OnStor, Compellent tackle block, data storage

Computerworld - Organizations running applications with both block and file data can now use a single device for data storage that relies on a newly bundled system of products from OnStor Inc. and Compellent Technologies.

Under an agreement announced yesterday, Compellent will bundle OnStor’s network-attached storage gateway device with its Storage Center storage-area network offering.

Prior to the bundling deal, applications using block data -- and those that use file data -- needed separate storage devices. The agreement also lets users work with a single company for sales and support, said Bob Fine, director of product marketing for Compellent, which is selling and supporting the storage hardware.

“We’re allowing customers to choose between different kind of drives, Fibre Channel or [Serial ATA], but also different RAID levels [5, 6, 7 or 10],” said Fine. “Automatic tiering software will place data anywhere in those four levels to match cost and performance automatically.”

The bundled offering is now available. An entry-level configuration with 2TB of storage, one Compellent Storage Center Controller and one OnStor Bobcat NAS Gateway, costs $71,000. A typical configuration with more than 6TB of data, two Controllers, two Bobcats and the Data Progression software costs $173,000, the companies said.

Before yesterday’s announcement, Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University in Columbus had looked to use the OnStor device with its Storage Center installation as part of a Novell file and print server migration, said Nick Poolos, systems developer/engineer at the school. The college then became a test site for the bundled product.

Fisher has about 125 faculty members, 150 staff members, 4,700 undergraduate students and 850 graduate students using approximately 50 Linux and Windows servers, as well as a few Sun Sparcstations.

Poolos selected the OnStor-Compellent bundle instead of a competitive offering from Network Appliance Inc. because the organization wanted to stay with its existing investment in Compellent drives.

The college has been testing the OnStor system with its Compellent software since October and is planning to start using production data in early April, he said.

Users previously had to deal with separate pools for Novell and Network File System storage and had to use FTP to move files back and forth, but they can now see all of their data at once, Poolos said.

He said he hopes the bundled offering will soon add support for Network File System Version 4. “I know I’m ahead of the curve on that one, but it’s something I could use today,” Poolos said. “I’m not sure I’d put much production data on that, but I’d like to look at evaluations.”

Compellent has indicated to him that such functionality is “in the pipeline,” he said.

Sharon Fisher is a special correspondent for Computerworld.

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