News

posted on 10 April 2008 09:11

Israeli data compression startup up Storwize has raised $19 million from investors in a third funding round. Simultaneously it has launched a new compression appliance.

Funding
Storwize has raised $38 million so far. The company was founded in 2004 with the aim of developing real-time data compression hardware for primary storage. Typically data deduplication cannot be used for primary storage as it slows down data access too much. Also the amount of redundant data on primary storage is much less than on virtual tape libraries and disk targets for backup where deduplication is proving very popular.

By compressing data on primary arrays, Storwize gives data centre managers a way to reduce the effects of rampant data growth. It has collaborative alliances with HP and NetApp.

The company says: "Storwize products are installed between the storage arrays and the IP network and provide on-the-fly lossless and fully transparent compression and an increase in available capacity of 300 percent or more. Storwize technology works across all applications, and is based on algorithms deployed in a custom appliance that compresses data at real time while clients transparently access their data files and save them more quickly and efficiently than ever before."

The company has its R&D centre in Yahud, Israel, and offices in San Jose, California. It employs 60 people overall.

New product
The Storwize P Series is the next generation of its STN-6000 product family (pictured) and has transitioned from 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture in the shape of the latest STN-6800p and two other products:-

- STN-6300p - the company’s entry-level model providing the same availability, reliability and efficiency of higher-end models
- STN-6500p - optimized for enterprise environments
- STN-6800p - expands enterprise functionality to high-end environments performing large file processing on huge volumes of files. It is designed to work with drive arrays such as NetApp's FAS6070 and EMC's Celerra NSX.

All three are optionally available in high availability configurations.

Gal Naor, Storwize CEO, said: "Storwize now offers end-to-end solutions to all market segments from entry-level to high performance computing data center environments yielding dramatic data foot print reductions regardless of the vertical or data type at stake."

Arun Taneja, a consulting analyst and founder of the Taneja Group, said: “Without question, Storwize is leading the way for primary storage capacity optimization and the P Series enhancements certainly raise the performance bar for this class of products. Most of the attention about data reduction technologies has been focused on secondary storage platforms but given the vast amounts of storage that companies are still struggling to manage, the substantial cost benefits of properly applied primary compression should cause IT departments everywhere to take a hard look at the advantages of the new STN-6000 Series.”

The P Series STN-6300p, STN-6500p and STN-6800p are available now. No prices were supplied.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}