Datrium Co-Founder Hugo Patterson Honored for Research in De-Dupe

Datrium, Inc. announced that Hugo Patterson, its chief scientist and co-founder, was recognized with a 2020 FAST Test of Time Award at the FAST ’20 Conference Luncheon in Santa Clara, CA for his paper, “Avoiding the Disk Bottleneck in the Data Domain Deduplication File System.

The FAST (File and Storage Technologies) Test of Time Award is presented by Usenix, an association dedicated to supporting advanced computing systems communities and furthering the reach of research; the award recognizes outstanding work in file and storage systems research that delivers a lasting impact on the community. To qualify, a paper must have been presented at its respective conference at least 10 years ago.

“Test of Time awards identify research that has a lasting impact despite the rapid evolution in file and storage systems,” said Patterson. “It’s an honor to be recognized for the second time by Usenix for my contributions in the file and storage field. Efficient deduplication is a key component of Datrium’s technology-it is used throughout our Automatrix Data Platform and is an integral part of the low-cost economics of Datrium DRaaS, allowing for cost-effective failback in the event of a ransomware attack or natural disaster.“

The paper was originally presented at FAST ’08, the venue devoted to academic papers on storage-related topics. The paper, co-authored with Ben Zhu and Kai Li, outlines how to perform deduplication for backup data streams even with disk drives instead of AFAs. As a testament to the significance of this research, the paper has been cited nearly a thousand times and inspired subsequent research papers and conference sessions.

Datrium has developed and patented a novel method for converged primary-and-backup deduplication technology to provide deduplication without impacting the performance of high-IO/s applications. Deduplication is always turned on in Datrium’s software-converged infrastructure, both on-premises and in the hybrid cloud, ensuring consistently data transport and as much as 95% less storage space consumed.

Datrium employees have been recognized over the past several years for various papers on file and storage research. In 2017, Patterson also received the Usenix FAST 10-Year Test of Time Award for a paper on snap-and-replicate technologies, SnapMirror: File-System-Based Asynchronous Mirroring for DR. Zhe Wang received the VLDB 10-Year Test of Time Award in 2017 for his contributions to a paper on data search strategies, including multi-prob locality sensitive hashing (LSH), and Lakshmi Bairavasundaram, director of engineering, received the ACM SIGMETRICS 10-Year Test of Time Award in 2017 for a paper on disk failures.