Compellent StorageCenter

Compellent StorageCenter
Score: 4.1 out of 5

Editor's note: This is a summary of our testing of this product, for a full rundown of how it fared in our testing across iSCSI SAN Server categories; please see our full coverage.

Compellent's StorageCenter is composed of an iSCSI and Fibre Channel controller chassis (in our case, a 3U Supermicro server equipped with a four-port Fibre Channel adapter, a two-port QLogic iSCSI host bus adapter, Ethernet, and a Compellent accelerator card in it — and 16 empty drive bays) attached to a Fibre Channel drive shelf.

Compellent sent us a 3U Xyratex dual-controller, 16-bay array with 400GB 10K RPM Fibre Channel drives which dual-attaches to the StorageCenter, giving nice high availability on the drive shelf side. If you want controller high availability, Compellent can attach additional controllers on the Fibre Channel loop. Similarly, more drive shelves (either slower SATA or faster 15K SAS drives) can be attached into the Fibre Channel loop. This makes the StorageCenter very expandable.

What stood out most about the StorageCenter in our testing was its manageability. Compellent has the best management console of any of the systems we tested, providing more control, configuration visualization and monitoring capabilities than its competitors. The StorageCenter management system closely aligned with what we needed to accomplish in our test. For example, when looking at performance graphs, we were able to get the graph we wanted, rather than the graph that they wanted to give us. There's not much customization in the performance graphs, but the graphs available are so well chosen that we didn't miss it. Snapshots were also easy to take and analyze from within the management interface because of the underlying supporting capabilities.

A significant differentiator for Compellent is its tiered storage architecture. Conceptually, tiered storage means the StorageCenter controller watches how disk space is used, and subsequently moves frequently used data to faster storage (that is, those provided by its SAS drives), while pushing seldom used data to slower storage (that is, those provided by its SATA drives or slower SAS drives, depending on your configuration). This is a very different view of storage management than is taken by every other system we tested, and one that seems most attractive to us. With the huge differential in cost and capacity between SAS and SATA drives, budget-minded storage managers will want to take advantage of SATA where they can, and use SAS where they must. Compellent makes that easy.

While Compellent barely grazes the midrange space we wanted to focus on with this test, coming down from the high end with a high-end price for a basic high-availability system and heavy expandability, storage managers at all levels anticipating moderate amounts of management should focus on Compellent. There is no command-line interface for the super power user, but with the Compellent GUI, it's easy to sit down in front of the console and get work done quickly.