Storwize Dedupe Boosts Primary Storage Performance

Company:

Headquarters: Los Gatos, Calif.

Technology Sector: Storage

Key Product: Storwize STN-6000

Year Founded: 2004

Number of Channel Partners: 75 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Data deduplication is great for data backups and less active data sets, but compression of data on primary storage could be a real capacity and performance boost for many clients.

The Lowdown: Optimization of data for archiving, tape backup, disk backup, and moving across the WAN helps clients squeeze more performance and capacity out of their storage infrastructures.

Storwize adds another layer of optimization in front of those technologies via appliances which do real-time compression of data in primary storage, said Peter Smails, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Storwize.

While data deduplication removes redundant files or blocks of data, it is most often applied to backup or other data which seldom -- if ever -- changes, Smails said.

Primary storage compression, however, squeezes data by up to 90 percent before it goes to be further optimized for archiving, tape backup, disk backup and moving across the WAN, he said.

"Our technology reduces the payload sent to all the other optimizations," he said. "All those other operations run more efficiently because they're dealing with a smaller data set."

Storwize's appliances sit in the data stream to compress data in real-time as it is written to primary storage without impacting a customer's existing storage environment and without the need for software or drivers, Smails said. That means customers can use their existing software to do backups, deduplication, snapshots and other operations, he said.

Storwize gets almost all its revenue from indirect sales, with the few direct customers holding on from the days when it first released its appliances in 2007.

Storwize plans eventually to take all its customers indirect by recruiting solution providers with experience in storage and data reduction, Smails said.