News

posted on 08 July 2008 08:19

Block storage supplier Compellent is about to announce it has reached the 1,000 customer mark as its storage area network (SAN) array product keeps on gaining customers.

The company attributes its success to a terrific product that provides highly efficient and multi-tiered block-level storage with low system management overhead and high utilization.

John Boyd, IT manager for UK customer gm2 LOgistics, a paper distributor, said it just did what it said on the tin. His company wasn't interested in technology for technology's sake at all. Their storage had to be cost-effective, reliable, well-supported and just do what the supplier said it could do.

Boyd's team were considering NetApp and EMC storage systems and getting perturbed about things like long training courses when they were introduced to Compellent by Fordway, a UK IT infrastructure change supplier, who asked for half an hour to present the Compellent offerings. It as enough to lever open the door and lead to a purchase.

The company was a green field SAN site, and has moved from 70 servers with direct-attached storage to six blade servers each running six VMware virtual machines connected to the Compellent storage array. Server virtualization has led to storage virtualization and consoldation.

Compellent believes in building an excellent basic product and, like gm2 Logistics, eschewing technology unless it delivers real benefits to its customers. Compellent director of Marketing Bruce Kornfeld, asked about the glamorous topic of solid state drives (SSD), said a couple of customers were trying them out, the Compellent software providing an abstraction lasyer between SAN users and the SSDs making their incorporation quite feasible. But, all in all, Compellent didn't feel that the benefits of SDD use in its arrays were sufficient to outweigh the still quite considerable cost.

One thousand customers with over 2,000 installations agree with this point of view about technology. The company should record another straight quarter of sequential growth when its Q2 results are reported, not that it is saying but that seems to be a reasonable prognosis given its Q1 sequential growth and the steady rise in customer numbers.

The 1,000 customers are spread across 22 countries by the way. Compellent is providing a pretty compelling proposition to customers all round the globe.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}