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IBM Real-time Compression

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BusinessANGLE:

Some Storwize Facts:

*Founded in 2005
*Technical team out of IDF
*$40 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital, Tamares Group and Tokyo Electron Device

*Executive Staff – Ed Walsh (CEO), Mary Henry (CF), Steve Kenniston (VP Product & Strategy), Roger Cummings (VP Sales)
*Founders: Gali Noar, Yoni Amit
*100+ global customers – e.g. Shopzilla, Polycom, Snowball, Trident Micro, Mazda
*35 patents awarded or pending

IBM’s motivation for buying Storwize was to embed the intellectual property throughout its storage portfolio pervasively. IBM has placed Storwize into its Systems and Technology Group (STG) within the storage line of business under GM Brian Tuskowskowski. The original Storwize executive and technical teams remain in tact. IBM continues to sell the existing Storwize product under the IBM Real-time Compression brand and over the next 12-18 months is expected to bring the technology to the balance of its storage portfolio.

MarketANGLE:

Historically, compression has been broadly applied in tape technologies and other use cases such as music, video, pictures and PC file compression. While niche products existed in the form of adapter cards, IBM’s Real-time Compression technology was the first to be delivered as an appliance and applied to primary disk storage. The IBM technology can be targeted at all external storage but is currently available for file-based (i.e. NAS) systems. Customers indicate that on average 50% of storage capacity can be saved using real-time compression.

The economic downturn, combined with technological advancements in compression technology and higher performance processors dramatically increased interest in “doing more with less.” Interest in storage optimization technologies such as compression, deduplication, thin provisioning and others has escalated as a result. Technologies like real-time compression have became viewed as a much-needed evolution and has led larger, established suppliers to re-tool strategies and in many cases make acquisitions to respond to market demands.

Total Available Market: The TAM for external storage arrays according to IDC is about $20B worldwide (external storage factory revenue). In theory, real-time compression can be applied to the entire marketplace of which analysts indicate approximately 60% is file based (i.e. that portion served today by the IBM appliance). The penetration of real-time compression today is minuscule however over time three key trends are expected to develop:

1. Real-time compression will apply to both file and block-based storage systems
2. The technology will be increasingly embedded inside of storage arrays as a feature
3. All vendors will offer similar optimization capabilities and data reduction techniques will be widely adopted

According to Wikibon analyst David Floyer, within the next five years, fifty to sixty percent of the capacity shipped will be compressed. Floyer estimates that the value of compression technologies will be approximately $2B in this time frame, however he points out that the feature will become ‘tables stakes’ to compete in the market for external storage arrays. IBM’s current share of the market is between 11-13% worldwide and observers indicate IBM hopes to gain 5 market share points by 2015; or roughly $1B in incremental market share annually. If IBM succeeds, the ROI on its $140M investment in Storwize will be impressive.

Other suppliers competing for share in this space include NetApp, EMC and Dell, which recently acquired Ocarina (a compression/deduplication hybrid). Another technology that will compete in this market includes deduplication for primary storage offered by Permabit (see chart).

TechANGLE:

Historically compression was used against whole files, and had to be done asynchronously. THis measnt that writing or reading compressed data was very slow, and it was impossible to utilize for primary storage. The Random Access Compression Engine (RACE), Unified Protocol Manager (UPM) and the Monitoring Reporting Manager (MRM) together form the IBM Real-time Compression product offering. As indicated above, this will become a fundamental integrated feature of all IBM’s storage offerings, and IBM is aggressively driving this adoption. With the advent of faster processors and the Storewiz RACE algorithms, compression can now be applied in-line for primary storage with little or no performance impact. As a result the cost of storage is significantly reduced .

Another technology that is complementary to compression is de-duplication, which has been historically used in backup, but has now moved into the real-time world, (e.g., Permabit’s Albireo technology). De-duplication removes identical pieces of data from the storage. Compression and de-duplication are additive technologies.

SocialANGLE:

Currently big data is chewing through storage resources at an alarming rate.  Consider this: a 12 year-old boy with his high-definition video cell phone is creating more data in a month than the bank of New York created in the whole of 1995. A new generation of storage administrators will be deploying this leading edge technology to help reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of storage, as users and consumers demand real-time access to data.