Manage and virtualise your data efficiently

Dell Compellent Storage Center delivers Optimise efficiency, agility and resiliency to help up to 80 percent, scale on a single platform and secure data against downtime and disaster with the multi-protocol Dell Compellent Storage Center featuring Fluid Data technology.

Efficiency

Dell Compellent Storage Center is an enterprise data storage array that delivers high performance with fewer drives, power and space. In fact, with Fluid Data storage, your cost per gigabyte can actually decrease as you grow.

• Storage virtualization — storage is virtualised at the drive level, creating an ultra-efficient, high-performance pool of storage shared by all servers and applications.
• Thin provisioning — virtual volumes of any size are provisioned upfront, yet physical capacity is only consumed on write.
• Automated tiered storage — using granular real-time intelligence, snapshots and inactive data automatically move to lower-cost drives, while new writes and active data remain on high-performance drives

Agility

Dell Compellent Storage Center forms a solid foundation for flexible grid storage, allowing you to scale up and out with dynamic business continuity. What’s more, you can do it all without downtime or disruption.

• Technology independence — mix and match the latest drive and interconnect technologies, and easily add new technologies as they become available.
• Non-disruptive architecture — add capacity, dynamically change system configuration and initiate new functionality online without disrupting operations or suspending data access.
• Unified storage management — easily manage your entire storage infrastructure and save time and effort through built-in automation.
• Dynamic business continuity — non-disruptively migrate volumes between storage arrays and data centers, creating an on-demand cloud infrastructure.

Resiliency

The Dell Compellent Storage Center enables you to continuously protect data against downtime and disaster—without the need for full-volume clones, capacity pre-allocation or high-speed data links. Fully redundant hardware and advanced failover features help to ensure high availability.

• Space-efficient snapshots — once an initial snapshot is taken, only incremental changes in data need to be captured, allowing you to take continuous snapshots for near-instant recovery to any point in time.
• Thin replication — cost-effectively replicate data synchronously or asynchronously over Fibre Channel or IP connections. Only subsequent changes are replicated following initial site synchronization.

Dell Compellent Copilot Support

Like having a Dell Compellent expert on staff.

Dell Compellent Copilot Support delivers proactive, comprehensive 24×7 technical support that covers the entire storage infrastructure. Operating out of a state-of-the-art U.S. call center, Dell Compellent Copilot engineers continuously monitor system performance and alert customers of potential issues. Dell Compellent Copilot Support provides:

• 24×7 access to highly trained Dell Compellent Copilot Support engineers.
• Priority or next-business-day on-site* response by Dell Compellent-certified technicians.
• Priority, next-business-day or UPS ground delivery of replacement parts.
• Real-time storage system monitoring via integrated PhoneHome technology.

Dell Compellent Copilot Support enables you to choose the right level of phone support, on-site3 support and parts delivery for your unique business needs. Every call is answered by a highly trained Copilot engineer, who takes ownership of the entire storage infrastructure, including third-party technology partner products.

Intelligent, automated software

Fluid Data technology empowers organizations to move beyond simply storing data to actively managing data. Built-in intelligence and automation optimise the storage environment, and every advanced enterprise feature is fully integrated for optimum efficiency, flexibility and performance.

Dell Compellent Fluid Data technology virtualises storage at the disk level, accelerating data access by spreading read/write operations across drives so multiple requests are processed in parallel. You can create high-performance, ultra-efficient virtual volumes in seconds without allocating drives to specific servers, complicated capacity planning or manual performance tuning. Remove the limitations of physical drives and dynamically change and scale your virtualized pool without disruption or downtime.

Dynamic Capacity: thin provisioning

Built into every Dell Compellent Storage Center system, thin provisioning delivers efficient storage utilisation. Our advanced thin provisioning, called Dynamic Capacity, completely separates storage allocation from utilisation, enabling users to allocate any size volume upfront yet only consume physical capacity on write. You can even reclaim capacity that is no longer in use by applications, automatically reduce the space needed for virtual OS volumes and convert traditional volumes on existing storage to thin-provisioned capacity.

Data Progression: automated tiered storage

Based on actual use and performance requirements, Dell Compellent Data Progression automatically classifies and migrates data to the optimum tier and RAID level. All new data is written to Tier 1, RAID 10, for the highest write performance, yet snapshots automatically move to the lowest tier and most cost-effective RAID level within 24 hours. The most active blocks of data remain on high-performance SSD, Fibre Channel or SAS drives, while inactive blocks dynamically migrate to lower-cost, high-capacity SAS or SATA drives. With Data Progression, organisations can reduce overall storage costs by up to 80 percent.

Data Instant Replay: space-efficient snapshots

Dell Compellent Data Instant Replay enables organisations to take thousands of continuous snapshots to speed recovery to any point in time. Fluid Data technology doesn’t require full-volume clones—not even to provide a base snapshot. Instead, after first write an initial snapshot is taken of that write data only. Subsequently, only incremental changes in data are captured and the system uses real-time intelligence to create virtual pointers between all associated blocks. Stored on lower-cost drives to free up Tier 1 capacity, in most cases these readable/writable snapshots can be used to recover any size volume to any server in less than 10 seconds.

Remote Instant Replay: thin replication

Dell Compellent thin replication technology, called Remote Instant Replay, leverages space-efficient snapshots between local and remote sites to deliver a cost-effective disaster recovery solution. After initial site synchronization, only incremental changes in data need to be replicated regularly, cutting hardware, bandwidth and administration costs. You can choose between replicating data over Fibre Channel or native IP connections, depending on your unique business requirements.

Live Volume: dynamic business continuity

Dell Compellent Live Volume enables organizations to move volumes on demand between Storage Center arrays within a local storage grid. All migration occurs transparently while applications remain online. And the functionality is fully integrated into the virtualized storage platform, eliminating the need for additional hardware or server-side agents. Live Volume supports any virtualised server environment. In fact, migrated volumes automatically map to associated hosts regardless of physical location to Dell complement leading virtual machine movement engines.

Storage Center GUI: intuitive management

Dell Compellent Storage Center features a unified, point-and-click interface that cuts administration time and eliminates the need for specialized skills. The intuitive interface automates repetitive, time-consuming tasks so data center staff can focus on other important projects. Complex allocation, configuration and administration functions are easily accomplished with wizards to guide the process. And comprehensive PhoneHome capabilities deliver remote, diagnostic and monitoring tools coupled with automated alert and notification services.

Enterprise Manager: enterprise storage management

Enterprise Manager simplifies storage resource management by providing comprehensive monitoring and management of all local and remote Dell Compellent Storage Center systems. You can gain instant visibility and control of a multi-terabyte, multi-location environment, streamlining administration and reducing operating costs. Configure and verify remote replication processes, monitor storage capacity and disk utilisation in real time, and generate comprehensive storage usage and performance reports—all from a single pane of glass.

Data Center Automation: technology partner integration

With aggressive platform integration, ongoing interoperability testing and collaborative design efforts, Dell Compellent delivers best-of-breed data center automation for industry-leading applications. The Storage Center Command Set for Windows PowerShell streamlines system management with an intuitive scripting interface. Replay Manager provides consistent, automated backup and restore for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Hyper-V data. These certified and validated platforms ensure seamless interoperability and support.

Storage controllers

The Dell Compellent Fluid Data architecture allows organisations to select single- or dual-controller configurations with a combination of industry-standard front- and back-end interconnects to meet cost, performance and availability requirements.

The Storage Center SAN supports 4/8Gb Fibre Channel, 1/10Gb iSCSI and 10Gb Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) front-end connectivity as well as 4Gb Fibre Channel, 3/6Gb SAS and 2Gb SATA back-end connectivity.

Dell Compellent storage controllers connect to open-system servers without server-side agents, and automatically fail over to another controller when clustered.

Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and cooling fans help to ensure non-stop operation and high availability. Virtual ports increase port capacity, disk bandwidth, I/O connectivity and port failover.

• Persistent hardware architecture for no forklift upgrades
• Upgrade and add technology over time on same platform
• Standards-based hardware helps to avoid technology lock-in
• Connect servers and disks with ease via PCI cards
• Controller clustering for high availability
• Shared-nothing approach for no single point of failure
• High-speed mirrored, write-back cache to prevent data loss

Network Attached Storage

Beyond the multi-protocol SAN capabilities of Storage Center, Dell Compellent also extends the benefits of Fluid Data into network attached storage. Dell Compellent NAS solutions enable you to consolidate file-based data and manage it together with block-based data. Dell Compellent NAS solutions allow you to select the best architecture for your IT environment. The Dell Compellent zNAS is ideal for midsize and large organisations with mixed UNIX, Linux and Windows environments, while the Dell Compellent Storage Center NAS is optimal in pure CIFS or Windows environments.

With Dell Compellent NAS solutions, file serving operations remain separate from application operations to avoid bottlenecks from CPU-intensive processes. Yet all I/O requests are spread across the storage pool and processed in parallel, to increase overall performance and availability. Clustered configurations and hardware redundancy further enhance availability, with active/ active failover and advanced multipathing (MPxIO) helping to ensure no single point of failure.

Disk enclosures

Dell Compellent disk enclosures feature the latest industry-standard technology, including 6Gb SAS interconnects, so organizations can scale up and out with ease. Administrators can mix SSD, Fibre Channel, SAS and NLSAS drives in the same system as well as different speeds and capacities in the same enclosure.

New 24-bay 2.5” SAS enclosures accommodate more than twice as many drives as 12-bay 3.5” enclosures. Any combination of enclosures can be housed in an array to balance cost and performance. Users can change configuration on demand—adding, replacing or updating enclosures—as new technologies emerge and business needs change. Migrating data to new enclosures can be performed without disruption.

Drives

Dell Compellent drives feature the latest industry-standard innovations. Organizations can combine SSD, Fibre Channel, SAS and NLSAS drives in the same system. Administrators simply choose the drive types, capacities, form factors, transfer rates and rotational speeds that make sense for their business and application needs. Dell Compellent Data Progression software automates the movement of data among drive types in the storage pool—between tiers and RAID levels, including RAID levels within the same tier.

Dell Compellent 3.5″ disk drives support 4Gb Fibre Channel and 3/6Gb SAS back-end connectivity. Also available are 2.5″ 6Gb SAS drives, which deliver twice the performance, yet consume much less power than conventional 3Gb SAS drives.

With Dell Compellent Fluid Data storage, you can add disk capacity on the fly as business needs change. Also, migrating data to new drives can be performed without disruption.

• Scale from 2TB to nearly 2 PB on a single system
• Expand or migrate storage online without disruption