft and Compellent virtualization together has helped us provision and recover servers in minutes, reduce the number of physical servers from about 130 to 90, and save about $1,000 per month on maintenance, cooling and power costs." - Mike Dufek, Director of Information Systems

  • Indiana University’s Auxiliary Services and Programs Department

    "Using Microsoft and Compellent virtualization together has helped us provision and recover servers in minutes, reduce the number of physical servers from about 130 to 90, and save about $1,000 per month on maintenance, cooling and power costs." - Janssen Jones, Associate IT Director

To Partner Overview
Compellent

"To extend the life of their data centers customers must embrace virtualization strategies, key business processes can be simplified and automated using common management tools for virtual and physical machines,” said Bill Laing, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Server and Solutions Division. “We are working with Compellent to deliver valuable virtualization solutions that help customers consolidate and unify management of their IT assets, while making their data centers more sustainable in the process."

Mark Bowker, industry analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, discusses virtualization with Dai Vu of Microsoft and Stephen Anderson of Compellent