Technology Overview

IBM Storwize Real-Time Compression

IBM Storwize appliances provide online storage optimization through real-time data compression, delivering dramatic cost reduction without performance degradation. The IBM Storwize STN6500 and STN6800 appliances align to your existing storage networking configuration for easy installation.

IBM Storwize appliances transparently compress primary storage up to 80% without changes in performance, storage, applications, networks, or processes.

IBM Storwize appliances deliver real-time, random access, deterministic, and lossless data compression, maintaining reliable and consistent performance and data integrity. IBM 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.

IBM Storwize provides enterprises the following benefits:

Real time data compression up to 80%

No performance degradation
No loss of data integrity
Increases the effective storage cache size

Fully transparent

No change to performance, applications, networks, storage, or process

High Availability

Fully redundant components and deploys seamlessly into high-availability environments

Our Technology: Random Access Compression Engine Architecture

With over 35 patents, IBM Storwize's Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) Architecture is uniquely positioned to enable significant primary data compression and storage optimization without decreasing performance or data integrity.

RACE enables IBM Storwize appliances to be:

Random access/real-time to ensure no performance degradation
Deterministic for reliable and consistent performance
Lossless to ensure data integrity

Storwize holds over 35 patents for its RACE technology which is based on proven Lempel-Ziv (LZ) data compression algorithms.

The IBM Storwize RACE is made up of three components:

Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) – enables random-access data compression without compromising performance
Unified Protocol Manager (UPM) – enables transparent support of multiple storage and network protocols, including CIFS and NFS
Monitoring and Reporting Manager (MRM) – enables online storage compression trending, analysis and reporting.

Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) Architecture

How RACE Works

RACE takes incoming data streams and compresses the data within these data requests leaving the metadata intact, to the storage array. The data is stored in the array and the acknowledgement that the write has been committed is sent directly back from the array to the end user or application.

The Customer Impact

Customers worldwide trust IBM Storwize to optimize their storage capacity without compromising performance and to deliver unprecedented cost savings, ROI, operational efficiencies, and environmental benefits:

Better Storage Utilization

Reduces existing storage utilization up to 80%
No performance degradation
Maintains data integrity

Lowers Capital and Operational Costs

Slows the growth of storage acquisition
Storage agnostic, supports NAS protocols (NFS, CIFS)
Reduces the amount of storage to be managed throughout the life cycle
Easy, transparent deployment

Better Energy Efficiency

Less to store, power and cool

Reduces Storage Footprint and Costs throughout the entire Data Lifecycle

IBM Storwize real-time compression reduces data as it is written to primary disk enabling benefits throughout the entire data lifecycle because smaller files are copied, replicated, archived, deduplicated, and backed-up. See how much IBM Storwize can save you with our ROI Calc Tool.

Enhances Storage Performance and Efficiency

IBM Storwize operates in real-time and addresses data reduction at the point of origin resulting in less data being physically written to disk, so storage systems can operate more efficiently.