Compellent Aims For Midmarket With SAN Technology

Company:

Headquarters: Eden Prairie, Minn.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: Compellent Storage Center 4.5

Year Founded: 2002

Number of Channel Partners: 300-plus worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Midmarket-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Compellent is slow to change. It was channel-only from day one, and as stayed that way ever since. And its storage architecture has not changed, meaning today's newest solid-state disk technology can be integrated into any installed system to boost performance.

The Lowdown: Compellent is the developer of Storage Center, an enterprise-class SAN that provides high availability and storage virtualization to midrange and enterprise customers and bring them such storage services as automated tiered storage, simple replication and data recovery.

The company is unusual in that it sat down with prospective channel partners and customers a full year before coming to market in order to understand their needs, and then built its Storage Center based on those requirements.

Being 100 percent channel-focused from day one is the key to Compellent's success, said Brian Bell, vice president of sales for the company.

For instance, the Compellent Partner Advisory Council met early this month and looked at things like how to tweak the company's deal registration program. "It's great to have an advisory council to run ideas by," he said.

Another unusual aspect to Compellent is that its Storage Center architecture was designed so that advances in storage can be applied to customers' existing Compellent equipment without the need for a complete replacement, Bell said.

Compellent this summer introduced solid-state disk (SSD) technology to give customers a new high-speed storage tier for active data while keeping inactive data on SATA drives, Bell said.

"The SSDs can be popped into a system customers bought six years ago," he said. "It's a key benefit of working with Compellent: Customers don't need a forklift upgrade to get new technology. With EMC, if you have a Clariion CX-3, and want SSD, you need to buy a CX-4."