Taming the Data Tiger

Although it is commonplace to write about a world where complexity increases by the moment, many solid attempts are also being made to get more—and more easily—from a given resource, to make multi-purpose devices, and to find inescapably logical ways to do things smarter. It’s why we have crossover vehicles in our garages, flexible working patterns, and gaming consoles that play DVDs, too. Of course, these are all relatively recent improvements, born of both opportunity and the need to fix or improve something. Likewise, many areas of IT have grown up steadfastly specialized, and indeed many storage platforms and approaches are still that way. Compellent was founded on the idea of implementing a different approach; one based more on the changing needs of data than on the whims of storage vendors. Over the years, it has attracted many loyal customers, gained market credibility, and now is bestowing a name upon what it delivers: a “Fluid Data Architecture.”

Market Background

Before getting into more detail on Compellent and Fluid Data, a brief reminder of the general state of the storage world is worthwhile. The essence is really simple: data is growing, as are the complexities, applications, and expectations that surround and compound it.  Truly, users often find themselves trying to tame a data tiger. Thus, whatever the technical niceties, the two key needs in the storage arena are value and simplicity. Value can be summarized as using efficiencies of all sorts to counter exponential capacity growth. Simplicity invariably comes from a combination of intelligence and automation; while there may be (and indeed, often should be) more ‘smarts’ under the covers, the storage system itself should be a breeze to understand and to operate. Additionally, the user environment to which all this value and simplicity must be applied has an unfortunate but necessary tendency to be highly dynamic. Business and application needs change. The IT world and the real world that it in turn serves are fluid and the pace and extent of change is growing. Why on earth would you want to try to tame that beast with rigid storage? Traditional application-specific storage (try imagining one PC for PPT, another for Word, and so on) that was  managed myopically by highly specialist personnel was an outcome of expediency and generous budgets;  we must admit that it served its purpose in a different IT age, but we must equally now realize that it is unsuited to today.

The Compellent Differentiation: “Fluid Data Storage”

By introducing the concept of  “Fluid Data,” Compellent is aiming to restructure the way that data storage is understood and discussed—in this case, restructured around what Compellent can offer, obviously, but equally to emphasize the IT and business values of flexibly and dynamically managed and provisioned data. After all, storage is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Like many good things, the essence of a Fluid Data architecture is strikingly simple and does not need a 50-page white paper to explain it. Compellent’s marketing materials state that “data isn’t something to be stored, it’s something to be actively, intelligently managed”—making that happen in conjunction with automated and dynamic responsiveness to the changing needs of specific data is what Fluid Data management is all about.

Most find it easy to grasp the “fluid” nature of business and application environments. If your IT organization is accustomed to words like “adaptable,” “adjustable,” “changeable,” “flexible,” “inconstant,” “indefinite,” “mobile,” “shifting,” “unstable,” and “variable,”[1] then it is highly familiar with “demand-side fluidity.” To deliver on the supply side, IT in general—in this specific case, the storage part thereof—must be “able to flow and alter shape freely.”[2] The reason this is challenging for many vendors, and indeed the reason Compellent is happy to not only define this battlefield but to fight on it, is that “supply-side fluidity” concerns both software and hardware. Compellent has always had its innovative “dynamic block” architecture with secret sauce software to dynamically and automatically manage data in a granular (block) fashion, but the fluid nature of its hardware is also important. The company offers a single model that scales without practical limits and that can continually integrate new technologies and components as needed—without forklift upgrades.

Fluid Data management is less a traditional product or feature launch and far more a semantic and conceptual culmination of what Compellent offers: framing the market context both in its own—and also an inescapably logical—light.

Fluid Data Analysis

ESG’s recent research[3] demonstrates vividly the relevance of Fluid Data storage when it comes to addressing current user priorities. Figure 1 summarizes the major business initiatives faced by IT departments; somehow, managers must  not only continue to tightly control costs (still the number one factor), they must simultaneously address the renewed and increased desire for a host of other laudable business initiatives from business process improvement and security to supporting ‘green’ endeavors and improved R&D.

Given that the priority and scale of each need will naturally ebb and flow within any organization as its business environment and/or management change, the need for flexibility is paramount. Yet such flexibility cannot typically be achieved at the cost of any large budget increases (remember initiative #1!) or the introduction of unacceptable risk or delay. CEOs are invariably measured by their ability to control costs, manage risk, and deliver improved cycle times—constantly adding or changing storage (whether vendors, products, or both) to meet changing demands is not likely to help any of those measurements. A Fluid Data solution, on the other hand, probably can.

Compellent’s Fluid Data Capabilities

Against these challenging needs, Compellent has honed a solution that offers an impressive and extensive selection of capabilities that perfectly address Fluid Data storage needs. The underlying hardware and software architecture makes Compellent “fluid” based on the automation of data movement and management, an area in which the company has been a pioneer. The bottom line is that Compellent provides a responsive, granular, and automated storage system. Underlying its flexibility is the Fluid Data architecture, which uses patented tools to classify and dynamically move data blocks to optimum tiers based upon their usage. This allows users to have data that is provisioned, placed, and protected with a malleable and appropriate balance of performance, cost, and risk. The approach also reduces waste by maximizing the use of available—and appropriate—resources in addition to being based on a continually evolving platform that precludes forklift upgrades and escalating software license costs. This means that Compellent can provide value in terms of the three motivations that most CEOs have: controlling costs, delivering agility, and managing risk. Listed below is a selection of specific functionalities that help with the Fluid Data approach:

• Thin provisioning – only buy capacity that’s actually needed and only move real data within the system.
• Snapshot capabilities –used for ‘dev and test’ copies, [remote] replication, and CDP.
• Broad efficiency – apply block-level automated tiering, which also helps with power reduction via better usage of high-capacity drives as needed.
• Virtualized storage – provide a pool of storage, which matches well with virtualized-server environments in which VMs demand great flexibility such as easy and rapid provisioning or recoveries (“server replay” is the Compellent term).
• A single interface – the single, easy GUI reduces training needs while the extensive automation allows for low management touch.
• A single unified platform – can incorporate a range of current storage technologies from primary to secondary storage—whether FC, SAS, SATA or SSD; SAN or NAS; and FC, FCoE, iSCSI, or 10GbE.

As can be seen from this range of capabilities and functions, the Fluid Data management that Compellent enables and delivers is just as good for IT as it is for the business.

Applicability vs. Acceptance

While the logic behind and the need for Fluid Data storage is hard to question, that’s not the same as an entire market accepting the term and approach. It differs greatly from what the storage world has been used to; this means it will almost certainly generate “FUD” (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) from those vendors that will not benefit from the status quo being challenged. Luckily, there are other signs of a fluid approach being introduced into IT: for example, server virtualization, the move to collapsed IT stacks (where resources are flexibly assigned as needed), and even some more ‘fluid’ storage approaches by a handful of other storage vendors. Such industry moves are good to support Compellent’s definition.

There is no decree that storage has to be complex or specialized. If we use vehicles as an analogy, it makes great sense to have a fluid offering (like crossovers) that can do the vast majority of things that the vast majority of users want the vast majority of the time. Yes, there may be the occasional need for a specialist, limited tool—a Ferrari or dump truck, for instance—but that is marginal and not mainstream.

Compellent’s ability to define a new category will be determined and strengthened by ensuring that Fluid Data storage is at least as much about generic market and data needs as it is about the specific Compellent solution. Only by doing this first can it then benefit from and maximize traction for its own delivery against those needs.  Despite these challenges, what is very clear is that users are very motivated along these logical lines and that market acceptance of Fluid Data in general is implicit in what ESG has uncovered with its research.  ESG’s data shows that when users are looking at cost reduction as a major factor in their storage initiatives, they certainly include such thing as storage virtualization, more power efficiency, tiered storage, and remote data protection—these are all great in isolation and apply to the expenditure issue, BUT the opportunity for Fluid Data storage arises from the fact that the justification for any IT expenditure is based on more than cost containment alone. Figure 2 shows a slightly different angle to the prior data and emphasizes the justification for actual expenditure rather than merely the motivation for desired initiatives.

In many ways, this represents the value proposition for Fluid Data storage: it’s not just about ‘speeds and feeds’ and reducing operational expenditure, it’s about addressing business requirements.  Firing on multiple cylinders, as those business requirements wax and wane, is why Fluid Data storage is needed.

The Bigger Truth

The title of this paper uses the word “applicability.” This can be looked at through three lenses: the market need, the needs of data, and the relevance of what Compellent brings to the table for the first two.

Market need: As mentioned, two “mega trends” driving demand in the storage market are value and simplicity, jointly dealing with continually increasing data volumes and operational complexity. This market need is significant.

If a vendor or product does not have a useful contribution in either one of these areas—and ideally, they should contribute to both—then that vendor or product will probably die. Products that are overly specialized, are techno-geek ‘crack,’ or that require an army of specialists to tweak all the knobs will be increasingly irrelevant as storage continues to become more of a flexible and automated servant of IT and less of a rigid and frustrating shackle restraining it. We must remember that storage is no more and no less than a tool—no one makes money by having storage in grand isolation. It is a means to an end, and not an end in itself.^[4]

Put simply, the market needs something different from the traditional storage systems approach—something far more generally applicable and flexible.

Data needs: It is abundantly clear that changing business and application needs mean not only that data has a lifecycle (as we’ve always known), but that dynamism and speed of change make that lifecycle less predictable and more demanding of sophisticated automation. No longer can individuals manually manage their data provisioning, placement, and movement optimally. The challenge is that IT inhabits a world full of convergence and virtualization where users want more from storage, but want less to do with it! Again, a new approach is necessary where systems automatically morph to handle the variable needs of varying data; since data is fluid, so are its needs.

The relevance of Compellent’s Fluid Data Architecture: Compellent’s entire intended value proposition has been to create (in its own words) a “storage solution that automates the movement and management of data throughout its lifecycle, to constantly adapt to changing business conditions.” Its system is designed to be highly flexible in order to extend such a fluid service to the data it manages. One scalable system that can take advantage of new storage technologies without forklift upgrades is an ideal approach; indeed, no existing Compellent user will have to change anything to take advantage of Fluid Data storage.

The correlation of market and data needs to Compellent’s abilities is, of course, not a coincidence given that it is Compellent that is introducing Fluid Data storage; however, this does not diminish the relevance of the market and data needs themselves. Compellent is throwing down a defining “how things are and should be” gauntlet. It is very easy to comprehend given that the definitions of the need for Fluid Data storage are based on IT and business logic and are supported by end-user research. This is not a case (as sometimes happens) of a vendor using semantics to obfuscate its shortcomings, but is instead clearly Compellent  highlighting a market need and its ability to be a Fluid Data storage leader—both in terms of thought leadership and product fulfillment.

[2] “Fluid” as found in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, OUP, 1995.

[3] Source: ESG Research Report, 2010 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2010.

[4] Source: ESG Brief, What’s on the Block for Block Storage in 2010?, January 2010.