User Opinions of Compellent SANs

Anyone?  No opinions?  

I've had Equallogic for about 10 yrs (mostly SATA), and am in about yr 3 of Compellent. I've been very happy with the addition of Compellents, and have been very satisfied with the support received from Co-pilot. Getting DPACK's done on your current workload is a great asset to sizing out the Compellents so they suit your needs.

Thank you!

I do have some concerns regarding the Compellent SANs...  I was wondering how upgrading firmware was on the Compellents and how "easy" it is to expand your storage with SSDs/spindle drive mix.  Another concern is how it performs with the writing in RAID 10 and storing cold data in RAID 5.  I am considering the SC4020 if that makes any difference.  

Hi,

We have had our Compellent SAN before it was Dell (about 6 years now). We have gone through a controller upgrade, enclosure replacements, upgrades and expansion, and firmware updates on pretty much every component in the SAN. The only issues we've really had during any of these upgrades was due to a misconfiguration on our FC switches during one of the controller firmware upgrades, and that only took a few minutes to reconfigure on the FC switch.

As tomcat mentioned, you will want to run DPack on your existing environment to ensure your system gets spec'd out correctly.

The way the Compellent writes data is, it writes to the fastest storage that you have configured, if that storage runs out, it will automatically write to the next fastest tier. RAID 10 has the least overhead for writes, and RAID 5 will give you the best read performance. Depending on how often you end up doing replays (AKA snapshots). The data will progress from RAID 10 to RAID 5. And depending on how many tiers of storage you have, will determine how long your least used data moves down to your lowest (cheapest) storage.

Hope this helps information helps.

Working with multiple storage's i can say i love Compellent, pointing out few pluses :

-thin provision storage

-Copilot great help service

-data progression

-multiple raid's and tiers

-support assist services

-and  Enterprise manager amazing tool for troubleshooting and managing SC

-simplicity of use

I gone through about 10 firmware upgrades with our Compellents with no issues. I have also upgraded/replaced controllers on two of them twice and the system had no issues or downtime running on the one controller.

Hello! Totally depends on the size of Your environment - if You are a small shop (eg. <10 ESXi hosts), stay away - even our Storwize V3700 will out-perform SC4020 in one-host-one-VM-low-QD benchmarks, BUT if Your have a larger environment Compellent is a good choice - our performance tests running concurrent with more than 4 ESXi hosts, 4VM's with high QD will outperform our Storwize V7000 clearly.

Also be aware of the "wasted space" functionality of the replays and the requirement of leaving quite a lot of unused space for replays. Quick stats say You'll have to reserve 10-20% more space than with competitors products.

Co-pilot basicly is just a marketing speak - I've dealt with 7-8 different "engineers" and only 1 of them really knew anything. Plus it takes forever to upgrade the firmwares, when You first have to contact copilot, then they will check things etc. compared to the traditional "download the upgrade packages and upgrade Yourself" -method. Also we've done 3 major upgrades - of which 2 resulted in a mess and hazzle.