Maybe Dell can give an official statement, like: it's in version 6.1 or customers receive a dedup appliance for free? Does this seem standard sale talk, promise everything and deliver less??

We were promised something similar when prior to ordering in Nov/2011. We were told that Dell bought Ocarina and that they would be integrated that technology into Compellent arrays.

I still not seen this feature as promised. I expected it in 6.0 but like you I haven't seen it yet.

Sounds like your sales rep was either new or twisted the truth. There is no SAN dedeuplication on Compellent. I'm not sure if their file server appliance supports it either as I thought it just ran Windows. The closest thing to dedeplication is preventing multiple copies of data in the first place when spinning off snapshots or cloning volumes by mapping to the same block initially. There is no mechanism that scans for identical blocks.

I'd love to hear if this feature is in a road map, maybe I'll contact our CSE again. Last time I asked about this was in 2011. (Been running Compellent since mid-2010)

What are your experiences with Compellent, does it deliver what is promises, or should i worry?

This is the first SAN with an active support contract I've dealt with but our experiences have been almost entirely positive. The really fancy stuff is expensive, though, like Replay Manager and the replication features. Copilot support has been excellent and the system's run great outside of expected hardware failures (fan, a few disks, and a fan controller board, for which they sent a tech to swap the whole controller). We've never had an outage. We're not a high performance shop but the system runs great for us, our bottleneck is actually the gigabit iSCSI. We've had a few gotchas with volumes, but Compellents don't run the way most systems do. We got a LOT out of the training course.

We don't use Enterprise Manager very often as we haven't gotten the enormous budget approval for replication yet. But from what I've seen of it, EM is Compellent's weakest link. If you check out these forums more you'll see evidence of that.