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GCN Home > 03/20/06 issue

Tiered SAN means better storage

With Compellent, you can mix and match drives and more

By Greg Crowe, GCN Staff

The right storage solution has always been the brass ring of running a network. As users’ needs grow, and the files they work with become bulkier and more complex, your storage requirements increase.

And capacity isn’t the only concern. A user wants a file this instant, no matter when it was last modified. This has to be balanced with staying within budget, and using the least expensive option when possible.

A backup-to-tape solution is initially inexpensive and cheaply expandable, but it can be cumbersome to maintain. A storage area network is arguably a better, faster solution.

The Storage Center from Compellent is a good example of the advantages a SAN can bring to your network. Its methods of data management and expandability bring network storage to a whole new level.

Compellent works through resellers whose technicians come in to take you through the entire set-up process. Depending on the complexity of both the system and the client’s data, this can take a couple of hours to two days from start to finish. Setup is included in the cost of the system.

What we looked at

A minimal setup for the Storage Center (which is what we tested here in the GCN Lab) comes with one server connected to two 16-slot drive bays, one for Fibre Channel drives and the other for cheaper serial ATA drives. This gave us a total disk space of three terabytes using just half of the available slots.

The Web-based interface can be accessed from any computer on the network. You can see which physical drives are in which bays, and start to manage disk folders or groups of disks (we put all 16 disks in one folder). The system shows you the disk tiers it’s created based on disk performance, with Tier One being the fastest and Tier Three the slowest. Each tier is broken down into three RAID levels: 10, 5 (five-disk), and 5 (nine-disk).

More news on related topics: Hardware, Storage Management



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