Big announcement today from Ocarina about our newest product release, Ocarina 3.0. At this point, there’s no question that dedupe for primary is one of the hottest topics in storage. Our recent partnership announcements with major vendors were well covered in the storage press, and if anything the excitement around this technology is growing.
Update as of 5/8/09: Chris Mellor has a piece out in The Register (UK) on the new Ocarina release. Even better, he references our earlier post on dedupe.
In today’s release, Ocarina details the changes that this release makes to its groundbreaking dedupe and compression solution for online data. Here’s one key part to take note of:
“New to Ocarina ECOsystem 3.0 is object deduplication, the ability to manage optimized data end-to-end and customize the workflow by deciding how and where in the life-cycle to dedupe and compress data. Object deduplication, unique to the Ocarina ECOsystem, can identify duplicate information within and across file types, tiers and vendors, resulting in much higher reduction rates.”
As Carter explained in an earlier post, this is one tangible way that Ocarina gets better results than the more standard, block-level dedupe everyone else is doing. What this means is that it can intelligently discern natural objects in a file, deduping them as it finds them. If you stop and think about it, this is clearly a far more surgical approach, and the results bear this out. A head-to-head comparison should be published soon, and I’ll be sure to let you know about it when it does.
In any case, this all bodes well for the storage industry. As we approach the petabyte era, the survival of the world’s data centers depends on finding new and innovative ways to reduce the rising tide of data.
