Storwize just had their company kickoff. As with most company kickoffs, representatives from around the world got together to discuss messaging, strategy, and go to market ideas. We had representatives from around the world participate in these discussions and Stowize, having engineering roots in Israel has a strong sales an SE team there. I should also take a step back and mention how impressed I am that, while this American speaks no other languages, our counterparts in other parts of the world speak many other languages and are always courteous to speak English during our meetings which must be hard to do all day if its not your native tong. I digress. The funny thing is, sometimes things get 'lost in translation' and can really enlighten any conversation.
One of our top SE's in Israel, Guy Meir, was helping the group understand one of Storwize's value propositions and how it has helped him to be successful in accounts in Israel. Because Storwize does compression real time, there is zero performance degradation and in most cases a performance increase. As Guy is explaining this to the team, he proceeds to tell the team that, "The reason that the customer loves Storwize in their environment is because it doesn't cause any 'slowlyness'." As you can imagine the room erupted when this was said, and of course Guy knows the proper term is 'slowness' but pack 20 people in a room for a few days and anything can get 'lost in translation'. We thank Guy for adding a lot of levity to the day and we will be using this term for years to come. Thanks Guy!
The reason why I am writing about this however is that there are a few things that cannot be sacrificed when performing compression with on-line or primary storage. IT makes strategic storage decisions based on two important criteria with a third important component. IT buys storage based either on performance or cost. For primary storage applications, performance is king. NetApp or EMC usually win a storage deal because, based on the customers configuration and application one array out performs the other. In environments where capacity is growing out of control and performance is not a major concern then cost is king and the best $/GB becomes an important factor. The other component that is important to each of these criteria is availability. Downtime or the inability to access your data obviates the fact that your storage is fast or cheap. It is critical that when supplying capacity optimization solutions for primary capacity that you you don't add 'slowlyness' to the environment. If an administrator selected a specific storage array for its performance, 'optimizing' it, shouldn't slow it down. The ONLY way to do this is using real-time data compression. Traditional compression technologies that compress data once it is already written to the array is called post-process compression and it is slow, has a big impact on your storage array, is not transparent to your users or applications (it must be uncompressed before it can be accessed) and poses additionally challenges to downstream processes such as backup and archive. By doing compression in real-time, before the data gets to the storage array, whatever your compression ratio is with the data is also the amount by which you increase your storage cache. So if your compression ratio is 4:1 - you increase your cache by 4x. Since cache is king (ha) and expensive, this is an easy way to save money on storage capacity and increase your storage performance, a double win. Additionally, not only do you increase your storage cache but you also have less data to store which means less I/O, less disk movement and great storage CPU availability. So what I am saying is Storwize introduces absolutely no 'slowlyness'.
This post is focused on performance. Later I will discuss the other benefits Storwize provides by doing compression in real-time and using random access capabilities for storing these compressed files.
After participating in last weeks kickoff I am more excited than ever to be a part of a company that has made the seemingly simple so elegant and truly is the beauty of technology. I am confident that there is no other way in which any storage provider or capacity optimization solution can do what the Storwize technology does which means there is a long life ahead for this company with tremendous opportunity for great success.
This blog is brought to you in part by Guy Meir and the newly created storage term 'slowlyness' - Thanks again Guy!