Online Storage Optimization

It’s a great experience going through a a positive transfer of ownership in a company, whether it’s an IPO or a strategic acquisition by a larger company. From an Engineering perspective, the day-to-day tasks are mostly unchanged, but there’s clearly something different in the air. Maybe it’s the fog hanging in the air, from all the attorney’s forms…sign this and sign that…  Maybe it’s just the anticipation of change, which is almost always good, but there’s no denying that there’s a ton of uncertainty in the air. Will I have to change...

The acquisition of Ocarina by Dell has now closed, and we can now say some things about where we are headed.  Mergers and acquisitions can often be a time of confusion, as the new combined company figures out what the new plan will be. I’d like to use this first blog after the closing of the deal to clear up some of that confusion.    Some of our competitors have tried to take advantage of the period between the announcement of the deal and the closing (a time during which neither company can make forward-looking statements about joint operations) to sow uncertainty and doubt amongst some...

Data deduplication and compression are quickly becoming standards, with customers in a wide variety of markets and business sizes recognizing the value of saving money and reducing management through storage optimization. Earlier this week, InformationWeek released a research report highlighting how IT professionals were working to meet today’s exploding storage capacity demands. The report, unsurprisingly to us, showed nearly 80 percent of survey respondents said they were using compression technologies or had them under evaluation – while more than half reported similar implementations and...

For almost exactly a year, I had the privilege of being a blogger for this site, Online Storage Optimization. It was one of the most fulfilling collaborations of my professional life. When I heard the news yesterday that Dell would be acquiring Ocarina Networks, my first reaction was pride. I couldn’t help but give myself an inner “high five” for having recognized what a great company Ocarina is and would become. My second was to congratulate Dell on their smart choice. I was lucky enough to have worked with the people at Ocarina, and now a whole new group of folks will have this...

By now you may have heard the news that Ocarina will become part of Dell. Many of you who have been following Ocarina over the last few years may wonder why a company with exciting technology, huge customer success and rapidly growing revenues would sell itself at this time.  The answer is simple:  it accelerates our mission and is great for our people.  Our mission is compelling:  We will be the industry leader in primary data reduction by the year 2012.  Dell takes our current trajectory and straps a big rocket engine to it.  Their success with the EqualLogic product, huge customer footprint,...

It’s an exciting time at Ocarina, because we’re right in the middle of a wave of OEM efforts to bring data-reduction to market as a standard feature across a wide variety of storage implementations. ECOsystem for OEMs is an Ocarina offering of software libraries and APIs that allows storage OEMs and ISVs to embed data-reduction into their products. At Ocarina, we firmly believe that within a couple years, not only will we see dedupe as a new “standard feature” in all major block and file storage products, but it will be increasingly found in host applications as well. Here...

Interest in and discussion of data deduplication and primary storage compression seems to be at an all-time high right now. In the last few weeks, we have seen new entrants into the market, including Permabit, and a broad overview from Wikibon, focused on storage optimization. At Ocarina, we see industry discussions such as these as proof positive our business is on the right track. As the market innovators and pioneers in this space, we believe in end to end storage optimization, aimed to enable customers to best use their existing equipment and protect their core data. Some of the discussion...

As @storagebod (Martin Glassborow) noted today in a blog post, the issue of protecting deduplicated data is an important one for any business. Deduplication and other data reduction technologies offer the opportunity for increased data protection at a reduced cost. When you hit a threshold of 50% or greater overall data reduction, it lowers the cost of performing a a full mirror of data. For example, if you have 100 terabytes of data, mirroring today would require 200 terabytes of disk space. But if the data were reduced by 75%, you could store the same data in 25 terabytes, and full mirroring...

I came across this article on InformationWeek “Expanding Role of Data Deduplication,” and I thought I would share it. InformationWeek created a survey of 437 technology professionals and picked their brains regarding the technology of dedupe and how they might be using it within their infrastructures. The report is available free for a limited time here: http://dedupe.informationweek.com/ This report gives a solid overview of dedupe and how it relates to the overall storage market, its very detailed and I would encourage anyone interested in dedupe to download it and give it a read. Cheers! Share...

Thanks to EMC’s sponsorship, the effort started by the UC Berkeley School of information in 2003 to quantify the global trends in creation of digital data continues under IDC’s able supervision. The latest report, “The Digital Universe Decade,” is hot off the press, and breaks the banks on crazy metaphors for how much data is produced and consumed. They have the usual “moon-and-back” metaphor, but here’s my favorite: 707 trillion copies of the 2000+ page U.S. Healthcare bill stretched from Earth to Pluto and back 16-times. Nothing like a little dig at...