Online Storage Optimization

This past year, we at Online Storage Op gathered all manner of images to illustrate our posts. So as a way of looking back at 2009, here are some of the ones we liked the best–and the stories that went with them:

Holodeck fun:

In February, Robin Harris at StorageMojo wrote about a potential breakthrough in storage technology that could change the landscape forever: quantum holographic storage. Online Storage Op was on the scene. It also gave us a chance to upload a pic of a Geordi La Forge doll. Admit it… this is one cool toy.

Squeezing into your Genes:

This blog’s parent Ocarina had quite a year–inking partnerships with a number of major storage vendors and becoming a noted player in the hot dedupe space. It was also the year that genomics labs woke up to the need for better data reduction to deal with the coming onslaught of genetic data. In short, compression can be a matter of life and death. We reported on it here, and our readers got to relive their 10th grade biology class by looking at images like the one above.

Racing for Dedupe

As many pundits are now opining, dedupe really was one of the biggest stories of 2009, not least because of the high profile battle for Data Domain between storage titans EMC and NetApp. In the end, EMC nabbed the dedupe specialist for an eye-popping $2.1 billion.

Booth Babe Mania:

We know our readers are sophisticated types who come here only to absorb information and opinion, and to better themselves for the benefit of all humankind. But for some odd reason we saw a major traffic spike the day we ran our post on the great Booth Babe Controversy. When we asked, everyone quickly told us, “I read the articles.” Mmmhmm!

VMworld a hit

And speaking of images that make storage folks drool, one of the most mesmerizing sights of the year was at VMworld, held in August in San Francisco. Participants descended the escalator to be greeted by gleaming rack of servers and storage–which we later learned was the result of a plan drawn on a napkin by the VMware GETO team. In any case, this year’s VMworld was a major event–and as we rightly noted, it foretold more economic activity in storage and virtualization.

Industry puts aside differences to try to save a life

This is one of the saddest stories of 2009, and one that demonstrates an activist and caring streak in the storage community. When word got out in May 2009 that EMC employee Nick Glasgow was in need of a bone marrow transplant, folks within the storage industry put aside competitive differences and pulled together to find him a match. Sadly, Nick passed away in October. The degree to which he inspired others will not be forgotten.

And, finally…

We never did have an egg and spoon race, but…
In November, Ocarina participated in the first ever Gestalt IT Tech Field Day, which brought independent bloggers from around the world to Silicon Valley for two days of tech deep dives. Our “bring out your data” challenge started tongues wagging well before the event began. Participants brought us their toughest data sets, and aside from those who used archaic encryption software to stump our algorithms, the results were impressive–an average of about 30% reduction on these tougher-than-tough data sets. Plus, the whole event was just a ton of fun. And it didn’t even require that we slog around the mud clapping coconut shells together.

A story in Wired caught my eye today–at Cornell University, a computer has discovered a law of physics on its own. Without any prior knowledge of physics or geometry, the machine was able to extrapolate the laws of motion by analyzing a pendulum’s swings.

Contributor Brandon Keim writes: “The research is being heralded as a potential breakthrough for science in the Petabyte Age, where computers try to find regularities in massive datasets that are too big and complex for the human mind.” (Italics mine.)

As explored in more detail in Wired last summer, the rise of the so-called “petabyte age” has meant that science can move forward at a far more rapid pace than in the past. This is true for many areas, including medicine (genomics), physics, and geology, to name a few. Of course, the flip side of this, which is often ignored or forgotten, is the storage demands this kind of intensive data usage can create.

As I discussed in another post, our ability to successfully navigate the petabyte era could mean the difference between life and death, particularly if we’re talking about medical research. If a computer can figure out the laws of physics, who knows what progress is possible? We’d better have the infrastructure to see it through.

Image from Wired article.

It’s only Tuesday, and already it’s been a jam packed week. Ocarina’s partnership with Isilon Systems was a big news item for this blog. For those who don’t follow the blow by blows, Isilon announced a new integrated nearline archive solution combining Isilon’s new 36NL and Ocarina’s ECOsystem storage optimization software.

Chris Mellor’s piece in The Register gives a good bit of detail on the new offerings from Isilon, along with background on the competition between Isilon and NetApp around Isilon’s specialty–highly scalable NAS storage clusters.

The inimitable Beth Pariseau also covered the news today on SearchStorage providing significant context and some insights from analysts Noemi Greyzdorf and Robin Harris.

And finally, Byte & Switch’s Paul Travis covered the Isilon-Ocarina news in this article.

Also this week, Ocarina’s partnership with Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Computing yielded a really nice piece that will be out in this month’s edition of Drug Discovery News. Storage optimization has been an absolute boon to the biomedical field, which is drowning in a sea of image rich data.

In other news, lots of discussion around what B&S has called the “storage smackdown.” (We were pleased to be mentioned by the mysterious NoHype in that comment field.) There’s an element of what Ruptured Monkey is calling “bare knuckled brawling” among vendors that’s getting… well, you could say out of hand, or you could just call it entertainment, depending on how you see the world.

Meanwhile, it’s nice to have folks like Storage Nerve taking stock of the entire storage blogosphere and giving us all a bit of link love. Let the games continue…

Today, Ocarina Networks announced that it closed a $20 million Series B funding round. This is obviously great news for the company, as well as a strong validation of what the Ocarina set out to accomplish. The funding round was led by Jafco Ventures, with significant participation from Series A investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners.

The Mercury News did a very nice piece on the funding today. As reporter Scott Harris put it:

“The incredible shrinking economy may not be creating much in the way of jobs, profits or consumer confidence, but it’s doing a bang-up job of producing data. The Information Age is nothing if not a volcanic profusion of digitized documents, photographs and video — not to mention the data emerging from the genomics industry and other deeply scientific pursuits.”

Ocarina has a solution for these rising storage demands. As VentureBeat wrote this morning, 90 percent compression is an attractive proposition these days, not only to manage costs, but also, as the article states, “for companies concerned with greening their business models, cutting down on storage requirements can help shrink energy footprints.”

This new round of venture funding, raised at a time when the economy is in dire straits, demonstrates the immense need that Ocarina fulfills in the marketplace.

In the new economic climate a mantra is going around venture capital circles–”save customers money.” Most of us in the valley are already aware of this trend and have been for some time. It certainly sums up Ocarina’s mission in a neat little nutshell. Today, the New York Times Bits blog reported on a talk from three major VC investors, all of whom say this is the way to their hearts.

Promod Haque, a managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, is quoted as saying, “‘The core driver is efficiency and cost savings.’”

The article cites three investment areas where they are backing horses that fit this mold–IT, health care technology and green tech. This is no coincidence, as all three of these areas have potential for immense efficiency gains. Interestingly, Ocarina Networks straddles all three of these areas, with storage optimization technologies that increase efficiency in data centers, reduce their storage load, and save on costs. Most recently, for example, the company has developed a specific solution for life sciences, working in partnership with Cornell University and DataDirect Networks to manage the upwardly spiraling load of genomics and other medical data that is crucial to its research and services divisions.

The trend towards cost-cutting is poised to pick up steam, and to us this is a good thing. Some of the greatest innovations come out of real needs, and with storage and other IT costs ballooning, finding ways to significantly bring these down is crucial.

Nice piece today in Bioinform about our compression solution for genomics data. Carter George of Ocarina spoke to the author of the piece, Vivien Marx, last week, as did Dave Lifka at Cornell. The article details the work we’re doing with Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) in partnership with DataDirect to increase their capacity by up to 90 percent.

Gene sequencing has opened up new vistas in medical research that could lead to a completely new era of “personalized medicine,” with targeted treatments and few or no side effects from medications. Momentum for this type of medicine is building–the FDA announced today that it has created a new position dedicated to “coordinating and upgrading” the agency’s involvement in genomics and other elements of personalized medicine.

The potential is huge, and it’s truly horrifying to think that all this progress could be slowed or stopped due to the cost of storage. Thus, freeing up disk space truly can be a matter of life and death.

We’ve addressed this by developing compression solutions specifically designed for sequencing technologies such as those from Illumina and Affymetrix. The Bioinform article offers significant detail on the types of files we compress as well as the checksums Ocarina performs on each before any shadow files are deleted. We hope you’ll take a look at the piece.