DELL to acquire Compellent

Today (13 dec 2010) DELL and Compellent announced they have come into a definitive agreement for DELL to acquire Compellent.

Compellent is a storage provider, known for providing (highly) automated and tiered storage to manage data in a flexible way. “Fluid data” is what Compellent calls it.

Compellent is a relatively new player in the storage market, for them that’s a good thing because they never had to take older concepts into account when they started developing their solution.

Erik Zandboer at VMdamentals.nl wrote a good post about the Compellent presentation by Mark Dik from Compellent at the Dutch VMUG last friday. It gives an insight at Compellents technology.

I like Compellent for their flexibility. Don’t worry about data growth or size, just put in some disks or an extra controller. No need to buy an other model/range when the number of disks grows. Disks can also be mixed in a disk enclosure (to an certain extend of course). This all works because Compellent uses a block level storage virtualization technique.

I hope the service of Compellent stays the same now DELL takes over, Compellent tended to go all the way (not stopping at the storage layer) with their support.

Looking at DELL this acquisition might have some impact on the relation between DELL and EMC. DELL sells the EMC portfolio at this moment, will this partnership between DELL and EMC be continued the same way it is now?

We will see what the future brings …