Compellent Technologies

Dell Compellent

Former type	Subsidiary
Industry	Data storage devices
Fate	Acquired by Dell
Founded	2002
Founder	Larry Aszmann John Guider Phil Soran
Defunct	February 22, 2011 (2011-02-22)
Headquarters	7625 Smetana Lane Eden Prairie, Minnesota, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Michael Dell (Chairman & CEO)
Products	Storage Center, Storage Center with NAS
Revenue	$ 125.3 million (2009)
Number of employees	565 (Start of 2011)
Parent	Dell Technologies
Website	www.dell.com/compellent

Compellent Technologies, Inc, founded in 2002, was a provider of enterprise computer data storage systems that automate data movement at the block level. The company was headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, USA. Compellent's chief product, Storage Center, is a storage area network (SAN) system that combines a standards-based hardware platform and a suite of virtualized storage management applications, including automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and replication. The company developed software and products aimed at mid-size enterprises and sold through a channel network of independent providers and resellers. It became part of Dell in February 2011.

Compellent Technologies was founded in 2002 by Phil Soran, John Guider, and Larry Aszmann. The three had network storage and virtualization backgrounds.

The company had its initial public offering on October 15, 2007, became profitable for the first time in Q3 2008 and was profitable in consecutive quarters since. On February 11, 2010, it announced Q4 2009 revenues had increased 35 percent over Q4 2008, the company’s 17th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, with full year revenue of $125.3 million.

On December 13, 2010, Compellent announced it agreed to be acquired by Dell for approximately $960 million. The purchase was completed in February 2011 and the product line sold as Dell Compellent.

Compellent’s storage area network (SAN) system, called "Storage Center", combines several virtualized storage-management applications with hardware. The product tracks metadata, information about each block of data stored on the Compellent system, including the date and time written, frequency of access, associated volume, type of disk drive used, type of data stored and RAID level. Large amounts of data are stored and managed on a granular level and assigned automatically to high-performance drives or large-capacity drives. Compellent said this method of data management can lower hardware, power and cooling costs."

The base configuration of Storage Center includes a disk array controller, disk enclosure, disk drives, connectivity hardware, and software modules. The operating system, also called Storage Center, is regularly updated. Software modules include: