Storwize has unveiled new capabilities for its family of real-time data compression appliances, which it claims to enable NAS users to reclaim existing storage capacity, achieve faster throughput, support high availability (HA) configurations and improve forecasted storage resource requirements.

The company said that the new STN-6000 Series appliances compress all data for NAS protocols (CIFS and NFS). They can be deployed in any NAS environment with no change to networks, storage, applications or process.

According to Storwize, the new features include, Random Access Compression Engine (RACE), which provides a primary storage optimisation to offer random access and lossless data compression; compression accelerator for existing data that compress up to 10TB per day per single device; enhancements that support NAS HA configurations and complements existing storage HA functionality; and a capacity advisor that enables IT managers to predict storage needs.

The company claims that it enables IT managers to reduce the storage footprint in the data centre and reduce associated power and cooling costs. It delivers between 50 and 90% reductions in storage utilisation for network attached storage (NAS) without performance degradation.

Ed Walsh, CEO of Storwize, said: “The major storage challenge for most companies is storage growth and the cost associated with that growth. Storwize directly attacks the problem at the source – primary storage – with real-time data compression. Our solution delivers dramatic savings without changing downstream storage processes such as cloning, replication, backup, deduplication and archiving.”