IBM acquires storage company Storwize for data compression capabilities

IBM said yesterday that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Storwize, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Storwize provides real-time data compression technology to help reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80 per cent, 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 virtualisation 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.