Storewize
A Case Study in Data Compression
Compression of data has been around since the early days of computing. Early compression was used for removable media and downloading of data. Products like WinZip have been compressing files for years. Attempts to compress data at a local or network disk level in real time have not been very successful. Factors like speed degradation, CPU utilization issues, and software overhead have made compression at the primary storage level a practice no network administrators were ready to commit to.
Early in the compression technology was the data backup products like tape drives. These devices would compress the data before streaming it to tape. This allowed the user to save money by purchasing fewer tapes. Reduce wear on the drive by writing less data and reduce costs by transporting and vaulting fewer tapes. Compression found its way in the data transmitting arenas also. Customers could use less bandwidth to transmit data to and from remote offices. This also saved them time and money.
This year alone, industry experts predict that corporate storage needs will increased by 30 to 50 percent over last year. This ever growing increase in data storage is hurting the already strained IT budgets of many companies. As an IT manager do you keep purchasing disk to meet this growth? That will make the disk manufacturers of the world very happy. Do you install analysis programs to find old and unauthorized data so you can delete or archive this data to reclaim space? Do you invest in technology to centralize your storage to better control growth? What about a storage management program to concatenate available space on volumes to departments who need more storage space? Maybe you invest in all these solutions?
Let me ask you this question. If you could take your 10TB of storage and turn it into 8TB or 6TB or even 4TB with no noticeable impact on performance and availability, would you do this?
Alliance Technology Group LLC has been a leader in storage technology for over a decade and we have heard all the claims. Every product is the latest and the best of breed. Every vendors product is better then the competition. This product will change technology as we know it. Disk is Disk, Storage is Storage and how you get there is determined by marketing and relationships. We have the market share so you should buy from us? Just because they are the largest doesn’t mean they are the best. Yada… yada….yada…..
So when a sales rep from a company called Storewize called us to pitch their product we were reluctant. Here was a device that could regain a large percent of our storage with no impact on performance. Also they could sell their product at an affordable cost? Pinch me I must be dreaming.
As any good storage engineer I had to see it to believe it. I talked to our sales manager and asked for a demo unit to test in our lab before we met with the Storewize team. They had no problem sending us a unit to demo.
First off there was no setup manual included? The real product they assured me ships with the manual. After obtaining the IP address and password it took less then 20 minutes to setup with no instructions. It is basically a virtual share which you map to your clients. Data is compressed on route to your NAS device via the Storewize device. We first took a 700 mb file and it compressed down to400 mb. Not bad. When we compressed video of course we did not get much compression there. Overall we had a 40% compression when we were done compressing files everything from a doc files, xls files, pdf files and video/picture files.
Storewize would not elaborate on the secret sauce recipe but my guess is they use a compression technique which works on very long streams of bits performing a deduplication type algorithm along the way. They temporarily offload the data to a centralized and powerful appliance; by writing less data to disk they are able to make up for any transfer rates lost during the compression and decompression of data.
The only thing I did not like about the Storewize device is that the data cables are located in the front of the device. Also currently only works with NAS and ISCSI but they claim to have SAN solutions on the horizon. Basically it seems to work as advertised. We are still testing the device and creating our list of questions and concerns, but at this time I think we may have a winner in the real-time compression technology arena. If Storewize is not the winner they are currently in first place. Nice Job.
For more information: http://www.storewiz.com/Products.htm
