Dan Marbes, Discipline Lead – Systems Engineering for Associated Bank, has been going to the Dell Storage Forum “since it was the Compellent C-Drive conference in Minneapolis. I’ve been to them all.”

In the process, he said in an interview in the SiliconAngle Cube from the Dell Storage Forum 2012 in Boston, he has seen the technology grow and prosper (full video below).

“For me last year was a chance to see what Compellent’s acquisition by Dell meant. There was a little trepidation in ‘Okay, you’ve gobbled up this intellectual property, what are you going to do with it?’ It’s a little exciting to come back a year later and see all the integration points.”

Associated Bank is a full-service financial institution serving Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota with headquarters in Green Bay. It has two data centers and about 300 remote sites. It has been a Compellent customer since 2006, and in that time it’s storage has grown from a single 3 Tbyte array to 12 arrays with a total aggregate capacity of about 12 Petabytes, driven in large part by the explosion of unstructured data and compliance requirements.

Associated Bank was first attracted to the then startup storage vendor in 2006 because of its basic approach to system design, Marbes said. “The fundamental tenant of the product when it was first designed was ‘Tell us what you want from a storage product and we will design the product you need.’ Looking at that product I saw that I no longer have to manage tiering, I no longer have to manage spindle count.”

That advanced automation has carried through to today. “Even today at the scale of storage we have, I only have four engineers with access to the system, and managing storage is not anybody’s full-time position.”

Associated still uses a traditional block storage/file sharing architecture and basically lets the system manage both structured and unstructured data automatically. Marbes sees that changing soon, possibly to an object-based architecture using Dell DXP/SharePoint-based system to improve metadata tracking.

He is also excited about the Exanet integration with Compellent that is about to be released with the promise of the addition of Ocarina compression in the near future. “It seems like a much smarter way to manage data at scale.”

Although all of the bank’s storage is Compellent, HP, rather than Dell, is its main server provider, and its networking is Cisco. This creates complications as all three vendors move aggressively into competing converged architectures. However, so far Associated is not interested in moving to any of those architectures. “I don’t know that at this point we’ve seen enough of a value proposition from any one vendor that would convince us to forgo the investment we have in our existing relationships.“

In any case, he says, the bank’s IT philosophy is to find the right solution that provides the greatest business value for its server, storage, and networking needs and find or build its own middleware to integrate those solutions. That middleware can provide the bank with competitive advantage, which is another reason to stay with this strategy.