Compellent Bundles VMware Replication Software For Disaster Recovery & Cloud

Compellent Technologies on Tuesday said the company will bundle VMware's vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) software with its Storage Center storage systems for its channel partners.

By OEMing and bundling VMware's SRM with Compellent's Storage Center systems, Compellent wants to make it easier for partners to implement disaster recovery and cloud storage offerings, said Bruce Kornfield, vice president of alliances for the Eden Prairie, Minn.-based storage vendor.

It also means that VMware SRM will be supported by Compellent's Copilot support services, giving customers a single source for help, Kornfield said.

"We hear a lot from end users about the need to simplify as they build disaster recovery capabilities," Kornfield said. "This allows customers to get their data between any sites very easily."

For instance, with Compellent's Storage Center, customers can get a replication started with only six clicks of the mouse compared to a process taking several hours or days with many other vendors, Kornfield said.

With the VMware SRM integration, that data replication simplicity is extended to the ability to run virtual machines at a remote location if needed, said Parag Patel, vice president of global alliances at VMware.

The whole purpose of SRM is to get customers back up and running as soon as possible, so that if something goes down at the primary data center, they can get their applications restarted quickly in another site, Patel said.

"We help customers recover data and operations," he said.

Storage Center along with VMware SRM also provides a cloud-ready storage architecture with the virtualization, scalability, automation, and availability needed for a successful multisite disaster recovery implementation, Kornfield said.

"As customers move into building clouds, it's not enough to have all that technology in one location," he said. "That's risky. The ability to have that data in one location while able to move it to a second location is critical."

This is especially true for Compellent customers, about 70 percent of whom replicate data from site-to-site, Kornfield said.

VMware's SRM is already an important piece for any site-to-site replication implementation using Compellent's Storage Center, said Paul Clifford, principle at the Davenport Group, a St. Paul, Minn.-based solution provider and Compellent partner.

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Therefore, the bundle is less of a technical bonus, and more of a pricing bonus, Clifford said. "If a customer is involved with VMware and understands what SRM is, it becomes a purchase," he said. "Because it's going to be bundled with Compellent, it becomes a pricing advantage as part of a total solution."

More important is the fact that VMware SRM will be part of Compellent's Copilot support service, Clifford said.

"That puts a real smile on my face," he said. "Copilot is far more than maintenance. It's like an additional member of our team. With SRM under Copilot, we get the confidence that our backsides are covered."

The bundle is currently available. Pricing for a typical Storage Center 5.4 configuration with VMware SRM starts at about $83,000, which includes clustered controllers; 6 TBs of 6-Gbps SAS; Compellent licenses for multisite management, automated tiering, thin provisioning, snapshots, and replication; and VMware SRM with a license for 25 virtual machines.