Storwize Upgrades STN-6000 Series Compression Appliances

March 2, 2010

Storwize detailed new capabilities for its family of real-time data compression appliances. Storwize delivers between 50 and 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 data compression is uniquely different from traditional compression technologies in that it can drastically reduce the amount of data that must 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 archiving, 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,” said David Hill, Principal, Mesabi Group. “Storwize should be commended for solving those and other inhibitors to the adoption of compression on primary storage. And in so doing Storwize 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

STN-6000 Series appliances are storage-agnostic and 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 change to networks, storage, applications or process.

The new Storwize features include:

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

“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. “Our solution delivers dramatic savings without changing downstream storage processes such as cloning, replication, backup, deduplication and archiving.”

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 in 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.”