Online Storage Optimization

This blog’s parent Ocarina and I have something in common. Can you guess? That’s right. We both have names that are cause for frequent comment. The first question anyone ever asks me when they meet me is, “is that your real name?” And the first question that anyone asks a person from Ocarina is “where did you get the name?” In essence, this is the same question in two different forms. I almost always answer in the same way when asked about my name. I confirm the fact that my parents were indeed hippies (as the questioner already suspected) and that yes, I do...

Last week’s BD Event was more than just a deal making event. It was a chance to learn about new product releases and trend in the storage industry. The big picture: gone are the days when end users had to accept whatever the storage industry handed down to them. Today’s small-to-medium-sized storage operations are all about designing systems in response to customer needs. Whether that’s developing end-to-end dedupe, refining and improving processes for data recovery management, delivering automated marketing tools, improving data migration, or creating storage that is more energy...

Last week, a group of us participated in a groundbreaking new anti-trade show, The Business Development Event. Organized by industry veterans Greg and VaNessa Duplessie, the event was the second of its kind and the first in the Silicon Valley area. Held in Palo Alto, California, it drew dozens of storage industry members who spent three days talking, networking, making deals happen and sharing their skills and expertise. Online Storage Optimization was on the scene–tweeting, talking and taking the occasional sip from a glass of wine that happened our way. Our parent Ocarina Networks was also...

Interesting story from the vault of the Ocarina case study library. Social network Tagged is the third largest social network in the U.S. It has seen traffic increase 10x over the past two years. With its focus on making new friends rather than simply getting to know existing ones, it has carved out a successful niche and is building an international subscriber base of over 80 million members. The cost of this success? Data growth. Tagged’s storage infrastructure has been doubling every single year. With 1 million new photos uploaded every single day, Tagged needed a way to expand capacity...

Thanks to Data Center Knowledge for picking up this science geeky piece of news–turns out that the SNAFU-prone CERN Large Hadron Collider is quite the data beast. The detectors built into the giant science experiment are coughing out gigabytes of data every second. One detector has 100 million readout channels. The below video is a mind blowing journey into the data center that is powering this experiment. As someone points out in the comments field, despite the multi-petabytes of data being generated there, the collider experiment all really comes down to one bit of data. That is, the Higgs...

Bleary-eyed, the storage industry has begun to wake up from its holiday stupor. VMware has decided to go into the email business. EMC continues to vacuum up talent like a Roomba on a tear through the world’s biggest living room. Meanwhile, the jokers over at Gestalt IT are picking up the “Fake Steve Jobs” meme and running with it. Their version is actually funnier than the original — at least to this blogger, perhaps because I know the players and situations. The increasingly crowded and competitive Storage Monkeys Top Vendor Blogs contest is about to screech to its exciting...

The headline of this post poses a question that was raised in a recent comments discussion between Dave Vellante of Wikibon and myself on this blog. Dave wanted to know if there are use cases in which generic compression might still be useful. As I wrote in my post, most of the storage industry still relies on generic, or LZ compression. This is a shame, because it’s severely limited compared to possibilities inherent in more advanced, file type specific compression algorithms such as we at Ocarina use. My main point was that the more advanced, file type specific compression algorithms can...

It’s that time again. Storage Monkeys is a running a contest for the Top 10 Vendor Blogs, and once again, Online Storage Optimization is a nominee! Even more exciting, this blogger is listed on there, making it the only entrant with a woman blogger. Not to play the gender card or anything, but to me this is good news for the industry. And no doubt next year, there will be even more diversity represented in the list. Here’s the full list of blogs that have been nominated. It really is an honor to be listed among these top bloggers such as Stephen Foskett, Marc Farley, Vaughn Stewart,...

There’s a lot of talk about compression these days, but how much do we know about it? Well, for one thing, compression as a research area for mathematics has evolved much faster than most people realize. The thing is, most compressors used in computer products, including dedupe appliances, use generic algorithms rather than making use of these advances. Most storage products use Lempel-Ziv (LZ) or derivatives, and try to use that single compressor to compress everything. These algorithms have been around forever, and for the most part, have not evolved much in the last ten years other than...

If you haven’t yet tuned into the weekly podcast known as Infosmack on community site Storage Monkeys, you’re missing out. Every Monday, hosts Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley bring on guests to dish about the latest storage industry news–and they do so in a very entertaining and informative way. This week’s show was particularly enjoyable, as they moved on from the usual format and turned the mirror around, so to speak–discussing social media such as blogging and Twitter, and how well big companies like EMC, HDS, IBM and HP are doing on that front. The guests this...