Compellent Leverages Partners To Devlop, Launch Appliance
Published for the Week Of September 6, 2004
Compellent Technologies’ three founders had a long history together before founding the storage upstart.
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In the late 1980s at Tricord Systems, Phil Soran and Larry Aszmann worked on the first storage systems to support multiple servers, a notion that later become known as SANs.
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In the mid-1990s they joined John Guilder to found XIOtech, which specialized in storage configuration and management. After selling XIOtech to Seagate for $360 million, the three launched Compellent, Eden Prairie, Minn., in 2002.
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What they developed at Compellent, and launched into the channel this February, was a product called Storage Center, an appliance that enables storage to scale across one or more operating systems using a mix of storage technologies.
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President and CEO Soran said Storage Center eases management of storage regardless of how quickly or large it grows and is offered exclusively through the channel. “Compellent delivers twice the functionality of high-end systems,” he said. “We wanted to make this attainable for small- to medium-size enterprises.”
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Compellent took an unusual tack in launching its product. Rather than starting out by developing a few direct reference accounts, it brought in solution providers and their clients to form an advisory group during the development stage. Now the company is working with about 25 partners in a single-tier program.
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Compellent’s Storage Center is a rock-solid product with absolutely no issues, said Paul Clifford, principal at the Davenport Group, a St. Paul, Minn., solution provider.
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Clifford said Compellent has been a great channel partner as well, even when everything doesn’t go Davenport’s way. “When we’ve had conflict within the channel, it’s been resolved,” he said. “I can’t say I’ve always been happy with the result. But it’s been resolved by them.”
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On the technology side, the founders--Soran, CTO Aszmann and COO Guilder--developed their own Dynamic Block Architecture that enables Storage Center to pull together various types of storage devices into a centrally managed storage block.
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Administrators can access Storage Center through a Web interface. And storage virtualization enables the solution to allocate data to the most appropriate device, whether it be tape, disk or another SAN.
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Storage Center ships with a core of standard business functionality, including multiuser administration, manual snapshots and instant replays, booting from SAN, and zoning and copy-mirror-migrate functions.
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