IBM, a non-contender in the 3PAR event despite the billions it's otherwise spent on storage, said Tuesday that it has thrown California's newfangled Emergency Management Agency (Cal EMA), a lifeline.

Cal EMA is the deficit-ridden, emergency-prone state's year-old combination of its Office of Emergency Services and its Office of Homeland Security and it's supposed to archive stuff like information on critical infrastructure and real-time data collected by satellite for decades, something it's increasingly doing it on VMware virtual machines.

IBM says reducing the data in Cal EMA's virtual environment is critical because a full snapshot of the data in its charge would mean backing up 15TB-20TB every time

Cal EMA Secretary Matthew Bettenhausen addressing his staff in 2009

So Blue brought in its partner Pancetera's SmartRead virtual storage optimization widgetry, which is supposed to eliminate empty space and redundant data, cut the amount of data that has to be backed up by 75% and accelerate backup time to minutes rather than hours.

With Pancetera it's also supposed to be able to run backups anytime without impacting the performance of its production systems.

The stuff works with IBM's own Tivoli Storage Manager's centralized, policy-based data backup and recovery software.

The combined Tivoli-Pancetera solution requires no staged backups or agents in the virtual machine, saving Cal EMA the expense of supporting proxy storage while relying on Tivoli for managing and de-duplicating the backup and recovery solution.

About 20% of Cal EMA's data is live now. It relies on IBM tape storage for archived data on projects that are years-old like the data on the remediation and recovery from the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles.

IBM also has a new version of Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC) for managing complex heterogeneous storage environments. It now has intelligent agents that automatically deploy to discover new capacity (including in virtual machines), as well as advanced analytics that identify the best paths to the network and host. Humana is using the new release to reduce management time for required disaster recovery processes.