Ocarina in the News and Blogosphere

An article in SearchStorage UK by Bryan Betts reviews primary storage dedupe & compression solutions. The article includes an interview with Phil Knowles of Imagination technology, one of the top providers of specialized semiconductors for the mobile handset market.

"Our server rooms were at their maximum capacity, and disk storage uses the majority of that space," he explained. "We really couldn't afford an expansion in disk space and didn't want to throw away perfectly good equipment to replace it with higher-density storage." He goes on to say, "It works fine, and we're getting reduction ratios of nearly 80%, much better than other file system compression tools we benchmarked," Knowles said.
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Eric Slack posts in SearchStorageChannel blog some of the adoption obstacles that dedupe first encountered in coming to market, and the promise that dedupe can now bring to primary storage, in particular tiered architectures:


...Data Domain had this new technology that got us appointments all over town but was a little difficult for users to grasp. We’d spend the first meeting and a good part of subsequent meetings explaining the technology, originally called “commonality factoring.” They did grasp the effective data reduction rate of about 20x, but didn’t like the fact that it was being presented for backup only. We’d explain how the technology relied on the inherent redundancy in backup data and that using it for regular files would net only a fraction of these data reduction percentages....

...data deduping is a storage optimizing technology that can make your tiered storage solution more attractive, especially compared with traditional disk solutions that don’t offer dedupe. In this era of low budgets for new capacity and high requirements for storage utilization, incremental improvements like deduplication can make a difference.

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Ocarina Networks Inc. claims that its primary data storage-targeted ECOsystem appliance produces data reduction of up to 85% on Microsoft Office documents, PDFs and virtual machine files and 40% or more on images.  [more...]

One of the stops during the event was Ocarina Networks. Ocarina specializes in online storage optimization to reduce disk consumption. The main point of the visit was to obtain a clearer understanding of compression and de-duplication for data management.  [more...]

In this post about the inclusion of the tech industry at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, Ocarina is mentioned an example of a compression technology that can help companies lower their energy consumption.  [more...]

The downside to most of these NAS implementations is that efficiencies are gained only on a platform-by-platform basis. If your customer has a mixed NAS environment, you may want to look at an external solution that can work across different systems. Today, Ocarina Networks and Cofio Software have products in this space. Both companies' products can identify redundant segments of data and store only one copy of that segment. Both also have the capability to move data from primary storage to secondary storage and maintain the deduplication efficiency.  [more...]

Ocarina Networks presented to us during the Day 2 morning session of the GestaltIT Tech Field Day. Their presentation was a deep dive into storage compression and optimization.  [more...]

A company called Ocarina Networks says they "make free space on storage you already have" through some very clever content aware compression and de-duplication. The key element here is that it works on your online storage so the savings are multiplied as there are flow on effect to the transmission of your data over networks and to the amount of data that you need to backup. So even though companies like Netapp (which Ocarina say they are 57x better than) and DataDomain do de-dupe its only at the underlying storage without these possible secondary benefits.  [more...]

George Carter comes in first and gives a product overview of what Ocarina is, how it works, where it resides, the architecture, the compression, the dedup and various other aspects of the entire solution. During his presentation he mentions how there are several Academia Scientist that work at Ocarina on several Compression algorithms for standard files like JPEG, TXT, PDF, ZIP’s, etc, etc. He also shows how the technology takes the data, uncompresses or unzips it, compresses it again, calculates checksum and then upon validation of the checksum, discards the original file to write with the newly compressed file.  [more...]

Ocarina Networks, or Ocarina as they are usually called are a company that specialize in a thing called data deduplication and compression. Basically you can think of it as removing all the data that you find more than once and replacing all duplicates with a pointer to just one original version of the data. This can be done on multiple levels, and the most 'simple' version would be to use a corporate mailbox as an example. Say you would send out a mail to 5 colleagues with a Powerpoint presentation you want them to review. Normally each recipient will have a copy of this file in his or her mailbox and consume the space for the attached file. A deduplication solution could for example look and find that the same file exists 5 times. It saves one version and has the others just point to this one file.  [more...]