Compression, Deduplication and Financing News

IBM Corp. announced it is acquiring Storewize Inc., a data compression technology company, and a new mid-range ProtecTIER deduplication appliance. In addition, its financing arm, IBM Global Finance (IGF), unveiled a new zero percent financing offering for U.S. customers acquiring IBM System x equipment bundled with software and services. Meanwhile, EMC Corp. announced three new products, including a new mid-range Data Domain deduplication appliance, a new disk archive system with deduplication for mainframes and a disk library series with arrays that scale from 8 terabytes (TBs) to 1.4 petabytes (PBs).

Focal Points:

• IBM announced it will acquire Storewize, a privately-held company headquartered in Marlborough, MA with R & D in Tel Aviv, Israel, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition is expected to close this quarter. The Storewize appliances do real-time compression based on random access compression engine (RACE) technology. The company holds more than 35 patents for the technology. The appliances work with NAS arrays from multiple companies, which IBM claims the products will continue to support in the future. Storewize's products can reduce response time by up to four times, use up to 80 percent less space, and expand the amount of data available for analytics by a factor of five, according to the companies.
• IBM unveiled a new mid-range deduplication appliance, the ProtecTIER TS7610, which is priced at half the price of its current low-end data reduction gateway, the ProtecTIER 7680. The ProtecTIER TS7610 has a starting price of around $50,000, and is available in 4 TB and 5.4 TB configurations. IBM expects shipments to begin on Aug. 6. Earlier this year, IBM released the ProtecTIER TS7680 gateway device for mainframes. The ProtecTIER TS7680 is priced at over $100,000, and features two-node clustering for up to a petabyte of storage capacity per system under one management interface.
• Meanwhile, EMC announced a new deduplication storage system, the Data Domain DD670, which offers an extremely fast data compression rate of up to 5.4 TBs per hour of inline deduplication throughput. The DD670 scales to 76 TBs of raw data capacity and 2.7 PBs of logical capacity with a data reduction rate of up to 50 times depending on the type of file or block-level data being used, EMC said. It also increases the number of remote arrays that can replicate back to a Data Domain device to 90. EMC also announced a data deduplication expansion unit for its existing DLm960 (Disk Library for mainframe) product. The expansion unit is based on the Data Domain DD880 deduplication storage system. The company also unveiled a new Disk Library series – the 5000 Series – that scales from 8 TB to 1.4 PBs of usable capacity with up to 2.8 PBs of logical capacity. The new Disk Library 5000 has an average data compression rate of 2:1 and can handle up to 10.2 TBs of data per hour.
• IGF announced a new zero percent financing offering for U.S. customers acquiring IBM System x solutions bundled with software and/or services, offered by IBM or its business partners. This financing solution allows for a zero percent FMV lease on System x hardware and zero percent interest on IBM or non-IBM hardware, software and/or services provided the System x hardware comprises up to 70 percent of the solution. This enables IBM Business Partners to offer one "simple" rate for well qualified end-user clients on deal sizes $5,000 to $500,000. The monthly payment is equal to the total purchase price divided by 36. Another element that makes this lease "simple" is the credit rating, which will be done solely on a pass/fail basis.

Experton Group believes enterprises will aggressively pursue storage management capabilities that reduce the bandwidth and/or storage requirements as well as overall cost of storage management. Compression and deduplication technologies can significantly lower the capital and operational costs of storage management while improving productivity, including analytics of larger data stores and reduced backup windows. IT executives can expect to see further mergers and acquisitions in the storage sector. IGF's financing offering is well-timed and should receive strong acceptance by business partners (who can reduce solution sales time and improve overall sales with this option) and customers (who can more easily obtain financing for total solutions without tying up corporate capital). The pass/fail credit test is a nice touch that should appeal to many small and medium businesses, given today's constrained financing environment. IT executives looking at acquiring x86-based solutions costing under $500,000 should include the IGF offering in the short list of solutions and evaluate which one best satisfies corporate financial and technology requirements.