Compellent, a storage solutions provider, announced an enhanced partnership with VMware by adding Compellent Storage Center systems to the VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager package.  The bundle will promote a disaster-ready cloud environment using a cost-effective automated process of moving, protecting and recovering data from nearly all disasters.

“Our enhanced relationship enables Compellent to offer simplified disaster recovery by bundling VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager with Compellent products. The new solution offers automation and comprehensive management to help customers deliver IT as a Service,” Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware.

The Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities is currently using Compellent Fluid Data Storage with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager as a foundation for 10 care facilities. While its private cloud is delivering IT services, an automated protection and recovery of both operational and client data is also running, allowing them to recover critical data during disasters while evading costs, manual processes and complexity.

“Serving 80,000 people in Ohio requires us to have a reliable and highly available IT infrastructure,” said Brian Brothers, network administrator manager, Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities. “In just six months, we’ve virtualized 90 percent of our server and storage hardware with a goal of 98 percent, further reducing space, power and cooling costs.

In the process, we seamlessly added VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager to our existing Compellent replication to enable bullet-proof disaster recovery. With Compellent and VMware solutions, we can now shift resources on demand between our data centers and deliver IT services that can scale for numerous departments across our organization.”

The combination of Compellent and VMware technologies will enable enterprises and service providers to have a centralized management system, update and recovery trial run during regular operation periods.

This offer is immediately available via global reseller network. Compellent Copilot support services will also provide infrastructure, implementation and on-going support from a single contact point. A typical Storage Center 5.4 configuration with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager starts at $83,000 minus maintenance and support. The package includes:

* Clustered Series 40 controllers
* Fluid Data software licenses including Enterprise Manager multi-site management software, Data Progression automated tiering, Data Capacity thin provisioning, Data Instant Replay snapshots, and Remote Instant Replay replication
* VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 25 VM pack
* Approximately 6 TB of tiered 2.5″ 6Gb/s SAS storage

“As businesses turn to virtualized environments and the cloud for IT services, Compellent and VMware are helping these organizations recover from data loss in minutes with less hardware and software to buy and operate. The combination of Compellent with VMware technology provides a simplified, efficient and scalable disaster recovery solution. The continued innovation we deliver for the enterprise increasingly makes Compellent Fluid Data the virtualized storage platform of choice for data centers and cloud computing,” said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of alliances and business development, Compellent.

Compellent released a product update for its Storage Center while VMware is still on the path for rapid expansion, gaining new partner support all the time, but the company may have given Red Hat a competitive advantage by not acquiring Makara first.