Compellent has announced a new release of its storage area network, offering several industry-first technologies that can reduce the number of disk drives required by up to 80 per cent.

Compellent Storage Center 4.0 is the first networked storage system to manage data inside the volume to automate tiered storage within every drive, amplify the storage utilisation benefits of thin provisioning and reclaim unused disk space. New software applications like Fast Track, Thin Import and Free Space Recovery help eliminate disk drives from the data centre, effectively reducing total cost of ownership and energy consumption for mid-sized enterprises.

New features exclusively integrated in Storage Center 4.0 includes:

Fast Track:

Dynamically placing active data on the outer tracks of a disk drive can speed access to information while decreasing costs as fewer high-performance drives are needed. Unlike competitive offerings that only place entire volumes on perimeter tracks, Fast Track just moves frequently accessed data from the entire system to these tracks. As a result, performance is accelerated and disk drive requirements are reduced by up to 30 per cent.

Thin Import:

As existing data is copied to a Compellent SAN, Storage Center 4.0 converts the data into thin-provisioned volumes. This feature can reduce disk drive requirements by up to 50 per cent and help IT departments reclaim storage resources previously wasted in their legacy systems.

Free Space Recovery:

After Windows files are deleted from a thin provisioned volume in other SANs, the operating system will continue to report that the space is unavailable. Free Space Recovery enables this unused space to be utilised again, thereby making Compellent’s advanced thin provisioning technology one of the most efficient in the industry.