Compellent CEO Phil Soran stopped by theCube and talked about the concept of fluid data and how it spans across the entire Dell portfolio. Compellent’s been talking about this concept for a very long time now, and the inaugural Dell Storage Forum has proven a great opportunity to learn more about the company’s goals around this initiative since being acquired by Dell.

“Dell and Compellent coined the term (fluid data) describing the whole product, how they manage data, how they get the right data at the disk drive, at the right time, at the right price, automatically and fluidly,” said Soran.

Fluid data is important for Dell as they shift to a stronger cloud strategy – this will require powerful storage on their end, and a great deal of integration for their existing services and products. Fluid data has lots of possibilities and is far from over. It can:

• Slash the time and cost of managing storage up to 80%, now and in the future
• Scale up and out on a single platform, adopting new technologies as they emerge
• Establish a grid of virtualized storage as the foundation of a cloud infrastructure
• Ensure business continuity with integrated snapshots, replication and data migration

Compellent also discussed their strategy on how to keep the innovation going, despite being under an umbrella as huge as Dell. The company formed C3 (Customer Costumer Council) in order to achieve this. “When you’re smaller, it’s easier to innovate,” Soran added. Innovation comes from small companies like EqualLogic and not from legacy vendors, with Soran using the analogy of “big hats but no cattle.” The concept of customer council is chiefly opening up to customers and asking what they want to see.

We’ve also heard Soran’s take on Compellent’s products. “The Compellent development team is working on the Compellent product– but there’s also a portion of this that we’re integrating with other kinds of technologies like the scalable file system, and the compression and deduplication technology. It’s separate but, pretty frankly though, integrated too.”

Dell doesn’t teach Compellent what to do and vice versa. “We got our way, you got your way, but that’s actually done really smoothly.” “Dell has a lot more technical talent that what they might have had years ago and these engineers see technically competent people they work with, they get respect and then they work together. That’s what happens.”