Compellent Makes ILM Easier

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Compellent Technologies hopes to make information lifecycle management (ILM) easier with its new Storage Center QuickStart ILM offering.

Compellent says the product is the first storage area network (SAN) that fully automates tiered storage within a single disk drive enclosure. The company says QuickStart ILM “is unique in its ability to provide not only tiers of storage based on drive types and RAID levels, but also automated data classification and data movement between these tiers.”

QuickStart ILM offers tiered storage by mixing high-performance Fibre Channel (FC) drives and lower-cost mid-tier FC drives in a single enclosure. Data is automatically classified and migrated to the optimum tier of storage based on usage.

The SAN uses metadata to determine which tier of storage should be used to store each block of data and then monitors usage over time. Frequently accessed data is retained on high-performance storage and infrequently accessed data is automatically migrated to lower-cost storage, reducing overall disk expenditures by as much as 74 percent, the company says.

“Storage users want ILM, but manual data classification and data movement are preventing companies from moving forward,” says Bruce Kornfeld, Compellent’s vice president of marketing. QuickStart ILM, he says, lets users “implement automated tiered storage for their organization in just minutes.”

“I think Compellent has done a really nice job of making ILM a reality inside a single box,” says Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst at the Taneja Group. “Several other players can do the hardware part of this, i.e., have FC and SATAdrives in the same box, but the movement of data is done manually based on whatever the customer wants as a policy.”

Compellent should meet with success in its target SMB (small and mid-size business) market, Taneja says. “In that environment, making it easy and simple is the mantra,” he says. “That is what they have done. Keep in mind that simple also means not having loaded functionality. For instance, if the customer wants to move the data on some complex understanding of the content of data, as would be the case in some larger enterprises that are regulated, and not simply on some simple algorithm such as the age of the file, then this is not the product for them. But for many medium-size businesses, this is cool functionality and I suspect they will welcome it.”

Storage Center QuickStart ILM pricing starts at $49,500 and includes a Storage Center SAN with 6.4 terabytes of storage and automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and continuous snapshots. The SAN can scale to more than 300 terabytes on the same platform, Compellent says.

Aptare Manages Backup

Aptare, meanwhile, unveiled its own storage management product this week — StorageConsole Managed Services Edition, which offers real-time backup reporting and active management for Veritas NetBackup and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, with EMC Legato to come later. The software is used as a managed service by GlassHouse Technologies and other service providers, and the company also boasts an OEM deal with Hitachi Data Systems.

Using the centralized, Web-based portal, Aptare says storage administrators can increase the integrity of their data protection by being able to quickly identify unprotected data, improve capacity planning, increase performance and provide compliance with audits and legal discovery.

The private, profitable company has been in the storage software market for six years. Aptare CEO Richard Clark says the company stands out from competitors like Bocada by offering early warnings of problems.

Pricing starts at $4,995 for a backup server and $60 per client, or $50 per client annually for a subscription offering.

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Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

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