Tag: "random access compression"

Top 10 Reasons Real-time Compression Provides Extraordinary Storage Efficiency


Over the past few weeks I have witnessed the proverbial mudslinging that takes place in the blogosphere when marketing feathers are ruffled.  Most recently I was reading Rich Anderson of The StorageSavvy Blog.  The article was "Compression better than Dedup?  NetApp Confirms!"

I have to agree with Rich on many fronts.  First, "When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail."  Rich points out vendors have to sell "what's in the bag" so it is conceivable that all problems look like they can be solved with their solution.  If you look back over the last few years NTAP has always had a "me too" reputation.  Whatever the industry has, they have one too and its better.  For the last few years, while competing against Storwize, they have pulled the EMC tactic of trying to stall a market by saying, "We have optimization for primary storage with deduplication."   The reality is, you can't use it in real time, it is a resource hog, and again Rich mentions, the only use case it works well on in primary storage is VMware (and that is ONLY IF the customer stores their data outside the .vmdk file otherwise compression is much better).  Now that NTAP has compression their story has changed saying that compression on primary storage is better for most use cases.  Duh!  The folks at Storwize (now IBM Real-time Compression) have been saying that for years.  Why, deduplication is great for repetitive data sets, i.e. backup, not primary storage.  There just isn't that much repetitive data in primary storage.  Again, NTAP is trying to stall the market saying they have "in-line" compression for primary storage.  Sorry guys, not good enough.  In-line is NOT Real-time.  Rich also points out that the key characteristics of storage for customers are capacity and performance.  Patrick Rogers of NTAP has said publically that compression WILL indeed impact performance and that they even have a tool that will tell you how much performance will be impacted.  While NTAP may say compression is "free", we all know nothing worth having in life is free, you get what you pay for.  If you need the performance to do compression you are going to have to perform a major upgrade to  your filer in order to just be able to perform compression let alone try to do compression in real time.  No real savings there.

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Dec 15, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Disk Elasticity and Storage Efficiency


Storage is elastic.  How do I know you ask?  Yesterday I visited a customer who is using the Storwize product to do Real-time Compression on their primary storage.  The customer is Allianz and has been using the product for over a year.  They see 75% compression on their users home directory data.  To give you an idea, Allianz is an insurance company and generates TONS of spreadsheets, 14TB worth of spreadsheets (okay, not all 14TB is spreadsheets but you get the picture).

Prior to Allianz purchasing the Storwize technology, Allianz didn’t have great data management practices.  Users store data in their home directories and there is really no discipline around deleting or cleaning up files so data just grows.  Additionally, storage isn’t really budgeted for.  Overall IT is but at a storage level, they just purchase some when the need some.

Again, prior to the Storwize technology, Allianz had their primary storage and a backup to tape at their local site.  They then replicated the data to their remote site and also performed a backup to tape.

Allianz has an overall IT mission to reduce spend by 10% per year.  The thing to think about is that this 10% could come from a lot of places including data management.

Once the Storwize technology was installed the first things they saw were:

  • 75% capacity optimization
  • Better data management capabilities through Storwize reporting
  • The ability to keep more data on line and available for faster recoveries
  • No change in any of their existing storage processes
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Oct 05, 2010 | 2 comments View Post

IBM Day 1 – It’s Official


Between time off with the family this summer and all the work required to get done between 'signing' a deal to be acquired and 'closing' a deal to get acquired, the blog has been a bit slow.  But I am here now to tell you it is official.  Storwize is now Storwize, an IBM company.

As for myself, I am looking forward to the work of integrating the Storwize Technology into the IBM Storage portfolio.  The Storwize group will live under the STG organization under Brian Truskowski.  There is a new ground swell taking head at IBM these days all around storage efficiency.  To get a better understanding, please have a look at my new colleague, Tony Pearson's blog discussing storage efficiency.  My job will be now to evangelize how IT now needs to take a look at all of the available storage "services" (clones, snapshots, thin provisioning, replication, compression, deduplication, etc...) can help to create an overall storage solution that allows them to reduce their over all $/TB on not only capital expense, but also on operational expense.

Lets face it, data growth isn't slowing down and there is never a one size fits all solution for storage.  The great part about being a part of IBM now is that we have all the tools to pick from to architect a data storage solution, end to end, that allows customers to reduce their overall $/TB for both primary as well as secondary storage and make that storage much more efficient and work for the end user.

This is going to be an exciting time.  I am also anxious to continue the Storage Alchemist blog.  EMC, under the guise of Polly Pearson and Chuck Hollis taught me that social media is great, but social media done right, in a collaborative and thoughtful way can drive influence.  I join some of the best bloggers around from IBM.  (I have added Tony's "Inside System Storage" - It is a great read.)

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Aug 30, 2010 | 1 comment View Post

So Easy a CIO can Do It!


You have all seen the Geico commercial - "So Easy a Caveman can Do It!" now its time for high tech to jump into another viral-video marketing frenzy with this funny video.

The reality is Storwize is just that simple, plug it in and start saving 50% to 90% of your storage capacity, transparently without changing your applications, your servers, networks or storage.  The technology is so easy to implement even  your CIO can do it!

Hope you like it!

This video was created in conjunction with Media Boss Studios!

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Aug 11, 2010 | 1 comment View Post

6 Ways to Tell Your Boss You’re Saving Him Money


Ever had this situation.  You know you know the right thing to do but convincing the non-techie that you need to move forward on a project tough.  Try some of these techniques!

More funny, viral video, shameless advertising.

For more information on how 15 minutes can save you 50% or more of your storage go to www.storwize.com

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Jul 26, 2010 | 1 comment View Post

A Bright New Day – Part Duo


I am not sure how many of you have seen the ABC show 'V' but it looks like they have it looks like they have two things in common with Storwize.

First, if you are unfamiliar with the show V - the description from their website is as follows:

The Visitors spread their message quickly and clearly: They come in peace, bearing gifts of medical miracles and technological breakthroughs far beyond our wildest imaginations.

Very similar to Storwize.  We visit customers in peace bearing gifts of miracles and technology breakthroughs beyond their wildest imaginations.  Storwize is the only company to do real-time data storage compression without performance degradation.  As the growth of data exceeding 487M TB (IDC 2008 study) something has to be done to control this growth and end users are quickly turning to capacity optimization technologies to control this growth and more  specifically to Storwize Real-time compression.

With another banner quarter under the belt, I had an opportunity to meet with a number of existing customers as well as customers to be.  One of the more interesting meetings came when I met with a large manufacture in the mid-west.  We were sitting with the storage architecture team and the finance team.  We were going through our usual presentation, showing the finance folks the savings they were able to achieve with Storwize.  Storwize was able to compress their data 66% giving them back more than half of their storage capacity that they could continue to grow into.  We also showed them how there was no impact to their production environment with the Storwize appliances in line.  The finance folks were VERY impressed.  At that moment one of the storage architects jumped out of his seat and said, "But wait, your forgetting the most important point."  To which we all looked at each other a bit perplexed and said, "Oh, what is that?" And he replied, "Storwize is Butt Simple!".  He went on to say that the deployment (during their POC) caused no down time (they were in an HA environment) and once in place, they just started compressing - no change to their filers, no change to their networks, no change to their applications and the end users never even knew anything different.  He said, "Storwize makes my job simple and look like a hero to my boss!".

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Jul 09, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

A Blueprint for Primary Storage Optimization


During the past three to four months the storage industry has seen a spike in the number of reports, white papers and news articles surrounding the evolution of primary storage technology, capacity optimization (it is 2010’s Hottest Storage Technology).

The reason this technology is getting a lot of ‘air play’ these days is due to the fact that this technology is so critical to help control the growth and costs of storage.  In 2010 the EMC sponsored IDC Report “The Digital Universe Decade - Are You Ready?” was release and stated that:

  • In 2009, amid the “Great Recession,” the amount of digital information grew 62% over 2008 to 800 billion gigabytes (0.8 Zettabytes).
  • The amount of digital information created annually will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020…

The folks at Wikibon also released an info graph that exposes the true explosion of data.

Information Explosion & Cloud Storage
Via: Wikibon

When you combine storage capacity (and the foot print it takes up) along with the power it takes to run it and cool it as well as the human resource it takes to manage it, you soon realize we cannot keep ‘just adding more cheap disk’ in an effort to manage the storage demands.  High Tech companies with high tech labs are also telling IT that ‘they are out of tricks’ when it comes to the ability to continue deliver disk drive that double capacity every 18 months.  It is for these reasons that primary storage optimization technologies have stepped into the ‘lime light’ as it serves as a means to help control the growth of primary storage including the foot print, power, cooling and man power required to manage it.

However, as we all know in IT, no two environments are the same and what may be good for one may not be good for another.  When looking at primary storage optimization there seem to be a number of available technologies and ways to deploy these technologies and the key question is what is right for ‘my’ environment.

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Jul 01, 2010 | 3 comments View Post

Marketing, FUD and Doing What You Do Best


Rather than leave a lengthy comment on Tom Cook’s blog post from Friday Compression and Dedupe: Business Value and Data Safety (and from a marketing perspective, Friday’s are bad days to post blogs – especially in the summer) – I thought I would respond here (this may get lengthy as Tom made a number of points which I need comment on).

The first thing I do want to say is that when doing technical marketing; the proper strategy would be to not be on defense but rather take an offensive approach.  However, given the amount of FUD that Tom put in his latest blog post, I have to defend compression to some degree.

Now, I think we can all agree that data compression and data deduplication are two technologies that can complement one another very well.  Avamar (EMC) deduplicates the data at the source and then compresses the data before sending it to the Avamar Data Store gaining tremendous efficiency in network utilization.  ProtecTIER (IBM) compresses the data once it is deduplicated at the target device before it stores the data.  Other solutions also combine compression and data deduplication.

I’d like to comment on some key point Tom made in his piece where he is just blatantly wrong:

1)      Compression identifies redundant data across a very small window, usually 64 KB. – While this may be true for other compression technologies, this is not true for Storwize.  Storwize performs compression where the initial window is not fixed in size at all; it is the resultant write that is fixed in size.  This size is also specifically mapped to the I/O patter of the data being written.  The goal is such that in 1 I/O Storwize can do all the work it needs to on a particular file or LUN and it is for this reason Storwize has no performance penalty.

2)      Compression produces data reduction rates at most 2X for most data types. – Seems Tom needs a lesson in the most common answer in IT – “IT DEPENDS”.  Data compression ratios are 100% tied to the data type.  For a true indication of data compression ratios see Figure 1.

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Jun 21, 2010 | 10 comments View Post

Compressed Thoughts – Compression and Deduplication


This video doesn't talk about the merits of one versus the other but how when compression (or capacity optimization is done right) it should enhance data deduplication, not impact it.  Enjoy and for more videos like this one go to the StorwizeChannel.

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May 06, 2010 | 0 comments View Post

Compressed Thoughts – Random Access Compression


Learn how 'random access' compression is different than traditional compression and is the key to primary storage compression in real time.

For more videos like this one on Real-time Random Access Compression from Storwize - see our StorwizeChannel.

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Apr 24, 2010 | 0 comments View Post
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