Feature-rich, Easy-to-use SAN

Advanced Virtualization

Manage Disk Space as a Centralized, High Performance Pool

Compellent virtualizes at the disk level within Storage Center, accelerating data access by spreading read/write operations across all disk drives in the SAN (storage area network) so multiple requests are processed in parallel. Compellent virtualization technology allows you to create high performance, highly efficient virtual volumes in just seconds without allocating drives to specific servers, without complicated capacity planning and without performance tuning.


Storage Center creates virtual volumes from a centralized storage pool to provide:

Efficient Utilization: Manage disks as a single pool and present disk resources to any server. Utilize all disk resources all the time for maximum efficiency.

The Flexibility of Shared Storage: Remove the limitations of physical drives by aggregating them into logical, virtual volumes. Write virtual volumes to the entire disk pool or any subset of the disk pool; provision without restrictions.

Increased Performance: Advanced virtualization technologies provide an IT manager the ability to scale performance linearly across all the available drives; make each disk drive's performance characteristics accessible to each server. Any volume can simultaneously utilize all of the disk drives in the shared pool to access data.
Key Benefits
  • Managing disk drives as a single system resource provides increased storage performance, availability and utilization
  • Accelerate data access by spreading read/write operations across all disk drives in the SAN
  • Save time managing and allocating storage with a single shared storage pool
  • Full disk parallelization increases IOPs and reduces hot spots
  • Efficient data placement enables faster seek times
  • Mix drive capacities and speeds within volumes
  • Change RAID levels on the fly at any time

The Compellent Advantage
CompellentOthers Typically
Block-level virtualization creates high performance, redundant virtual volumes with any combination of disk drivesCreate volumes based on fixed groups of disks
Full disk parallelization writes virtualized volumes to the entire disk pool, or any subset of the disk poolStripe volumes across a limited subset of drives
Create any size virtual volumeConventional drives offer fixed sizes
Create any performance virtual volumeConventional drives offer fixed performance options
Create a fault tolerant, secure access virtual volumeConventional drives offer no fault tolerance, no security
Support for any number of pools each of which supports any number of volumesLimit number of pools and restrict number of volumes per pool
Customer Testimonial
“Our environment is 90 percent virtualized using VMware technology. We estimate that the cost savings that we've received by implementing the Compellent is about a 20 percent reduction in infrastructure costs for both equipment and staff.”

Todd Croy
Infrastructure Manager
Scott County
Performance Tuning
93% of customers spend less than 30 minutes a week on performance tuning thanks to Compellent's virtualization.
Related Collateral
Data Center Virtualization Datasheet:  Extend the benefits of server virtualization.

Data Center Virtualization One-Pager: See why your virtual data center should start with Compellent.

Scott County Case Study: Scott County Goes Virtual with Compellent and VMware.

Virtual Data Center Position Paper: Three Must Haves for the Virtual Data Center.

Simplified Virtual Server Management White Paper: Raising the SAN Value Proposition via Simplified Virtual Server Management 

VMware Fact Sheet: Going Beyond Certification
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