back to article Savvis picks Compellent for public cloud service

Savvis has picked Compellent to be its cloud storage supplier in the Spirit project to develop a virtual private data centre public cloud service. Compellent beat other vendors because its automated data movement made its storage more cost-effective and cheaper to manage. Savvis, an $850m a year revenue managed services …

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  1. bobtenda

    I feel another sidekick coming on

    Compellent certainly is cheap. It's inexpensive too. Good luck Savvis. I hope you have your backups down pat...

  2. Nate Amsden

    bet this wasn't a technical decision

    I bet this was some bean counter who saw the purchase price of Compelllent lower so decided to go with that. Not understanding the ramifications of the decision for performance.

    I don't have experience with Compellent personally though have talked with those who have used it and partner with it, they say it's not a scalable system. Which for many orgs out there I'm sure is fine, though for a company like SAVVIS I'd think that would be a mistake.

    Their block level data migrator is very attractive for sure, but that's really a small part of the picture. The only storage tier really worth moving data to for performance is SSD, and SSD is just too fast for any of the storage arrays out there to effectively handle today. Even the fastest storage array on the planet can be brought to it's knees with a handful of SSD disks. Systems weren't designed with the 10x+ improvement in I/O. Hopefully next gen storage systems will handle it better(my bar would be the controllers need to have at least a 5x I/O improvement vs today's technology).

    I remember talking to the VP at SAVVIS and a couple of the engineers there on a 3PAR reference call back in 2006 I think it was it was pretty amazing what they did with the technology back then(I think they had eight half populated 3PAR S800s at the time). It was one of the main drivers to go with them at the time.

    (yes I admit I'm biased towards 3PAR I don't try to hide it, no I'm not an employee but I am a customer! :) )

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    'Compellent'?

    I knew that the early 2000s vomited up some pretty egregious *ent names, but, not being in the business, I'd never heard this atrocity. Who the hell decided that was a good idea?

    "OK, gentlemen. It's clear that we need to have 'ent' on the end of our name. And we'd like to be very compelling. Anyone have any ideas?"

    "How about 'compellent'?"

    "Brilliant! We're done here. Let's all go pee in the well-appointed executive washroom."

    I mean, seriously... Lucent, Navigant, Conexant, Telegent, Agilent, Compellent... YAAAGH! What the hell is wrong with you, industry? Why! Why?!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Bad choice Savvis

    I think Savvis will be shocked when they see how poorly Compellent performs.

    Yes, it may be moving blocks all over the place, but at the detriment of overall system performance.

    Imagine holding a bucket of water and constantly "sloshing" it around. That's what Compellent does with your data blocks.

    "Price is what you pay, value is what you get" - Warren Buffet.

  5. LiemNCompellent

    Scalability and SSD Fact Check

    We’re privileged to have earned Savvis’ business and that of more than 1,500 other companies as of Q2. (Q3 earnings coming out soon.) I just wanted to set the record straight on a couple facts:

    Compellent actually scales both vertically (lots of disks per array) and horizontally (lots of arrays). The idea of scalability has definitely changed, particularly with cloud computing and virtualization. Today many of the companies who use Storage Center, including Savvis, have multiple arrays per site and many sites around the world – all managed in a unified way. Storage Center also scales to support SSD tiers within the same SAN without any existing customer having to buy another model just for SSD. If you have an enclosure you bought from us years ago, you can just plug in SSD to an empty slot and update the firmware. In fact one of our customers, Marketing Architects, was a finalist at SNW this week for his SSD deployment: http://www.snwusa.com/awards.aspx

    Savvis recognized our automated tiered storage technology improves performance while lowering their overall costs. And to be clear about our automated tiered storage: if you move stale data from SSD or FC tiers down to your SATA tiers, then your tier 1 storage is freed up for your most important apps. If the data on tier 2 or 3 gets accessed alot, say for quarterly financial analysis, then the array will automatically move that data back up to tier 1 drives without your intervention. Don’t take my word for it. Go back and read the comments from Savvis’ CTO in yesterday’s press release http://www.savvis.net/en-US/Company/News/Press/Pages/SavvisSelectsCompellentforHighPerformance.aspx. Their VP of storage explained it further in a video on their blog. http://blog.savvis.net/2009/10/todd-loeppke-savvis-vp-of-stor.html

    If I missed anything or you want to send me questions directly please don’t hesitate to contact me at lnguyen@compellent.com or twitter.com/liemnguyen.

  6. RogerBearpark

    Nothing beats first hand experience

    Take it from someone that has been around the block a few times and has signed up with all the major players at some time. I have personally used Compellent. The Borough of Hillingdon have two Compellent SANs, a primary and DR location, and we recently added SSD. The SSD performance has been stellar. Compellent also gives us a lot of advantages from space to power savings and we’ve improved many different services for our 250,000 constituents. Everyone has their favourites and likes to gripe about the others but this stuff is for real. Might not be comfortable for some in this industry but work with the facts

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