Compellent announced Monday a new version of its Storage Center SAN array that supports both block- and file-level storage access.
The company, which has a relationship with network-attached storage vendor ONstor to bundle its NAS capability, has now adopted Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, which provides unified SAN/NAS capability in a single box.
The new Storage Center SAN array now supports file deduplication, in which only one copy of a file will be stored even though several copies of the same file might exist. This capability should be able to save 35% in disk-space requirements, according to Compellent’s claims.
Further the NAS-based Compellent capability allows IT administrators to manage SAN volumes and multiple Fibre Channel or iSCSI connections.
Steve Merkel, CIO for Data393, a managed hosting and IT infrastructure provider in Englewood, Colo., anticipates the benefits of Windows-based NAS with block-level access.