Primary deduplication and campus-wide mirroring planned
I went to Compellent’s C-Drive users’ conference last week and learned a little about the company’s road map for the next two years.
Compellent reviewed the capabilities of its Storage Center storage area network and said that it will add:
• 64-bit OS
• Live Volume
• Metrocluster
• Encryption
• Deduplication of primary data
• Serial Attached SCSI solid state drives
Compellent’s upcoming SC040 controller will incorporate dual quad-core Nehalem processors and the 64-bit Storage Center 5.3 operating environment. It is expected to be available in the third quarter of this year. The SC040 controller will also contain a 6Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) link to backend storage and Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity.
Compellent’s Live Volume lets SAN administrators plan non-disruptive migrations. Multiple Storage Centers could exist with volumes stored partially on each system. As Data Replays age, they would be automatically migrated to less-expensive storage.
Another feature of the planned Storage Center is the company’s Metrocluster technology, which will offer high-availability in the event of an outage. With Metrocluster, Storage Center SANs in a metropolitan or campus environment would be clustered and act to failover for each other. And, dissimilar systems could be used to build the Metrocluster environment.
Compellent will also be adding AES 256-based encryption at rest to its Storage Center. Encryption will be implemented on an add-in host bus adapter. Although the company would not say who its encryption partner will be, it does OEM encryption-enabled host bus adapters from Brocade and Emulex.
Further, Storage Center software is expected to support primary deduplication of block-level data. Data will be deduped based on replays, not the first time it is written to disk. Compellent claims that it will develop its own dedupe technology and expect to market it in 2011.
Finally, Compellent, which uses the STEC Zeus Fibre Channel solid state drives as Tier 0 storage, will migrate to SAS-based SSDs. The company would not say whose SSDs it will use, though it said that it is evaluating both STEC and Pliant Technologies SAS-based SSDs.
