Marketing Gone Awry
Okay, so not many times will you see a blog post from me admitting that, perhaps the marketing and messaging aspect of what I set out to do, probably could have been better thought out.
What am I saying? Well, after the Storwize acquisition into IBM, and IBM so graciously took the “Storwize” name and put it on another product, we needed to come up with a name for our technology and hence the name “Real-time Compression” was born.
Here is the problem. The name really doesn’t do the technology justice, in a nutshell, it is a bad name. Not because “Real-time Compression” isn’t important for all of the reasons we have talked about in the past, but because compression is not really a part of the overall IP of the platform. As I have blogged about before, Real-time Compression use industry standard LZ compression to compress the data. There is nothing really innovative behind that. The value in Real-time Compression is really to allow the compression to happen in “real-time”, and that is the true innovation. Thirty-five patents go into making the half a century old zip technology, actually useful in an enterprise environment. The ability to perform the in real-time is now table stakes for storage optimization.
The issue is, by calling the technology “Real-time Compression” is it leaves the too much to the interpretation of the user and with the name “compression” users tend to ignore the “real-time” part, the valuable part, and only talk about the act of “compression”. The reason why this is unfortunate is because the market has already set a perceived value for the technology called “compression” at free. EMC and NetApp talk about having “compression for free”. Well, as my grandfather used to tell me, Steve, “You always get what you pay for.” The reality is you can’t do compression in real time with either of their technologies, they cause a huge impact to storage performance, they do not seamlessly integrate with backup and cause more of a headache for backup then they are worth, thereby you don’t get the level of storage efficiency out of their “free compression” technology.
