Storwize Focuses On Optimization Without Compromise

As the embers of the last decade slowly faded away, Storwize - a Massachusetts-based, storage optimization company - quietly planned for the start of a new decade with new executives and a plan to leverage the leadership of its CEO, Ed Walsh. At the start of 2010, I noticed the press release stating that storage analyst and EMC-veteran Steve Kenniston had joined the company as vice president of Technology Strategy. I know Steve from past work experience with EMC and found him to be a great guy and certainly chock-full of insight about the storage industry.

I had an opportunity to spend some time with Steve recently, and he provided a solid update on where Storwize is today, what it promotes as company values, and how it views partnerships as the company looks forward. We also discussed some measurements of the company's success, and what storage vendor they find a large percentage of their storage optimization solutions deployed in front of.

Also, we had brief discussion on our views of primary storage optimization (thin provisioning, deduplication and compression). After being unsure of just where Storwize is and where they are going, it was great to get a better understanding of their positioning, customer examples and confidence in their technology as well as the storage business overall, in terms of how they view stability and continued growth within the storage segment of IT. Storwize has assembled over 100 customers as of today, and Steve states that the company has "100's of appliances now in the field."  In fact, NETAP represents over 70 percent of the primary storage base which Storwize appliances sit in front of for dedup and compression.  

The Storwize appliance consists of its Random Access Compression Engine (R.A.C.E.) running on an IBM 3650 quad core Intel Nehalem processing environment and driving a unified protocol manager supporting CIFS and NFS today. (See Figure 1 for an example of where Storwize appliances fit within a Network Attached Storage (NAS) infrastructure.) While Steve had "no comment" on whether more connectivity options and protocols will be supported in the future, it seems pretty much a given that Storwize will expand connectivity protocol later this year and in 2011.

The company promotes its core values of "storage optimization without compromise" (no real-time performance impact) and to "leverage industry standard compression techniques." According to Steve, these core values have enabled Storwize to continue to build strong customer relationships and grow the company, even during the current global macro-economic down turn.

Storwize's real-time, random access method for compressing primary storage data is certainly unique and an attractive approach: as a file is processed through the appliance, a file envelope is created where attributes such as access control lists, permissions and file size are all identified and stored within the file envelope on the disk. The compressed data is stored in logical units. Should edits need to be made to files, they are made to the logical units negating the need to decompress/restore all the data just to make one edit. This can represent a significant time savings during write updates while also preserving compression ratios in downstream processes such as backup and deduplication.

Partnerships remain key to Storwize's go-to-market model. In fact, one strategic partnership involves a program with Landmark Software where NETAP file servers with dedupe support and Storwize compression appliances are sold as a pre-packaged CAD/CAM turn-key solution. The company will remain focused on developing its partner programs throughout 2010. From a service and support perspective, IBM continues to support the Storwize hardware, while Storwize itself provides support for the appliance-based software.

Steve took some time to give me a customer example of a global tele-video conferencing company with headquarters in the San Francisco bay area. The global company, an EMC and NETAP primary-storage user, relies upon Storwize to compress its Microsoft Home Directories, along with certain Oracle and VMware information. I did make contact with this customer and they confirmed their satisfaction with both primary storage vendors and with the Storwize compression solution.

So far this year, in addition to bringing Steve Kenniston on board, Storwize added another industry veteran, Roger Commings, as vice president of World Wide Sales. The company has an impressive list of investors including Bessemer, Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, Tamares Capital, Stiching (a private Dutch group) and Tokyo Electron Device Limited.Clearly, Storwize is beefing up its executive staff and focusing on getting its technology and value proposition messaging out to the IT community. The challenge for Storwize, as with many up-and-coming innovative vendors in this economic climate, is to stay focused on delivering top line and bottom line value to its customers as well as staying on track with its product road map and delivery schedules.

If you have Storwize solutions installed or are considering them, I would like to hear from you and understand you infrastructure configuration today (or where you are looking to take it in the future). 

Disclosure: At the time this blog was published I am not doing business with Storwize.