I had a chance at the beginning of 2007 to attend to a real demo in production site at one of the our biggest customer (it’s one of the biggest service provider here in Italy) but both me and customer were deluded not for results on compression but for other things.

The demo was conducted by an engineer that came directly from Israel (EMEA hw was based there then) for the show.

Nothing to say about compression, it compresses, no doubts but you’ve to put as a gateway in front of your storage, you can have a bottleneck there and at that time there was also an issue about fail over protection of that appliance nics and so on.

Another thing that we did not like was the fact that then the Storewiz was certified for Ontap 7.x (don’t remember exactly) and customer already had 7.z more recent…for the demo customer had to downgrade…really no good thing…

I can say, knowing very well Data Domain appliances (and the effort that that they’re doing to use them as inline storage, not only nearline or backup also if you can do it now) that to have your data compressed and usable (virtually online always) there are other better solutions.

One of this could be a DD restorer, or also A-SIS from NetApp (for not heavy processes) or, why not, something like Symantec Enterprise Vault File System Archiving and more…

Bye

Da: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] Per conto di No More Linux!
Inviato: venerdì 14 marzo 2008 23.17
A: toasters@mathworks.com
Oggetto: anyone using the storwize data compression products?

we are looking at these appliances which compress volume data on the fly and sit between the client and the filer(s). interested in hearing anyone elses success or failure stories with these devices.

http://www.storwize.com/

thanks toasters!