| ARMONK,
N.Y., July 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has
entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Storwize, a privately held company
based in Marlborough, MA. Storwize provides real-time data compression technology
to help clients reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80% (1), which improves
efficiency and lowers the cost of making data available for analytics and other
applications. The acquisition is anticipated to close in the third quarter of
2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Financial terms
were not disclosed. Storwize
has over one hundred customers such as Mobileye, Polycom Israel, Shopzilla, Inc.
and Sumitomo Mitsui Construction across a wide range of industries including energy,
manufacturing, finance, insurance, telecommunications and cloud services. With
Storwize, IBM is acquiring storage technology that is unique in the industry in
that it can compress primary data, or data that clients are actively using, of
multiple types -- from files to virtualization images to databases -- in real-time
while maintaining performance. This is in contrast to other storage compression
technologies that only compress secondary or backup data. By compressing primary
data, Storwize users can store up to five times more data using the same amount
of storage, preventing storage sprawl and lowering power and cooling costs. This
is important now more than ever as the world's data already vastly exceeds available
storage space and enterprise demand for storage capacity worldwide is projected
to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 43% from 2008 to 2013, according
to IDC (2). Compression
shrinks data so files and databases take up less space. Storwize's Random Access
Compression Engine (RACE) is based on the industry-standard compression algorithm
and uses Storwize's patented technology for real-time data compression without
any performance degradation. With
Storwize, analytics applications can improve decision making by scanning many
more years of historical data from multiple sources without the need to add additional
storage equipment. Compressing data in real-time can also help make data available
up to four times faster for transaction workloads (3). Running
Storwize data compression does not affect business and IT processes or other applications
and does not require special skills to maintain. Product installation can be completed
in as little as four hours, with little or no downtime. "Real-time
data compression helps address a significant client need -- making it affordable
to analyze and make sense of massive amounts of data in order to provide new services,"
said Brian Truskowski, general manager, IBM System Storage and Networking. "By
adding Storwize to our innovative portfolio of storage solutions, IBM is better
equipped than ever to help clients handle growing quantities of data and make
more of it available for analytics." "IBM
has the strongest vision for the future direction of storage and we are pleased
to become a part of that vision," said Ed Walsh, CEO, Storwize. "Our
customers will benefit significantly as our talented employees and innovative
storage solutions merge with IBM's world-wide reach in sales, service and research
and development." Storwize
joins other key IBM storage acquisitions and innovations that improve storage
efficiency and analytics, including:
-- ProtecTIER deduplication technology that can be used together with
compression
technology to significantly improve storage efficiency.
-- The XIV high-end
disk storage architecture that provides the performance
needed to make data
quickly available for analysis.
-- IBM's Scale-out Network Attached Storage
(SONAS), invented by IBM
Research to support multiple petabytes of storage
in a single file
system.
-- The IBM System Storage Easy Tier feature,
which uses ongoing performance
monitoring to move only the most active data
to faster solid-state
drives (SSDs) on IBM's flagship DS8700 disk storage
system.
The
Storwize appliance will work with popular NAS systems, including IBM N series
and SONAS, as well as non-IBM NAS systems from EMC, HP, NetApp and others. Storwize
real-time compression can provide added value to clients already using data deduplication,
thin provisioning and other storage efficiency technologies.
This
acquisition continues IBM's investment in real-time compression, which has been
proven for DB2 and Informix to reduce the overall total cost of information ownership
by up to 80%. About
Storwize Storwize
provides online storage optimization through real-time data compression, delivering
dramatic cost reduction without performance degradation.
Based on the Storwize's
Random Access Compression Engine(TM) (RACE), Storwize STN appliances transparently
compress primary storage between 50 and 80 percent without changes in performance,
storage, applications, networks, or processes.
RACE ensures that Storwize appliances
deliver real-time random access and deterministic, lossless data compression to
maintain reliable and consistent performance and data integrity. Storwize helps
slow the growth of storage acquisition and related storage life-cycle costs, including
reducing the amount of storage to be managed, powered, and cooled. Storwize is
headquartered in Marlborough, MA with offices worldwide. Storwize, optimize without
compromise. AboutIBM For
more information on IBM, visit www.ibm.com. For more information on IBM Storage,
go to www.ibm.com/systems/storage/.
(1)
Source: Compression data collected from installed Storwize appliances.
Compression
rates vary by file type and content. Compressed data may not compress further
with Storwize technology.
(2)
IDC, Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems 2009-2013 Forecast Update, Doc # 221287,
December 2009. (3)
Based on internal transaction processing performance tests performed by Storwize,
published in Storwize/IBM Technical Validation Report, November 2009.
Contact:
Joanna Brewer of IBM, +1-415-971-2777, jmbrewer@us.ibm.com
SOURCE
IBM
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