As anyone who has tried to lose weight knows, it’s no easy feat to get and stay slim. No doubt you’ve seen the barrage of ads that promise you a quick fix (hydroxycut anyone?), but most of us know these fad programs don’t work in the long run. Rather, the key is a combination of eating less (and making healthy choices about what we do eat) and exercising.
Well, something similar could be said of your storage budget. If you are like the vast majority of enterprises today, you’re dealing with what can be described as data obesity. Whatever type of array you’re running, it’s likely gaining files every day. Many are no doubt those pesky rich media and compound Office documents like PowerPoint and PDF that add more and more weight–stressing your resources to the breaking point.
To keep up, you have to cut the flab out of your storage. This, too, calls for a two-pronged approach. First, there’s the “diet” element. This means doing a better job of tiering, and keeping files only as long as you really need them. Of course, there are many examples of near-active and inactive data that nevertheless must be kept online for compliance and other similar reasons. But the plain fact is that many of the files that are clogging up storage systems at small- to medium-sized enterprises have nothing to do with their core business at all. They can be everything from family photos to funny videos to old documents that no one will EVER look at again.
The second part is the “exercise” element of keeping your storage slim and trim. That is, run a storage efficiency tool –may we suggest Ocarina as one example — that will efficiently trim the fat out of your data. That kind of combination means that you really can tighten your belt on your storage budget. With our solution, for example, a typical enterprise will reclaim half again as much storage space. We can shrink down your files to a slim and trim size — even on the types that stymie most conventional dedupe solutions.
To find out more about how Ocarina stacks up against the leading dedupe solution, give this recent article by Chris Mellor in the UK Register a read: Ocarina Dedupes Better than NetApp.
