IBM has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Storwize, a privately held company based in Marlborough, MA. Storwize provides real-time data compression technology to help clients reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80% , which improves efficiency and lowers the cost of making data available for analytics and other applications. The acquisition is anticipated to close in the third quarter of 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Storwize has over one hundred customers such as Mobileye, Polycom Israel, Shopzilla, Inc. and Sumitomo Mitsui Construction across a wide range of industries including energy, manufacturing, finance, insurance, telecommunications and cloud services.

With Storwize, IBM is acquiring storage technology that is unique in the industry in that it can compress primary data, or data that clients are actively using, of multiple types -- from files to virtualization images to databases -- in real-time while maintaining performance. This is in contrast to other storage compression technologies that only compress secondary or backup data. By compressing primary data, Storwize users can store up to five times more data using the same amount of storage, preventing storage sprawl and lowering power and cooling costs.

This is important now more than ever as the world's data already vastly exceeds available storage space and enterprise demand for storage capacity worldwide is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 43% from 2008 to 2013, according to IDC .

Compression shrinks data so files and databases take up less space. Storwize's Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) is based on the industry-standard compression algorithm and uses Storwize's patented technology for real-time data compression without any performance degradation.

With Storwize, analytics applications can improve decision making by scanning many more years of historical data from multiple sources without the need to add additional storage equipment. Compressing data in real-time can also help make data available up to four times faster for transaction workloads.

Running Storwize data compression does not affect business and IT processes or other applications and does not require special skills to maintain. Product installation can be completed in as little as four hours, with little or no downtime.

"Real-time data compression helps address a significant client need -- making it affordable to analyze and make sense of massive amounts of data in order to provide new services," said Brian Truskowski, general manager, IBM System Storage and Networking. "By adding Storwize to our innovative portfolio of storage solutions, IBM is better equipped than ever to help clients handle growing quantities of data and make more of it available for analytics."

"IBM has the strongest vision for the future direction of storage and we are pleased to become a part of that vision," said Ed Walsh, CEO, Storwize. "Our customers will benefit significantly as our talented employees and innovative storage solutions merge with IBM's world-wide reach in sales, service and research and development."

Storwize joins other key IBM storage acquisitions and innovations that improve storage efficiency and analytics, including:

• ProtecTIER deduplication technology that can be used together with compression technology to significantly improve storage efficiency.
• The XIV high-end disk storage architecture that provides the performance needed to make data quickly available for analysis.
• IBM's Scale-out Network Attached Storage (SONAS), invented by IBM Research to support multiple petabytes of storage in a single file system.
• The IBM System Storage Easy Tier feature, which uses ongoing performance monitoring to move only the most active data to faster solid-state drives (SSDs) on IBM's flagship DS8700 disk storage system.

The Storwize appliance will work with popular NAS systems, including IBM N series and SONAS, as well as non-IBM NAS systems from EMC, HP, NetApp and others. Storwize real-time compression can provide added value to clients already using data deduplication, thin provisioning and other storage efficiency technologies.

This acquisition continues IBM's investment in real-time compression, which has been proven for DB2 and Informix to reduce the overall total cost of information ownership by up to 80%.