Real-Time Data Compression for Financial Services

With data growth exceeding 50% for most financial services organizations, storage budgets are being devoured by the insatiable need to provision more and more physical storage capacity. Further exacerbating this trend is the fact that data protection, compliance, test and development, and disaster recovery requirements are expanding too, requiring more data to be stored online longer than ever before. The net result is that not only is primary storage capacity expanding rapidly, but also most financial organizations have between 15 to 25 copies of mission critical systems data. Something has to give. IT cannot endlessly spend money on purchasing physical storage capacity, let alone be able to afford the OPEX costs to manage all that physical capacity. Real-time storage compression for primary data can reduce the need for additional storage, without compromising financial services organizations' ability to quickly access information.

Here are four ways IBM Storwize appliances help financial institutions gain a greater ROI on their storage investment:

Compresses data in real time without performance degradation.
Increases disk capacity by up to 80 percent and reduce need for both physical and virtual servers, making them easier to manage.
Cuts or delays storage disk purchases with IBM Storwize real-time data compression which is powered by a patented Random Access Compression Engine (RACE) architecture.
Boosts backup and recovery operations because Storwize –compressed files can be read without having to be decompressed preserving compression ratios while reducing cpu cycles.
Conserves CPU cycles which reduce power expenditures that can be better used for video and 3-D graphics rendering.

Field Findings:

A large international bank deployed IBM Storwize and after a year of deployment, the IT staff at the bank reports that IBM Storwize has allowed them to delay additional storage capacity purchases, freeing up significant CAPEX dollars for other IT initiatives. In fact, even though the bank's unstructured data is growing at over 100% a year, they have not had to purchase new storage capacity since deploying IBM Storwize. IT management at the bank has observed that data reduction rates vary depending on the application and file types. They estimate that on their workload and data, IBM Storwize has reduced their overall data footprint between 30 to 35%.

Learn more about the Financial Institution case study, or watch one of the IBM Storwize videos to get details about how real-time data compression optimizes storage without compromising on performance.