Compellent Technologies, a provider of affordable and modular enterprise storage solutions, today announced it has been added to the SAN Compatibility Guide for VMware Infrastructure 3. Compellent’s Storage Center SAN has passed compatibility testing requirements to become a part of VMware’s list of supported storage platforms and will showcase its advanced virtualization solution at VMworld 2006 Nov. 7-9.

“Compellent’s certification brings customers the best of both worlds—VMware, the market leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, combined with a technology leader in storage virtualization,” said Tony Asaro, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “We believe that integrated virtualization at the server and storage layers will be requisite in the foreseeable future, since it breaks the limitations of discrete physical assets and simplifies otherwise complex and cumbersome systems.”

“Together, Compellent and VMware create a powerful end-to-end virtualization solution that promises to significantly simplify server and storage management, improve utilization and drive costs out of datacenters of all sizes,” said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing for Compellent. “Compellent’s unique features, including Automated Tiered Storage and Thin Replication, help customers ensure continuous availability for their virtualized environments.”

Compellent’s advanced approach to virtualization creates an unlimited number of virtual volumes to easily accommodate each of the large number of applications that can run on VMware Infrastructure. Compellent’s modular architecture allows each VMware virtual machine to use the optimal server interface, drive technology and speed, RAID configuration and snapshot schedule. The addition of Compellent to VMware’s SAN Compatibility Guide ensures a high level of joint support for Compellent customers.

“Using Compellent and VMware Infrastructure in unison has helped us create a high performance, flexible IT infrastructure to easily respond to changing server and storage demands,” said Jeff Olson, vice president, information technology for Kopp Investment Advisors, an independent money management firm. “With this virtual data center, we’ve been able to consolidate server and storage resources, cut infrastructure costs by 40 percent and easily protect our applications to meet business continuity requirements.”

“Compellent’s Storage Center allows customers to add valuable functionality to their VMware Infrastructure environment, enhancing the benefits of server virtualization,” said Parag Patel, senior director of storage ecosystem alliances at VMware. “Compellent’s certification ensures that customers can benefit from joint support for complementary technologies that significantly lower customers’ operating and capital expenditures.”

Compellent will be demonstrating the joint virtualization solution at booth # 640 at VMworld, Nov. 7-9, showcasing Thin Replication technology. Thin Replication’s unlimited frequency and optimized bandwidth, combined with VMware’s multiple server instances, enable customers to create the ultimate test environment, making changes more often and testing more possibilities. Using Thin Replication, customers can seamlessly replicate VMware ESX Server host instances to a remote site to provide continuous data protection and robust recovery for their virtualized environment without the traditional cost or complexity.