Storwize Said to Reduce Storage by 50%-90% With Compression

Storwize announced new capabilities for its family of real-time data compression appliances. Storwize delivers between 50-90 percent reductions in storage utilization for network attached storage (NAS) without performance degradation. Recent enhancements to the Storwize technology will enable NAS users to reclaim existing storage capacity, achieve faster throughput, support high-availability (HA) configurations and improve forecasted storage resource requirements.

Real-time, Random Access Data Compression
Real-time data compression is uniquely different from traditional compression technologies in that it can drastically reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored without impacting storage performance or data integrity. Sometimes known as primary or online storage optimization, the ability to save capacity at the primary tier of storage will pass along this optimization throughout the storage tiers, including secondary storage, backup and archive, saving on storage infrastructure and overhead costs throughout the storage life cycle.

“Data reduction in the form of data deduplication is a hot topic for backup. Now it is time to turn that attention to data reduction on primary storage. Compression is the data reduction answer for primary storage, but compression alone is not enough. The solution has to be non-disruptive, have no performance impact, and be reliable,” states David Hill, Principal, Mesabi Group. “Storewize should be commended for solving those and other inhibitors to the adoption of compression on primary storage. And in so doing Storewize is a budget saver in an IT world where the search for cost savings is a never-ending story.”

Storwize Real-time Data Compression Enhancements
The STN-6000 Series appliances are storage-agnostic, scalable and transparently compress all data for NAS protocols (CIFS and NFS). Storwize appliances are easy to install and fully transparent. They can be deployed in any NAS environment with no changes to networks, storage, applications or process.

The new Storwize features include:

• Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) – Based on Storwize patented technology, RACE provides a unique style of primary storage optimization: real-time data compression without performance degradation; deterministic – reliable and consistent data compression; lossless – consistent data integrity
• Compression Accelerator for Existing Data – Compression accelerator reclaims space by compressing existing data and allowing file compression while applications run and users access and update them. Users can now compress up to 10TB per day per single device (20TB in HA configurations), further reducing storage footprint and costs.
• High Availability (HA) Enhancements  – Storwize supports NAS HA configurations and complements existing storage HA functionality.
• Capacity Advisor – The Capacity Advisor enables IT managers to accurately predict storage needs by providing visibility, control and forecasting of storage resources.

Storwize enables IT managers to reduce the amount of storage footprint within the data center and, as a result, reduce the associated power and cooling costs. Storwize’s ability to dramatically reduce storage utilization by 50 – 90 percent and maintain performance enables IT managers to see an immediate ROI from their Storwize investment.  

“The major storage challenge for most companies is storage growth and the cost associated with that growth. Storwize directly attacks the problem at the source – primary storage – with real-time data compression,” said Ed Walsh, CEO, Storwize. “By putting Storwize in front of their NAS solutions, IT managers achieve higher levels of storage optimization by enabling greater data reduction, performance, availability, management, and energy and cost efficiency.”

Proven Results
Storwize and IBM have recently released a Performance Validation Report demonstrating Storwize storage optimization and performance. Storwize real-time data compression has enabled storage optimization at hundreds of enterprises worldwide. The following quotes are just a sampling of what customers and partners are saying about Storwize.

Lynn Allen, IT Service Delivery Manager, Allianz, said: “The amount of unstructured data within our data centers was rapidly growing at a rate that exceeded our storage capacity.  Storwize enabled us to avoid the high expense of purchasing more storage by significantly compressing data, with zero performance degradation and no change to our infrastructure, operations, data or user experience.”

Matthew Yeager, Practice Leader, Data Center Storage and Protection, Computacenter (UK), Ltd., said: “As a leading provider of IT services in Europe, we must continue to maximize the value of our clients’ IT investments with innovative solutions. Partnering with Storwize allows us to present an innovative solution whereby Computacenter will underwrite storage cost savings for a five year period and, if we’re wrong in any one year, we’ll write you a check for the difference. We couldn’t confidently offer such a unique guarantee without innovative solutions such as Storwize, which provide our clients a uniquely powerful storage optimization solution whilst still maintaining, and in some cases even increasing, the performance they need to run their businesses.”