ATG was impressed early with Compellent’s storage solutions. Their long included feature-list and more digestible price-tag caught our attention several years back. But as we flip our calendars to 2010 we’re left impressed at how they’ve IPO’d and continued to perform, enhance, and defend their growing installation base.

Why Compellent? Compellent represents one of the more stable and reliable block level virtualized storage arrays available. While it’s not everything to everyone, it certainly does what it says and does it extremely well.

Let’s take a closer look at some of their strengths.

Cost Efficiency:
Compellent has focused on cost efficiency in several areas. The product supports three tiers of traditional hard-drives, and, with a recent announcement, high-performing memory based drives. The product thin provisions storage, enabling customers to virtually assign any amount of storage to users while only requiring actual provisioning of hard-drives as physically needed. (no more huge volumes barely being utilized)

Performance Efficiency:
Compellent¹s unique ability to migrate data across multiple tiers of storage and locations within disk platters at the block level is key to their success. This automates and customizes storage performance to customer requirement without customer interaction. Multiple levels of performing/priced disk are automatically leveraged for the data type. This frees customers to utilize less high-cost disk without impacting performance, and provides vision to storage scaling, leading to more informed and efficient upgrades.

Scaling Efficiency:
Compellent¹s flexible design enables customers to design storage arrays by necessity. Mixed drives, mixed connectivity, high-end array features and an easy to use management interface make Compellent an attractive choice among it¹s more monolithic and non-flexible, model-based competition.

Roadmap Vision:
Compellent is planning to announce strong support of VMware infrastructures over the next six to twelve months. Deep integration with VMware should provide some significantly unique benefits and barriers to entry in the quickly commoditizing virtualization markets. Their ability to support the growing “cloud” computing trends is extremely important to their continued differentiation and success.

With a long feature-list and now hundreds of happy installations around the globe, Compellent has done a nice job of carving out a spot in the crowded storage market.