Compellent - the billion-dollar storage company?

Holding up Compellent as an example - and with an emphatic sideswipe at some business ethics - Compellent CEO Phil Soran opened his company's CDrive conference today by saying: "Big business isn't going to pull us out of this recession. Nor big computer computers. It's the small and medium-sized businesses that are going to have …

[Nate Amsden]

performance?

Anyone know how their stuff performs? The specs on the controllers

http://www.compellent.com/~/media/com/Files/Datasheets/DS_SC_TechSpecs.ashx

Seem kind of mixed, on one hand they support quite a few drives, and lots of raw storage, on the other hand they don't even have 4GB of cache on the system, and only 2 cpus per controller on the high end? Maybe I'm just reading it wrong. Do you really need to mention redundant hot swappable fans and power supplies these days?

Their basic architecture seems one that could(should) scale beyond 2 controllers. Interesting that they seem to have different enclosure types depending on the type of HD.

Tried finding some good spec sheets or architecture documents but couldn't find anything more than the highest of high level. From what I see the one thing that they do have going for them is the block based automatic storage tiering which is really nice. I don't see any other advantages to the system other than that though(over my 3PAR T400 at least).

As an Exanet customer as well I suppose I could ask my Exanet reps to give me the details on their system. I for one really enjoy reading technical specs and architecture documents. I'm so versed on 3PAR architecture/hardware/software I could spend all day talking about it, sometimes I even correct my SE :)

I went through a bunch of the posted SPC-1 numbers last week and was surprised of the results, especially the cost per usable TB for systems that needed to do short stroking to get acceptable levels of performance.

The block based virtualization of Compellent seems similar to 3PAR so they probably don't suffer as much from that need.

[TeeCee]

I can't believe it!

Only 45% of the next generation of lawyers are cheating, lying, unethical bastards?

Standards really are slipping.