Ocarina Networks Unveils De-Dup With Compression

Ocarina Networks, provider of online storage optimization solution, introduced the second major release of its Ocarina ECO System at TechTarget’s Storage Decisions Conference in New York City.

Since unveiling its technology vision and the availability of its solution to major photo sharing and social networking sites in Spring 2008, Ocarina has been deployed in some of the world’s largest internet data centers — including two of the three largest online photo sites in the world. Today’s release extends this innovative storage optimization solution to a much broader range of industry segments and customers, including Hollywood studios, oil and gas companies, medical and bioscience institutions, and cloud storage providers.

Ocarina’s patented three step ECO System — Extract, Correlate, and Optimize — is the world’s first content aware optimization technology to deliver a 10:1 reduction in the size of the files that are driving the exponential growth of online storage. These complex file types include email, photos, video, Microsoft Office, and industry-specific file types for energy, media, medicine, and genomics. The ECO System combines compression, deduplication, and patented Ocarina information extraction algorithms to achieve better results than either compression or dedupe alone.

The resulting solution yields significant cost savings for companies seeking to manage data growth and long-term data retention. Rather than buying more disk space, customers can store ten times more data on storage disks they already own. This makes Ocarina an eco-friendly green IT solution, and was recognized as such as the recent winner of the Frost and Sullivan Green Excellence Award for Storage Optimization.

"There’s little doubt that the demand for storage optimization will be on the upswing as energy costs rise, data grows exponentially, and the available resources to support and manage the necessary infrastructure can’t keep up with demand," said Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager, storage software, IDC. "Just as we have seen file system software revolutionizing file-based storage, we will also witness optimization revolutionize how efficiently data is written to disk or tape. Ocarina is clearly a stand out performer."

The Gold Standard for Online Storage Optimization
Drastically reducing the space taken up by files is only the first step in storage optimization. When companies reduce the space taken by primary storage by 90%, this leads to new possibilities for what companies can store, how long they store it for, and how they access this data.

The result is the emergence of a new tier of storage called capacity-optimized storage, or the ‘O’ Tier for short. Ocarina is a leader not only in data reduction, but in building storage features that use data reduction to deliver complete O Tier solutions that are synergistic with users’ existing storage vendor.

New O Tier functionalities in this release include:

• ECOmove: One step file migration and optimization. Based on policy a file can be moved from primary storage, optimized, and written to a a more cost-effective "O" Tier storage platform in a single step.
• ECOsnap: Time-sequenced daily snapshots of storage, in which each day’s files are re-compressed and deduped relative to previous versions in content-aware ways. This means that each snapshot takes less and less space, and it’s possible to store a snapshot per day of all your files, every day for ten years or more using very little storage. What file system snapshots are for Primary storage, ECOsnap is for archive and repository storage.
• Virtual Global Namespace: Implement a single view to all files that have been optimized by Ocarina. Users see a single namespace, showing files in their original location and size. Behind the scenes Ocarina has drastically reduced the size of the files and can place them on multiple physical filers from multiple vendors.

File Support by Industry Type:

• Media and Entertainment: Post-production file type support, including RLA, AVI, Maya, EXR, Renderman, SPM, and many other file types. This, combined with ECOmove and ECOsnap means complete solutions for digital media asset libraries for major motion picture studios, broadcasters, animation houses and video game makers.
• Oil and Gas: File type support for online seismic data archives, including compressors for such industry specific files as seg-y, seg-b, and BRI. Additionally, Ocarina has added functionality to move seismic archives from tape to nearline disk archives.
• Medical Image Archives: File type support for the types of images in X-rays, MRIs, PET scans, gene sequencing data, and other files to better serve pharmaceutical, bioscience, hospitals and other medical customers.

"Dedupe for primary storage is going to be the hottest topic in storage in 2009, but Ocarina is already delivering it today along with next generation content-aware compression in a single integrated solution," said Murli Thirumale, founder and CEO of Ocarina Networks. "We could not be more pleased with the work of our research team, and plan to roll out significant further upgrades in the coming months as we continue to respond to the needs of the many industries that are demanding our solution to help them reduce their storage footprints."