It was only last week that I posted news about the Dell-Ocarina deal  and now IBM has announced its intention to acquire data reduction vendor StorWize.  The music is still playing, but there is one less chair.

StorWize provides real-time data compression technology to help clients reduce physical storage requirements.  Prime use cases for the technology include files, databases, and virtual machine disk files where capacity growth is an issue and compression can make an impact—without having a performance impact.  Reducing the footprint of data reduces the footprint of storage infrastructure and lowers associated management and environmental costs.

IT organizations using any solution in IBM’s NAS portfolio (N-series and SONAS) will benefit from the active data compression, as will IBM’s DB2 database customers.  However, the StorWize technology is not limited to IBM-only technology; StorWize clients have been using it with non-IBM NAS solutions (HP, EMC, NetApp) and non-IBM databases (Informix).

The StorWize technology is additive to IBM’s data reduction/capacity optimization offerings.  IBM acquired Diligent and its ProtecTIER deduplication technology for backup storage a little over two years ago, and IBM introduced deduplication in backup/recovery/archive solution Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) in 2009. Actually, deduplication and compression are complementary.  When used together, capacity optimization is amplified.  StorWize compresses the data stored in real-time to achieve optimization, while data deduplication works to eliminate multiple copies of the same data.

For example, if StorWize is used with NetApp Deduplication in a primary environment, the combined solution offers real-time compression with block-level data deduplication as a post-process. Theoretically, if StorWize was able to achieve even a 10:1 compression ratio and NetApp Deduplication achieved a 10:1 deduplication ratio, the combined capacity optimization would be 100:1.  The same would apply for StorWize primary storage optimization combined with any secondary storage deduplication solution or single-instance archive solution—capacity savings for “downstream” storage would be improved significantly.

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Tags: backup, capacity optimization, compression, data reduction, deduplication, Dell, disk, EMC, HP, IBM, NAS, NetApp, Ocarina, ProtecTIER, storage, StorWize, TSM