Roel Construction and GreenWaste Recovery Using Compellent SAN

Compellent Technologies, Inc. announced its customers have realized demonstrable green benefits, reducing carbon emissions, hardware footprint and costs with the Compellent storage area network (SAN) powering their virtual data centers.

"Compellent continues to apply a scalable, modular design philosophy that helps our end users reduce storage costs, energy consumption and become more efficient in all facets of their organizations," said Larry Aszmann, CTO and co-founder, Compellent. "By offering the most advanced virtualized storage capabilities, we help our customers reduce the environmental impact of their data center and, just as importantly, reduce the costs associated with powering, cooling and maintenance."

Compellent’s storage virtualization creates a single pool of virtual drives that provide the flexibility to change or move storage without affecting how data is accessed by the server. Compellent’s integrated features, including thin provisioning and automated tiered storage, can provide users with advantages not found in traditional SANs. By providing the storage foundation for server virtualization, the Compellent SAN is enabling customers to consolidate servers and disks and, ultimately, reduce hardware and power costs by as much as 93 percent.

Virtual Storage for Green Data Centers
 
ROEL Construction, a more than 90 year-old commercial construction firm with five locations in the Southwest, was rapidly growing and struggling to manage an inefficient direct-attached storage infrastructure. As the company grew, it needed additional hardware to support data and application demands. The company implemented a Compellent SAN to provide the foundation for an efficient, completely virtual data center, helping the company to put a stop to rising costs and eliminate unnecessary hardware. ROEL now only uses four physical servers, which host 26 virtual machines rather than the 26 physical servers that were required in ROEL’s legacy configuration. Additionally, through server and storage virtualization, the company has reduced its cooling load from 4.5 tons to 1.5 tons.

"By seamlessly integrating our Compellent SAN with VMware, we were able to create a virtualized infrastructure that keeps our critical information available and protected," said Kevin Fitzpatrick, director of IT, ROEL Construction. "Storage virtualization has reduced our power and cooling costs and nearly eliminated the need for physical server upgrades. As a result, we’ve saved more than $70,000 in hardware enhancements and reduced our carbon emissions by 80 percent."

"With the current economy, IT budgets are tightening and companies looking to make the most of existing resources are greening data storage to maximize efficiency and help keep budgets in check," said Dave Reinsel, vice president of storage and semiconductor research at IDC. "Storage virtualization and specifically thin provisioning and automated tiered storage are recognized as key drivers in helping an organization reduce its real estate."

Growing Green While Growing IT Efficiency
 
GreenWaste Recovery, Inc. is a privately owned solid waste and recycling company specializing in the collection and processing of residential and commercial trash, yard trimmings, curbside recyclables and construction and demolition debris. Since day one, the company’s mission has been to incorporate green technologies and practices into every part of its operations. The company implemented a Compellent SAN to support its growing data needs and utilizes automated tiered storage, which requires fewer high-performance Fibre Channel drives and more less-expensive SATA drives. GreenWaste Recovery has been able to easily manage its data, while reducing energy use and costs.

"GreenWaste Recovery operates on a ‘zero waste’ mission statement, and our Compellent SANs have allowed us to implement a clean, green infrastructure that ensures we remain environmentally friendly even as the company grows," said Burt Crosby, IT Manager, GreenWaste Recovery. "We’ve virtualized our CRM, e-mail and other productivity tools on Compellent storage and Citrix, and a high level of automation and load balancing have improved performance and minimized maintenance for our small IT team. Combined, virtual servers and virtual storage have helped us cut physical hardware in half and reduce paper consumption by 60 percent as well, which further supports our mission to reduce waste."

With the Compellent SAN, customers can reduce the storage capacity needed for a virtualized server environment, accelerate storage provisioning, simplify management, and improve disaster recovery. By pairing the Compellent SAN with server virtualization software, enterprises can optimize their infrastructure to achieve the flexibility for business change and, ultimately, reduce floor space and costs.