Big Blue has once again thrown down the gauntlet to Amazon with the Tuesday announcement of a new cloud-based service that aims to help companies rein in on Big Data by reducing storage requirements to a minimum.

One of the main barriers keeping organizations from tapping into their growing information troves is the need to maintain separate copies of the same data across multiple silos, which requires additional physical infrastructure that takes up floor space and forces practitioners to spend more time on maintenance. That leaves fewer dollars for innovation while making it more complicated and costly to increase capacity.

SmartCloud Data Virtualization addresses this challenge by enabling users to create virtual copies of their data on demand, eliminating the need to invest in dedicated resources waiting to be used. The service leverages Virtual Data Pipeline technology from the Waltham, Massachusetts-based Actifio to keep only a single physical copy of client information at all times, an approach that IBM says improves response times and simplifies management and consumption.

Laurence Guihard-Joly, the general manager of Big Blue’s Business Continuity and Resiliency Services group, said that “as part of our growing portfolio of cloud software, services and expertise that help clients tackle any IT or business challenge with confidence, security and trust, SCDV will not only offer many customers faster recovery times at better price points, it will enable them to leverage their protected data as a business asset rather than simply an insurance policy.”

Companies will be able to store their master data copy in the nearest IBM data center for reduced latency. The vendor is planning to end 2014 with a total of 40 facilities across five continents, which includes the 13 it obtained through the SoftLayer acquisition last June and another 15 that will be added this year as part of a $1.2 billion cloud investment announced in January.