Amit Bar-On, Manager of IT at Polycom in Israel shares his story with us about not only does IBM Real-time Compression save him storage space, that space can actually now be used for people instead of equipment. As Polycom continues it success in the telepresence business, they have grown in the last five years to having over 120 developers in Israel. Office space anywhere is expensive, in Tel-Aviv it is VERY expensive. Polycom is taking data storage and data management to a whole new level.
What a great name, Snowball. And much like information can behave like a "snowball" turning into an "avalanche", Snowball VFX has been able to control the avalanche of data utilizing the IBM Real-time Compression technology. Here in this video customer case study, Yoni Cohen, Founder of Snowball talks about the value of Real-time Compression in his environment.
Additionally, we have captured from all of our Media & Entertainment customers what they think about the Real-time Compression technology. To see the value proposition, check out our through our good friends at TechValidate.
By the way, we couldn't have captured this amazing video without the help of the folks at Snowball for all of their footage they let us use as well as the folks at MediaBoss TV who helped us create this video.
Today IBM is making one of the most significant storage announcements in the last 10 years. (Steve Duplessie is quoted as saying “…last 20 years.” but announcing that they were basically getting out of the storage business in 2000 by selling their Mylex division was pretty significant.)
Today IBM has made it abundantly clear that they are back in the storage business. It makes a lot of sense actually. Servers have been commoditized to about 3% margins and services is a body business (to make more money you need more bodies). Storage is the only place these days to add significant ‘value’ to the infrastructure eco-system.
Storage software – or as I like to refer to them, storage services allow vendors to add more value to commodity hardware by providing very useful capabilities such as thin provisioning, virtualization, snapshots, replication, and optimization solutions such as real-time compression.
However this story is as much about the naming of the product as it is the product itself.
Let’s rewind a bit. It is September 1st in Tel-Aviv. IBM has just completed the Storwize acquisition and we are having our leadership meetings discussing the integration when the new management team informs us that: “You know, we really like the Storwize name a lot.” “We like the name so much that we decided we want to use it for a totally separate and new product.”
As new employees we two choices:
Having branded products and technology before, I didn’t really see this as an issue. Sales of course didn’t care for it. My feeling was, that even though the new Storwize V7000 doesn’t support the new IBM Real-time Compression (which now you have it, our new name – not flashy but does describe exactly what we do), it is the most modular storage architecture designed today and I am quite sure, that because the value in this ‘platform’ is really about storage services (software), IBM Real-time Compression could eventually make it on to this platform. That being said, the amount of noise IBM is going to make regarding the new Storwize will drive the old Storwize sales team to a number of new opportunities. Sure, we will have to work harder to vet them as the new V7000 is a block device and IBM Real-time Compression is an appliance for NAS today but that is okay. We will now have exposure to a great deal of customers to tell our story.