Storwize Boosts Compression by 35% for Primary and Secondary Storage

Storwize announced its new STN-6000i Series appliance. The STN-6000i is the first capacity optimization solution to universally reduce data on primary and secondary (backup) storage while also enhancing storage performance efficiency, enabling IT organizations to achieve operational and cost efficiencies in IT infrastructure and bandwidth, as well as associated power, cooling and floor space costs.

“Now, more than ever, cost containment is a key concern. Data reduction technologies for primary data and secondary copies of data can help drive down costs by using less storage, and can, perhaps, extend the useful life of currently deployed solutions,” said Dave Russell, Gartner Research Vice President. “IT directors and storage administrators responsible for primary storage, backup/recovery and/or disaster recovery will want to consider solutions for their ability to reduce storage capacity requirements throughout the data lifecycle.”

Double-digit storage capacity growth and current economic situations are forcing IT organizations to reduce costs and increase the efficiency of their entire infrastructure. IT organizations are looking to data reduction solutions to reduce their primary and secondary system costs and shortage of electricity for power and cooling, as well physical data center space. But, customers’ biggest concern is the impact data reduction may have on storage and application performance.

Storwize appliances are proven at hundreds of installations worldwide to reduce the costs of storage and associated operational and administrative costs without impacting business-critical production environments. 

Storwize solutions are uniquely capable of delivering universal capacity optimization in several ways:

• Unlike inline or post-process deduplication solutions that focus solely on backup optimization or impose significant performance penalties, Storwize operates in real-time on primary data, reducing the footprint of data at the point of origin before it is written to disk.
• Storwize supports application data such as high-performance databases as well secondary application data at subsequent points in the data path.
• Storwize enhances storage, network and backup performance and efficiency by reducing the amount of data that needs to be stored and processed.
• Storwize operates transparently of any NAS vendor, requires no changes to workflow, clients, servers or applications, and provides consistent reduction across all storage tiers.

“By delivering 65% data reduction, Storwize has had a significant and immediate impact on our storage and floor space costs, and delivered a great ROI,” said Bob Loreano, Storage Manager at Shopzilla, a leading comparison shopping service. “In addition, we draw over 20 million unique visitors so our data warehouse is critical to our business, requires frequent access, and must always be available. Storwize is the only capacity optimization solution we found that delivered the performance and availability required to deploy in our business-critical production environment.”

New capabilities
of the STN-6000i Series and STN-OS v.3.6 include:

• 3 models to suit a wide range of environments: Entry-level STN-6300i, Mid-range STN-6500i, Enterprise STN-6800i
• 35% boost in bringing sustained random access throughput to 800 MB/s. This ensures that the efficiency gain doesn’t compromise critical system performance.
• Real-time, in-place, optimization of all data from a single appliance with no need for additional capacity, streamlining the implementation and reducing operational costs.
• Enhanced reporting on capacity savings (by filer, by share and by file type), as well as predictive modeling for capacity forecasting. More accurate visibility into the current and future needs of the environment delivers further operational efficiency and effectiveness.
• Active Directory authentication, comprehensive SNMP MIB information and support for centralized syslog servers enhancing manageability of the solution further augmenting operational efficiency of the solution.

“Customers want solutions that reduce costs across the entire data lifecycle, but data reduction vendors either focus only on backup or are quick to point out performance penalties that may occur when implementing their solutions for active data,” said Peter Smails, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Storwize. “Our response is why compromise?  With Storwize you can dramatically reduce cost by optimizing capacity from primary through backup while enhancing the performance, utilization and efficiency of your existing storage infrastructure.”

The STN-6000i will be generally available in late May with prices starting at $35,000.