IBM has announced the completion to acquire Storwize. Storwize will become part of IBM Systems and Software Group.  The technology aims to help organisations improve storage efficiency while lowering the cost of making primary data available for analytics and other applications.

Integrating Storwize's Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) with its Storage solutions portfolio will help IBM to make it more affordable to analyse massive amounts of data in order to provide new insights and business outcomes.  The RACE technology complements other storage efficiency offerings like deduplication.

"IBM is focused on helping clients reduce the cost and complexity of managing the vast amounts of data that are consistently growing year over year," said Brian Truskowski, General Manager, IBM System Storage and Networking. "Using the RACE technology can help IBM client’s compress their primary data while preventing storage sprawl and lowering power and cooling costs."

Storwize RACE:

• Is the storage solution that can compress primary data of multiple file types without affecting performance;

• Can help clients reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80%;

• Has 35 patents pending and issued;

• Works with many deduplication, virtualisation and other storage efficiency solutions;

• Has over 100 customers across a wide range of industries such as energy, manufacturing, finance, insurance, telecommunications and cloud services.

The Storwize appliance will work with popular NAS systems such as IBM N series, as well as non-IBM NAS systems from EMC, HP, NetApp and others.