Compellent announced Monday a new version of its Storage Center SAN array that supports both block- and file-level storage access.
The company, which has a relationship with network-attached storage vendor ONstor to bundle its NAS capability, has now adopted Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, which provides unified SAN/NAS capability in a single box.
The new Storage Center SAN array now supports file de-duplication, in which only one copy of a file will be stored even though several copies of the same file might exist. This capability should be able to save 35 per cent in disk-space requirements, according to Compellent’s claims.
Further, the NAS-based Compellent capability allows IT administrators to manage SAN volumes and multiple Fibre Channel or iSCSI connections.
Additionally, the Compellent NAS server boots from the virtualized Storage Center storage system. It contains either Fibre Channel or 750GB Serial Advanced Technology Attachment hard drives and has the option of 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel controllers.