Remember when Beanie Babies were free in Happy Meals, and tons of people ran out to buy the Happy Meals but only really wanted the Beanie Babies? Yeah, that’s what the storage compression/dedupe market is  starting to look like these days. Lots of big names are out snatching up at-rest de-duplication and compression vendors to get the products onto their sales sheets, we’ll have to see if they wanted the real value of such an acquisition – the bright staff that brought these products to fruition – or they’re buying for the product and going to give or throw away the meat of the transaction. Yeah, that sentence is so pun laden that I think I’ll leave it like that. Except there is no actual meat in a Happy Meal, I’m pretty certain of that.

Today IBM announced that it is formally purchasing Storwize, a file compression tool designed to compress data on NAS devices. That leaves few enough players in the storage optimization space, and only one – Permabit – whose name I readily recognize. Since I wrote the blog about Dell picking up Ocarina, and this is happening while that blog is still being read pretty avidly, I figured I’d weigh in on this one also.

Storwize is a pretty smart purchase for IBM on the surface. The products support NAS at the protocol level – they claim “storage agnostic”, but personal experience in the space is that there’s no such thing… CIFs and NFS tend to require tweaks from vendor A to vendor B, meaning that to be “agnostic” you have to “write to the device”. An interesting conundrum. Regardless, they support CIFS and NFS, are stand-alone appliances that the vendors claim are simple to set up and require little or no downtime, and offer straight-up compression. Again, Storewize and IBM are both claiming zero performance impact, I cannot imagine how that is possible in a compression engine, but that’s their claim. The key here is that they work on everyone’s NAS devices. If IBM is smart, the products still will work on everyone’s devices in a year.

It would be sweet if you could get a 5x storage space improvement just by putting in one of these boxes, and if they are as easy to manage as claimed, the overhead is minimized while the benefit is maximized. The one concern that these boxes always evoke is recoverability of data. How in the world do you keep uptime if you lose the only box that can access the data on your NAS devices. And that is generally solved by putting in more than one device… Perhaps IBM can have a buy one get one free sale.

Some have wondered (aloud even) how IBM will manage its growing (in both size and complexity) storage offerings. I don’t think that’s a huge problem, to be honest. IBM has huge offerings of everything. From Tivoli and associated offerings to servers, they manage a complex solution set all of the time without problems. Presumably they’ll merge and end of life product lines as it makes sense, which would solve the complexity issue by itself, one would think.

Now that Dell, EMC, IBM, and NetApp all have compression/deduplication of one form or another, it remains to be seen if HP and HDS will get itchy fingers. With the rumors of HDS considering a Brocade purchase, that could get interesting quickly. Note that there are also rumors of HDS having something in their roadmap, but HDS is largely an enigma to US writers (I’ve dealt with them as a writer, they are tough to get solid information from), so I wouldn’t give those rumors much credence until you see what they’re doing. They might be OEMing or something, not developing. Though I find that unlikely. It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, will pick up Permabit.

For the record, F5 is a partner with nearly all of these vendors in one form or another, but doesn’t play in this space in any way. Our value-adds are Directory Virtualization and remote storage (So Called Capacity Optimized Transport) through our ARX and WOM products. Apologies for the repetitive disclaimer to regular readers, but that’s a fair statement for the individual that just happened on this blog.

So now we’re getting to the fun part of this game. Very soon, disk optimization is going to be available to you if you use a big-name vendor. The interesting part to me is how many of you will use it. My guess? Lots. We’ve been fighting the disk space wars for years, and yesterday’s blog was all about how to survive in the short term. I think that resistance to data that can’t be read by any old machine is going to go away in the face of space shortages. I’ve been wrong before, but it’s a tough call for a CIO to tell the CEO “there’s this technology that could give us X times the space with little outlay and very little work, but we fear it”. Most smart CEOs would respond “the rest of us don’t understand IT, and thus fear it, but we work with you every day”.

So I’ll be seeing you around the water container, your hands trembling as you worry about what to do if that redundant pair of compression/dedupe boxes ever goes down, but you’ll be there, I’m pretty sure. Because contrary to the old maxim, disk ain’t so cheap.

Related Articles and Blogs

• IBM Buys Storewize
• Dell Buys Ocarina Networks
• Wikipedia definition – Capacity Optimization
• Capacity Optimization – A Core Storage Technology (PDF)

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