StoreWiz: Well-kept storage secret

I know that the name of the company is a bit odd but you certainly won't forget it. StoreWiz is an Israeli based company that has developed a data compression solution for heterogeneous storage. Right now they support NAS but they have FC and iSCSI SAN support on their road map. You put the StoreWiz appliance onto the network and it will compress data in real time. You can use it to provide data compression to a bunch of NAS storage systems reducing their capacity requirements by 2:1, 3:1 or more. If you have 10 TB of primary data you can compress it so that it only consumes between 3.3 TB to 5 TB of disk capacity. Since primary storage is the most expensive tier this can yield huge cost savings. You can save on capacity costs and there is an impact on power, cooling and floor space. Additionally, once your data is compressed you get to take advantage of sending fewer bits over the WAN for disaster recovery as well.

The StoreWiz solution is actually in its third revision and they have over 100 systems installed. The key is that they support heterogeneous storage environments; they don't negatively impact performance; and the savings are easily quanitfied. As I've said before - nothing is a panecea and you need to do your own evaluations. And I have yet to speak with any of their customers or test the product first hand. Conceptually it is compelling and it seems to make a ton of sense.