Deduplication Gets More Face Time - Page 2

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"The explosion of digital content is forcing organizations to find ways to optimize primary disk capacity," Biggar said in a statement. "Technology [that] compresses and deduplicates data at the information level, are taking center stage because of the immediate cost-savings they can enable.'"

Ocarina's approach to avoiding data-loss and retrieval performance problems centers on how its Ocarina Optimizer hardware appliance functions. The product, which debuted last week, reads, consolidates and writes files back to storage, cutting down the size of already-compressed data and optimizing even large, media-rich files.

As a result, the company claims its system can help enterprises store 10 times more data on current storage systems.

"No one's really done online, primary de-dupe because it's hard to do," George said. "Performance requirements are much more stringent [in online data] and almost every file is compressed by its application during the save process."

For example, he noted that Microsoft 2007 documents are automatically compressed once a file is closed. That means the file can't be compressed again by traditional means to further save space -- which is where de-dupe technology comes into play.

Additionally, Ocarina takes steps to ensure data that's likely to be needed again soon remains readily available to users.

"We shrink [a] compressed file using policies, so that older files are 'de-duped' while data that needs to be accessible isn't shrunken until it's a certain age," George said.

Describing it as "complementary" to deduplication's traditional role in the backend, George said beta customers of Ocarina's technology are seeing big efficiency gains, especially among businesses in social networking and digital photo environments.

"These enterprises are dealing with many, many petabytes of data and the ability to compress those to save storage space is saving them money and storage space," he said.

Not every type of primary storage environment is ripe for de-dupe, however. Rich media, e-mail and workflow files may be a good fit the technology, while environments handling heavy database files aren't, experts said.

"The sheer volume of media files, the amount of data they create, presents an interesting place to play with online storage and could prove attractive to customers," Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, told InternetNews.com.

King also views the consumer environment as a potential target for deduplication, as it "doesn't have the same kind of regulatory requirements" enterprises often face with data files.

Ocarina's George said the technology may have particular appear for gas and oil industries, given their hefty seismic graphic files that require storage. He acknowledged that large financial institutions and transactional-based environments would find de-dupe less suitable.

"Databases are tricky," he said. "We could shrink the files, but due to the constant churn in data changes, they shrink and expand, shrink and expand -- it doesn't work as well."