New Iteration in Data Reduction From Start-Up Ascava

This article was published on June 14, 2016 on the blog of Philippe Nicolas who worked at SGI, Veritas, Symantec, Brocade and Scality, and is currently advisor for OpenIO, Infinit, Rozo Systems, Guardtime, and Solix Technologies.

New Iteration in Data Reduction

Ascava Inc. (no web site yet neither logo) is making progress in their mission to change the data reduction landscape.

The company, founded in 2007 and incorporated in Delaware, DE, has raised $1.59 million in November 2014.

The team is currently located in Los Altos Hills, CA.

I had the privilege to meet at SNIA DSI conference two key executives of the company: Harsh Sharangpani, CEO and CTO (formerly at Cisco, Vihana acquired by Cisco, and Intel) Rajesh Patil, VP business development and operations (previously at Cisco, Vihana and Motorola). LinkedIn shows five people in addition to Rajesh not listed as Ascava.

Its product is about data size reduction what the company named Data Distillation with ratio 1.5 to 2x better than the best de-dupe + compression ratio existing on the market. Ascava has made several innovations in that sector and is not ready yet to announce anything but developments are in sync with the plan.

The product is a software running as a separate standalone application you operate on any node able to shrink file size and return a super optimized reduced file. The outcome is obvious less consumed space for a fraction of additional CPU cycles. Of course you need a ‘reader’ able to unpack the file to give you back the original content before any application reads it in its original content.

We can imagine multiple usages of this such data archiving, data analysis and file tiering/HSM/migration stuff. It reminds me a bit what Ocarina Networks did in the past even if here Ascava is doing radical new things to achieve this reduction ratio.

For whose who wish to read a few things about Ocarina (acquired by Dell in 010, I wrote a few posts – sorry in French at that time – available here: August 2007, April 2008 and July 2010.

Ascava was a good meeting even a surprise. It illustrates that some initiatives and companies continue to dig in that space. CPU and memories continue to be super fast and affordable, we then imagine that some innovators wish to move forward and propose something new, Ascava being one of them.