I spent last week at Compellent's C-Dive Partner and Customer Conference in Minneapolis. While Compellent didn't announce any new products or technologies, the company presented a fresh view of not only its Storage Center array, but of its software offerings such as Data Progression, which provides for the automatic migration of data between tiers.

In one of the sessions I listened to Mike Dufek, director of information systems at Munder Capital Management, talk about his experience with Solid State Drives (SSD) – he beta’d the new drives for Compellent and found that after only a half-hour of installation the two drives he had installed performed at 15 times the speed of Fibre Channel drives. That was with no training or management changes. Quite an impressive figure.

In addition, Dufek was able to test Compellent’s Data Progression with the drives – writing the most active data into the new Tier 0 of storage and automatically migrating it out of Tier 0 and into Tier 1 and 2 as it aged.

Representatives from STEC also spoke about the performance results of their single level cell NAND drives. Taking questions at the end of the presentation, they admitted that with new controller technologies available there was room for a tier of storage made up of a multi-level cell (what many consider as the cheap throw away flash drives), and that some applications will be able to take advantage of it.

Following up on the theme of SSD, Compellent sponsored a session on the performance of SSD and how it integrates into a Storage Center array. Compellent is offering 146GB capacity drives with a 4Gbit Fibre Channel interface. They will be using STEC’s Zeus IOPS drives.

With 14 SSDs in an enclosure, a customer will saturate the bandwidth of that enclosure, but the customer may have an application that optimizes bandwidth, says Chad Thibodeau, senior product manager for Compellent.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.