Storage Roundup: Compellent, SGI, NetApp

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the storage industry:

Compellent unveils Blueprint for Virtual Data center. Compellent (CML) announced the findings from a joint report with Microsoft titled Increasing IT Efficiency in a Dynamic Datacenter with a Virtualized Storage Solution. Highlighting storage virtualization as a key component, the report details how organizations can maximize benefits and cost savings in a virtualized IT environment. The report showed that when Microsoft server virtualization is paired with Compellent storage virtualization physical servers reduced by 89 percent, rack space reduced by 59 percent, disk drives reduced by 76 percent, energy consumption reduced by 49 percent and operating system licensing reduced by 66 percent. Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group said “Compellent’s Fluid Data storage architecture matches well with Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized server environments in which VMs demand great flexibility such as rapid data provisioning or recovery. The power, space and cost savings achieved by moving to a virtualized environment are considerable, but the lasting benefits organizations can realize though improved manageability and more granular control of data are significant.”

SGI Releases COPAN 400 Storage Platform. SGI announced the release of the SGI COPAN 400 platform, the next generation of the COPAN line of energy-efficient, persistent data storage solutions. The COPAN 400 approaches 1.8 petabytes in a single cabinet, achieving dramatic savings in space and power.  With throughput at full bandwidth of 23TB per hour it is over four times the performance of its predecessor.  The COPAN platform uses MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) and power managed RAID software to minimize power consumption and provisioning by limiting the number of spinning drives to strict thresholds as low as 25 percent at any time.  The SGI COPAN 400T is available immediately and the 400M will be available later this year.

NetApp and Microsoft continue partner integration.  NetApp (NTAP) announced tight integration with Microsoft technology to enable the growing number of joint customers and service providers to better optimize and evolve their infrastructure while dramatically reducing costs, streamlining management, and increasing business agility.  “As part of our strategic alliance, NetApp and Microsoft continue to deliver on our promise to help customers transform their data centers to achieve greater efficiencies, increase agility, and respond faster to changing business needs,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products, Alliances, and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. Building on Microsoft’s extensible management framework, NetApp is unveiling a new management pack that enables Microsoft customers to manage NetApp storage efficiency technologies, plus basic self-healing capabilities with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager