Compellent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE Arca: CML) today announced details of mid-sized enterprises using the Compellent storage area network (SAN)’s thin replication solution as a flexible platform for cost-effective, automated disaster recovery and an integral part of their business continuity plans.

Organizations such as Tidewater Inc., headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana, Moss & Associates in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and OfficeWare, in Louisville, Kentucky, are recognizing the strategic and business-critical need for implementing an IT infrastructure that delivers easy-to-manage, 24/7 data operations.

"Most CIOs see the need for business continuity in the event of data loss due to a technical or natural disaster, but the cost and complexity of traditional recovery and replication solutions have prevented many from purchasing and implementing them,” observed Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing for Compellent. “Compellent’s technology makes it possible for organizations to affordably implement a sophisticated disaster recovery solution – whatever the risk to a company’s data might be.”

Compellent customers agree that disaster recovery solutions must strategically address the risks facing a company's data, balancing costs, complexity, and administrative overhead, while assuring continuous access to data. Despite varying data threats and business drivers, Compellent’s enterprise-ready replication technology easily fits into their diverse business continuity plans as a disaster recovery platform.

For Tidewater, the largest owner and operator of offshore oil support vessels in the world, the horrific hurricane season of 2005 highlighted areas for improvement in its business continuity plan.

“Planning for the worst doesn’t just mean preparing for any disaster that might happen – it means assessing and understanding what particular risks face your data center, and then thinking through to the worst possible events,” said John Chaffe, director of IT, Tidewater Inc. “Our problem is hurricanes, and based on our experiences, we chose the Compellent SAN to replicate our data from New Orleans to the second site 500 miles away in Dallas.”

Chaffe added, “Now, with Compellent, we can flip a switch and keep operations up and running for as long as we need, from wherever we are in the world, keeping critical data available to the hundreds of vessels out at sea supporting offshore oil drilling.”

Moss & Associates, a construction firm based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with annual revenues of more than $750 million, conducts live testing of its business continuity plan for weeks at a time, fully testing failover to the disaster recovery site and failback to the primary Compellent SAN. During most tests, the users don’t even know that they are accessing data from the remote SAN.

“I don’t feel like we have a disaster recovery plan until it’s been fully tested from start to finish—not just a practice failover, but being able to run off the remote site for any length of time necessary,” said Bill Snow, director of IT at Moss & Associates. “Part of our live testing is having someone who isn’t familiar with the procedure to do it all without IT assistance. This is very valuable in the event of a natural disaster, for example, when the system administrator may not be available.”

OfficeWare, which has provided document management products and solutions services since 1957, faced a different data threat. The company needed a cost-effective, real-time data recovery solution that provided employees with 24/7 availability in the event of a hardware or software failure – without increasing staffing.

“We’ve always wanted a robust disaster recovery solution, but we could never afford it before Compellent," said Chris Resch, chief technology officer and vice president at OfficeWare. “We don’t have to worry as much about natural disasters but certainly have to deal with human error and data loss. Compellent’s continuous snapshots and automated replication gives us the 24/7 access to data we need, and makes it very easy to implement a flexible business continuity solution."

The simplicity and robustness of Compellent’s disaster recovery solution makes it attractive for enterprises of all sizes. Using Compellent’s boot from SAN and continuous snapshot technology, administrators can create space-efficient copies to set up, recover and allocate any size volume to any server in seconds. Customers can also replicate an unlimited number of snapshots between sites and perform live tests of the replication, allowing multiple locations to serve as instant recovery points. For more information about the Compellent SAN for disaster recovery, visit: http://www.compellent.com/DR.