Image by wynner3 via Flickr

About a week ago I tweeted that I had been invited to a storage vendor’s event, was invited as a potential customer by two different parties.  Funny thing about email lists, people get invited that you wouldn’t expect to attend.  I took off my storage hat, put on my analyst hat and promised a few old friends that I would behave.  I’ve competed against Compellent in the past (sometimes very aggressively!).  I’ve also said some nice things about the technology as well.

Compellent

Strong storage player, public company surviving in a harsh IT economy, and locally here in Colorado working with some great internal talent and one of my favorite partners.  Basic premise of the storage technology is controller based disk array (controllers are commodity based architecture which I’ve mentioned before) with a plethora of storage software services.  The special part that they bring to the table is at the storage service level, Data Progression™, Fast Track, replication, etc.  They have a very compelling story, proven scalability and a growing revenue and customer base.  The recent introduction of SSD support brings what most like to consider as a Tier0 storage layer, and although they have SATA, I would really like to see a strong archival tier in the near future.

Lewan and Associates

Lewan, is one of my favorite local integrators.  They did a very nice presentation about how they have several lines of business, specifically broken into two main lines of business, the traditional printer/copier side, and the IT Solutions side.  Lewan was relatively recently acquired by Xerox, but remains a very independent subsidiary.  What I liked the most about Lewan’s presentation was that they get the whole IT picture, and to date have had some of the key technology partners to create best-of-breed solutions for customers in the Rocky Mountain region.  The quick elevator pitch from Lewan?  D.N.A. – Data Center, Network, and Application Delivery.  They cover it all, and do it not only from a pure product basis, but from a consultative model that keeps the customers coming back!

Latisys

Latisys was another sponsor of this event, and they have some great solutions to the remote data center/hosting/co-location problem.  The purpose of the presentation on this day was to talk about Compellent’s place within Latisys, specifically to offer a target for secure remote replication.  This is something that any customer should look at that is currently running a Compellent SAN, because it reduces the complexity and I would assume costs associated in owning your own remote installation of Compellent gear, while giving you a place to recover too.  The better play they are offering however, is the ability to bring up your VMware based environment in a disaster, which is something that is very powerful for business continuance.

The SAN Technologist

I felt like a spy, I got funny looks, got directly asked if I had any questions, but I behaved and while I made no promises, I learned, I liked the things I saw, and I could without loosing sleep write something that is meaningful about these companies.  It isn’t everyday that you get a chance to see old friends, not try to destroy them, and leave with friendship renewed.  Quick shout out to my lovely mother who will greatly enjoy the Wizard of Oz reference, although not Judy’s greatest role, it is a good one.