Storage: Virtualization and Optimization

Using a method it calls ECO—extract, correlate and optimize—Ocarina reads files from storage, decompresses them down to their raw information, looks for similarities, then squeezes out the redundancies, according to George.

He used the example of a company introducing a new widget. They might take a picture of the widget to store, then have the picture included in a marketing department PowerPoint presentation and put into a technical white paper, where technicians might use lines to highlight certain features. "Since jpeg stores the information one way, and PowerPoint stores it a different way, you wouldn't find a common string of zeroes and ones" for de-duplication, George said. New mathematical algorithms automate the search for similarities in files, he added, claiming Ocarina can offer a 10-to-1 reduction in storage needs.