Dell to buy virtual storage company Compellent – A good cloud play.
For those that are big fans of Dell or Compellent (like I am), some great news is coming out of Round Rock, TX. Dell has just closed a deal to buy virtual storage company Compellent. I’ve heard figures ranging from $820 million to $960 million, but the acquisition could be worth much more to Dell if they are able to execute in the mid-market virtualized storage and cloud computing space.
Virtualized storage offers businesses the ultimate flexibility by inserting a virtual layer between the blocks that are written to by attached servers and the physical disk blocks. Anyone who has worked with traditional SAN implementations knows the headaches that come from inflexible LUNs and being forced to over-provision space to ensure room for growth. The virtual layer in these new SANs allows you to thin-provision space out to servers. Thin-provisioning allows you to ‘promise’ a server a certain size LUN (say 2 TB) without actually committing that much space on disk. Alerts that are setup by SAN administrators inform them when a threshold has been reached for used disk space (say 80%) and they simply add more disks as needed to meet growth needs. By the same token, if a LUN is in need of more spindles for an increased IOPS load, an administrator can dynamically re-stripe the data across more disks to meet that demand.
Not only are virtualized SANs more flexible and more efficient to operate, they often do so at a lower price point than traditional SANs. Companies like Compellent also offer many if not all of the features of larger ‘enterprise’ SAN vendors at a fraction of the cost. They are just as reliable and scale up well to meet growth and demand needs. This flexibility and scalability are key in the cloud computing space as infrastructure has to react to demand dynamically.
Compellent will be an excellent addition to the Dell storage portfolio. I’m looking forward to implementing many more of their units in SMEs and Fortune 500s. It’s great to see a small company with a huge idea move into a larger company that has the cash and sales force to flood the channel with their offering.
For an in-depth analysis of your storage environment and future needs, contact the Silicon Whisperer. I’ll be happy to scope out a new storage solution, data growth plan and migration path for your business.
TheLadders.com Recruits 3PAR and Saves on Storage – Online Job Search Engine Cuts Total Storage Costs by 50%
3PAR, the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that TheLadders.com, the world's leading online service catering exclusively to the $100k+ job market, cut their total cost of storage in half by replacing their legacy storage infrastructure with 3PAR Utility Storage. The online job search website deployed 3PAR Utility Storage in conjunction with server virtualization from VMware as part of a datacenter virtualization initiative. This initiative reduced the company’s storage capacity requirements by 66%, which also reduced storage administration time. In addition, by consolidating onto a single, highly virtualized 3PAR InServ® Storage Server, TheLadders.com was able to eliminate the use of separate arrays for different applications and reliance on costly consulting services.
“By allowing us to cut our storage TCO by 50%, 3PAR was clearly the most cost-effective solution,” said Frey Kuo, Director of Information Technology and Operations, TheLadders.com. “However, it wasn’t only about the financial benefit. With 3PAR, we now have the ability to add storage at the drop of a hat and the platform’s superior reliability and high performance protects our critical end-user experience.”
With their legacy storage environment, TheLadders.com had to justify the roadmap for data growth on a per-project basis since the total lifetime capacity required for each individual project had to be purchased up front. This situation limited the number of projects that could be initiated in any given year due to cost constraints associated with purchasing all of this capacity at the outset. With 3PAR, TheLadders.com is not only able to scale their storage environment painlessly, but they are able to buy additional storage on an incremental basis and only as needed. This allows the leading online job search website to save on up-front capacity purchases, ease roadmap justification, initiate more projects, and reduce the cost of housing, powering, and cooling their storage.
For TheLadders.com, meeting their growing storage requirements by purchasing legacy storage would have required 200% more capacity than was required by deploying 3PAR Utility Storage. With 3PAR Thin Provisioning software, TheLadders.com is able to purchase only the storage capacity it needs, and only when it is actually needed, thereby reducing up-front capacity and energy costs by 75% and lowering storage administration to a fraction of what it was before. Storage configuration tasks that took days or weeks to complete with legacy storage took just hours with their new 3PAR array.
With the website listing more than 8,000 new jobs each week across every industry, it was important that the storage infrastructure at TheLadders.com be scalable while also protecting the end-user experience. Their 3PAR InServ distributes all workloads over all system resources for reliability and high performance. TheLadders.com has found automated rebalancing with 3PAR Dynamic Optimization, in combination with the array’s native mixed workload support, to be extremely beneficial. This has enabled the online job search website to maintain robust and consistent performance and avoid disruption when scaling their storage environment.
“TheLadders.com is one of many Internet and Web 2.0 companies that have come to us looking for cost savings and have stayed with us for our superior simplicity, efficiency, performance, and reliability,” said David Scott, President and Chief Executive Officer for 3PAR. “Legacy vendors are plagued by inefficient, inflexible architectures and a rigid business model. Our customers understand that there is a far better alternative that is well suited for businesses seeking a leaner, more agile approach.”
3PAR Customer Tickets.com Recognized by CIO Magazine as a CIO 100 Award Honoree
3PAR® (NYSE: PAR), the leading global provider of utility storage, announced today that Tickets.com and the company’s Chief Information Officer, Brett Michalak, have been honored by IDG's CIO magazine as a recipient of the 2009 CIO 100. The 22nd annual award program from CIO magazine recognizes organizations around the world that exemplify the highest level of operational and strategic excellence in information technology.
"This year's CIO 100 awards draw well-deserved attention to companies that are both innovating and creating business value with IT, despite the economic downturn," said Maryfran Johnson, Editor in Chief of CIO magazine & Events. "These winners are an inspiration to businesses everywhere."
“With the launch of our SaaS-based ProVenue® ticketing system, we have leveraged a highly virtualized utility storage infrastructure and a cloud computing deployment model to generate new revenue streams and expand our customer base,” said Michalak. “We are not only excited to be recognized for the technology decisions we made in launching this innovative new platform, but also for the way our new IT infrastructure is using datacenter virtualization to evolve our business model.”
Tickets.com is a leading provider of fully integrated online event ticketing services for thousands of top arts, entertainment, and sports organizations worldwide. As CIO of Tickets.com, Michalak is responsible for all aspects of the company's global product strategy and lifecycle. He oversees the global technology organization and plays an essential role in analyzing and evolving Tickets.com’s business processes to enable the company's growth and optimize its existing technology infrastructure.
Powered by agile, efficient 3PAR InServ® Storage Servers and Oracle® Database, ProVenue is the newest and most advanced ticketing system from Tickets.com, putting clients in control of their ticketing transactions—including box office, phone, and Internet sales and marketing. With unsurpassed flexibility, an open architecture, robust data management tools, and superior transaction speed, ProVenue delivers industry-leading technology to ticketing clients.
With advanced 3PAR software offerings such as 3PAR Virtual Copy and 3PAR System Reporter, Tickets.com has reduced storage costs by maintaining a virtualized environment that uses fewer disks, less power, less administration time, and which has saved the company over a half a million dollars in up-front costs.
The decision to build the ProVenue platform on a 3PAR Utility Storage infrastructure has also given Tickets.com the flexibility to add new customers and services rapidly, thereby decreasing the time to deployment window by 88%. The reliability and flexibility of the 3PAR Utility Storage platform are supplemented by 3PAR’s robust monitoring tools, which enable Tickets.com to automatically screen the health of their systems to ensure the best end-user experience for clients and their customers.
“We take pride in the fact that, as a result of deploying the innovative ProVenue ticketing platform on 3PAR Utility Storage, Tickets.com has gone from coping with an inflexible storage infrastructure to being recognized for exemplifying the highest level of operational and strategic excellence,” said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. “Their previous storage infrastructure simply wasn’t optimized for use with cloud computing deployments, but with 3PAR Utility Storage, Tickets.com has been able to do more with less—more automation, advanced capabilities, capacity headroom, and visibility—for dramatically lower cost and administrative effort.”
The 2009 CIO 100 awards will be presented at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on August 25th at the conclusion of the eleventh annual CIO 100 Symposium® and Awards Ceremony.
My Twitter Stream
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