Back in 2008, Compellent released their first iteration of the PowerShell Command Set. They were the first storage vendor on the scene to provide PowerShell automation capabilities with the Series 40 array. Fast forward a bunch of years. The PowerShell Command Set has grown from 50 cmdlets to over 100, and added the capability to work with more advanced features like replication and Live Volume.

I’m still getting caught up on events, so I thought I’d share with you a little about our participation in the 2010 Tech Field Day held in Seattle, WA.  Back in the middle of July, Compellent had an opportunity to participate in Gestalt IT Tech Field Day.  As it says on their website, “This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders, allowing them to get to know one another. It is a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback.” Compellent was thrilled to be part of the experience as one of five sponsors for this event.  Others included F5, NEC, Veeam, and Nimble Storage, who used Tech Field Day as their official launch. The event focused around these different vendors who had the opportunity to present their technologies to an esteemed panel of delegates.  The delegates, which comprised of technologists and bloggers, came from…

I was provisioning some Compellent storage today for a a series of tests that I am working on that required 62 volumes per server on two different servers.  These volumes are multi-pathed and although using the Compellent Storage Center GUI is easy and straightforward, completing this process would take a long time doing by hand and seemed fit to be automated using the Compellent Storage Center Command Set for Windows PowerShell. I wrote a script a while back that handles my provisioning for me; in this case a couple of mount point root volumes followed by data volumes that would be accessed by mount point instead of drive letter.  The script is flexible enough to handle different volume counts and whether or not drive letters would be used, but the catch was I had only used it with Windows Server 2003.  I tried to run the script this morning and…

I contributed a couple of postings to the Compellent “Around The Block” blog this last week.  These postings cover the new features in PowerShell v2 and how they can be leveraged with the Compellent Storage Center Command Set. Here are links to the postings: Part 1 Part 2 You can download CTP3 of PowerShell v2 here.

On June 10, Microsoft Press published the new “Windows 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit” by Robert Larson and Janique Carbone.For the past year, Shane Burton a fellow Microsoft Product Specialist here at Compellent, and myself have been working with Robert and Janique on this project and providing content, particularly “Notes from the Field” for the book, while our Compellent Marketing Alliance partner, John Porterfield kept us in line.Compellent is a project sponsor at the Microsoft Partner Solution Center and provided Robert and Janique access to a Compellent Storage Center for testing storage-related scenarios that are included in the book. Compellent users will recognize a lot of the screenshots which were taken directly from the Storage Center Manager.Shane and I are proud to be contributing authors on this project. We hope the Windows 2008 Hyper-V Resource Kit will prove to be an invaluable reference for administrators and IT pros who are responsible…