Primary Storage Optimization: An Overview

By Gal Naor, Co-founder and President, Storwize

Over the past year, a growing number of vendors have announced solutions that target the optimization of primary storage. Primary storage capacity optimization results in savings that initiate at the point of origin and cascade across the entire data life cycle. Optimization also adds value to storage components, offering improvements such as an increase in the effective size of storage cache without requiring an add-on caching device or costly SSD drives. Ultimately, primary storage capacity optimization contributes directly to reducing storage costs and lowering energy costs by reducing the storage footprint. Gartner predicts, "By 2014, some form of primary data reduction, such as compression and/or deduplication, will be used for at least 20% of all enterprise primary storage workloads — up from low, single digits in 2009."