In my career I have done a lot of traveling. Well at least I thought I had. I am just returning from a trip to Israel where I met with the Storwize engineering team and CTO (Yoni Amit) as well as some of the greatest minds in the storage industry. I have to say, Steve Duplessie’s blog was right on when it comes to the technology capabilities that exist in that country. As most of you may know I recently joined Storwize, a company who specializes in primary data storage compression. Now, that may not seem like a lot, but when you consider some of the intellectual property wrapped up in how to do primary data storage compression, real-time, with random access capability, and fully transparent in a storage network, it really is a work of art.
Storwize compresses primary storage (NFS/CIFS – today) anywhere from 50% to 90% with ZERO performance degradation and in most cases they provide a performance enhancement. (While we as a company don’t brag about this, after this week, I actually think we should, more on that later.) On top of it all, Storwize is storage agnostic and are transparent in the storage network. Let me be very clear, what Storwize does is very, very hard to accomplish.
The reason for the title of this blog however is simple. Take a tried and true, industry proven technology such as LZ compression that has been around for over 30 years and improve its capabilities with a little Israeli ‘secret sauce’ (which I believe is the same stuff they put on their Shawarma, but I could be wrong). They have taken the simple solution of compression to save data storage space, added their magic and walah; they have been able to take the slow nature of compression, typically done post process (once the data is stored on the device, and which still requires disk space to ‘uncompress’ the file) and turned it into a technology called RACE (Random Access Compression Engine) that can compress data, real time, with no additional storage capacity required, increasing performance, fit seamlessly into the storage network so there is no change to any of your applications, processes, and caries the benefits of this compression through every component of the storage lifecycle such as backup, replication and archive. (Which, by the way, is usually the list all of IT’s issues when you talk about putting something in front of their primary storage). It is elegant and it saves the customer tons of dough.
My trip was a success. The Storwize team helped to educate me as to how they do what they do and they were very gracious hosts. It was exciting to see another country I had never been to and am actually looking forward to my return trip in two weeks.
Also, stay tuned as I start to share more of how RACE™ works.