Compellent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE Arca: CML) today announced its customers have lowered total cost of ownership by implementing the company’s storage area network (SAN) as the foundation for virtual data centers. By utilizing Compellent technologies and VMware server virtualization, Gaston County, North Carolina, the eighth-largest county in the state, significantly increased productivity while lowering operating and capital expenses.

Data center virtualization reduces costs through the consolidation of data and applications onto fewer physical servers, increasing IT flexibility. Combining server virtualization with advanced storage virtualization allows enterprises to achieve the full promise of a virtual data center. Compellent seamlessly integrates with the industry’s leading virtual server platforms, enabling servers to share centralized storage resources and unmatched virtualization functionality to help lower costs, simplify management and provide robust disaster recovery.

Within one year of virtualizing its data center with Compellent and VMware, Gaston County saved more than $100,000 in hardware costs and downtime and $152,500 through workgroup application consolidation on the SAN. Adding VMware, a second Compellent SAN for remote replication, an electronic documentation system and other modernization initiatives have contributed to an annual savings of more than $512,000 in productivity gains.

“Compellent has enabled our team to measurably reduce IT costs, while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of our storage infrastructure,” explained Brandon Jackson, CIO of Gaston County, North Carolina. “The Compellent SAN has perfectly complemented our strategic initiatives to virtualize our data center and implement a cost-effective, enterprise disaster recovery plan.”

Gaston County’s efforts to modernize its data center led InfoWorld Media Group to name the county to the 2007 InfoWorld 100 list of top IT projects. Compellent features, including automated tiered storage, thin provisioning, continuous snapshots and remote replication, have dramatically reduced administrative time investments and effectively reduced data storage TCO. The county’s servers boot from the SAN, resulting in a primarily diskless environment that directly contributes to hardware savings.

“To take full advantage of server virtualization, IT departments need a storage solution that allows fully shared resources,” said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent. “Compellent’s storage virtualization design and automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and continuous snapshots are ‘must-haves’ for IT managers evaluating virtualization strategies to reduce complexity and enable disaster recovery for their data centers.”

Compellent customers are rapidly adopting virtualization services, with 70 percent virtualizing both servers and storage according to a recent survey. Customers employing the Compellent SAN as part of their virtual data centers have reported dramatic benefits, including:

• 98 percent spend three hours or less per week managing the SAN with 50 percent spending less than one hour per week on storage management
• 95 percent are improving capacity utilization or lowering operating costs without adding IT staff
• 80 percent are simplifying data classification with automated tiered storage