Compressed Thoughts - A History of Capacity Optimization

Users and Vendors alike have always had skepticism around capacity optimization and different points throughout history. The key, for end users is to be able to answer the questions:

What are you doing to my data? - This is directly related to availability and data integrity. If you can't ensure the customer will always have access to their data and it will be 'their' data then there is an issue.Whatever you do to my data… Read more »

Extending the Life and Economics of SSD with Real-time Compression

Last week in was in a number of business development meetings when the question came up, "Can real-time compression work with SSD?" I thought the question was a bit odd because I would have assumed it was obvious that real-time compression would work with any primary storage, including SSD but it turns out that the question was just a validation question on the road to a brilliant solution stack for SSD. The two big issues… Read more »

Slowlyness - What You Don't Want From Compression

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… Read more »

Putting You're Pounds Where Your Mouth Is

Last week I met my new, all time favorite “value added” reseller. Computacenter, based out of London is a partner to Storwize. More importantly, they actually do put the words “value added” back into the reseller business. The main reason, Computacenter is willing to pay their customers, real cash, if they don’t live up to the ROI numbers that are agreed upon by between them and their customer for a given solution. Today I am… Read more »

The Myths about Compression and Data Deduplication

How many of you have heard that compression and deduplication just don’t belong together? Like oil and water. I know from experience, when I worked for EMC, the Avamar sales reps and the Data Domain sales reps would tell their customers that the best thing to do if they had encrypted or compressed primary data, that they uncompress it to get the savings in their backups that deduplication promises.

This is wrong on a number… Read more »