Online Storage Optimization

Four out of five college students agree, this is not the way to deal with data growth. How about this instead?

I’ve noticed a few blog posts recently about speed of deduplication in the modern data center. I agree that speed is an important factor, but keep in mind that not all dedupe is created equal. That is to say, fast is good, but only if you are also effective. One of the tricky things has been that the easiest data to compress is also usually the most carefully performance tuned. A great example of this is a database. This is because databases are comprised of simple alphanumeric fields and sparse tables. All of that is easy to reduce in size.

However, a company’s core transactional database is the most conservative asset in the data center. Introducing compression would save space, for sure, but you could only use very fast, simple compressors there. At the same time, customers will be hesitant to deploy a new layer of processing in their most sensitive application.

So, where is most data growth? In fact, it’s being driven by unstructured data – Office documents, rich media, email with attachments, PDFs, Flash videos, and so forth. This complex data does not lend itself to fast simple compressors. But perhaps we should back up for a moment and think about how customers have been behaving all along.

Throughout the history of storage, there have always been tradeoffs available between fast expensive storage, and slower but cheaper alternatives. This is not a bad thing. It gives users alternatives based on their priorities and budgets. Back in the old mainframe days, these choices were between very expensive mainframe memory and “offline” storage like drums, cards, and tapes. Today the technology is all much bigger, faster, cheaper and sexier. But really, the tradeoffs are the same.

Data reduction technology adds another layer of choice above and beyond the traditional hardware choices. Now in addition to choosing whether you want fast, expensive solid state disk (SSD) or slower but very cost-effective SATA, you can also choose whether you want to compress and/or deduplicate the data that is stored on those disks.

Just like physical disks, compression and dedupe come in a range of speeds and capabilities. There are simple and very fast compressors that are essentially invisible in terms of their impact on storage performance. There are more complex compressors that get better results, but which may take longer, either to compress or to decompress the data. Deduplication, done well, should always be pretty fast, and streaming dedupe rates of well of 300MB/sec are now available from many vendors (including Data Domain and Ocarina).

The emergence of tools to automatically tier data to its appropriate place help make the use of all of these technologies more feasible. That applies as much to solid state disks as it does to dedupe and compression. When data tiering can be made invisible to end-users and applications, then implementing multiple physical and logical tiers of storage becomes practical.  Good examples would include EMC’s new FAST tools, Compellent’s “Fluid Data Storage”, and HDS’s Data Migrator. When users or administrators have to move data by hand to get it to a compressed tier or a solid state disk, then the operational costs offset the capital savings.

You might want to be wary when someone’s biggest claim to fame is fast dedupe. Just as the old mainframe admin had to decide whether something was important enough to live in RAM, or could be stored on cheaper tapes instead, today’s IT shops have to decide where it is most important to try to get data reduction, and what tool will get the most bang for the buck for that kind of data. You need the whole story, and then you can decide based on your own priorities.

So much talk about dedupe these days it’s hard to keep up. The industry is waking up to the reality that dedupe is one of the best ways to reduce data, thus saving on power, cooling, space and other crippling storage costs.

Some of the more thought provoking posts of late:

DCIG - How SSDs can be leveraged to Deliver Inline Deduplication for Primary Storage
Jerome Wendt responds to a comment from someone about Hifn’s Bitwackr inline dedupe. I don’t necessarily agree with Jerome’s take on this. In general, inline solutions are extremely limited, as the original commenter pointed out. But the post provides interesting food for thought.

Storagebod - Where is OnTap 8 with a bit of a rant!
Martin Glassborow isn’t talking specifically about NetApp dedupe here, but the delay on shipping OnTap8 is of interest to anyone who is concerned about data reduction products. As he puts it, the elephant in the room is that A-SIS dedupe as it now stands has limited scalability.

Recovery Monkey - More FUD busting: Deduplication - is variable-block better than fixed-block, and should you care?
This post, by Dmitris Krekoukias, argues that major distinction some vendors make about variable and fixed block deduplication is a way of distracting customers from the real issues. The post served to defend NetApp against its detractors and competitors who say fixed block dedupe is limiting. The comments field is in some ways the most interesting part, with EMC heavy Chuck Hollis raising questions about his connections with NetApp. Also, our own Mike Davis weighed in, and the numbers he cited were so notable that further commenters questioned how this could be lossless compression. At this point, we’re used to it–the industry at large has become accustomed to less than spectacular results. More on all of this in a later post.

And here’s another interesting trend. The word “dedupe” is starting to creep into the lingo in a more general way. Among storage tweeps there is a greater tendency to throw “dedupe” into their conversations about everything from their record collections to what they eat. It reminds me a little bit of the “hepcat” slang I used to hear when hanging around jazz musicians. If something was ordinary, they’d call it “B Flat,” since that’s the most common key in jazz. For example, “Oh, I just had a B Flat lunch today of a burger and fries.”

The often Twit-witty Greg Schulz recently tweeted: “ I can have dvr record on disk NBC tape delay (thats probably on disk) then dedupe da commercials.” Good plan, Greg.

This post by Steve Gillmor at TechCrunch also uses the term–in a way that I’ve never heard anyway. In this case, he’s referring to the fact that there is duplication of content across what are now becoming overlapping social networks–FriendFeed, Twitter, and the new Google Buzz.

OK that’s all for now. Keep on deduping friends!

As regular readers of this blog know, we’re obsessed with out there tech. Anything that smacks of Star Trekkian futurism gets our blood pumping. This week, Deep Storage’s Howard Marks reports on something we’ve been watching for some time: holographic storage.

The news is sad. The company that was developing it, InPhase, is out of business. Their web site is still up, but according to the article, the company, a Bell Labs spin-off, was shuttered in early February and the Colorado Dept. of Revenue is now seizing its assets. As he points out, for now, technologies like deduplication make it hard to justify spending $10K on holographic drive.

Despite this terrible setback I for one don’t want to believe this idea will die out entirely. It promises a new generation in storage at a time when data growth is spiraling out of control, threatening to overtake data centers worldwide. And who says we can’t add compression and deduplication on top of that? Howard and I both predict that sooner or later someone else will follow the holographic storage clarion call. As he so succinctly put it: “It’s just so cool.”

Image from: Geek Stuff

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 in the area of performance. This is too bad, because compression has advanced in exciting ways. LZ and its cousins work well on the kinds of data that were around 10 or 20 years ago - plain text, plain numbers, or combinations of those things. They do not work so well on a lot of modern data - images, video, Office documents, PDF’s, already-compressed files like Zip, encrypted data, etc. What’s important to understand is that all the most notable advances in compression that apply to storage have taken place not in generic compression algorithms, but in file type specific ones. File type specific compressors can, in fact, deal with all those modern data types.

Compression is all about pattern recognition and prediction. You look for patterns in a file and if you can find those patterns you try to predict their occurrence. If you can predict a pattern, you can compress it. So understanding the kinds of patterns that might show up in a file - video, a Zip file, music, and a PowerPoint are all very different - is the key to building a compressor for that file type.

What’s especially relevant is that the most important thing in compression of data today is recompression. Almost all of the file formats that are driving data growth, and taking up the most space on backups, are already compressed. Think of a file type that’s eating up space, and it’s likely to an already-compressed format: JPEG, video, Office, PDF, mp3, medical images … all compressed already.

A generic compressor won’t get any results at all on an already-compressed file. That’s because the first compression obscures the patterns that a compressor would look for. That’s why if you try to compress, say, a Zip file, if anything you’re likely to make it bigger. Recompression means first decompressing the file and then recompressing it with a better compressor. To do that, you have to recognize what kind of file it is, what kind of compression has been applied, and how to decompress it. By first decompressing it, you are able to see and process the patterns that make better prediction and compression possible.

Almost every market has a set of well-defined file types that make up the bulk of its unstructured data. In medical imaging, it’s Dicom (which in turns contains JPEG 2000, JPEG LS, and TIFF). In seismic, it’s seg-y. In satellite imaging, it’s NTF, MrSID, GeoTIFF and a few others. In the average business, it’s Office, PDF, photos and video.

In specific industries, you see very advanced compression implemented in the application layer, not in storage. Video is a great example - the whole concept of the video codec is all about compression. Whole companies exists specifically to do better video compression (On2 is a good example), but this compression is done primarily for transmission, and implemented as part of the video application workflow, not as a storage technology.

In a world that had all plain ASCII text data, generic compressors would be great. But that’s not the world we live in. For compression to have any meaningful impact on today’s data sets, you have to have file type aware recompression.

It’s a shame that most storage products today have not implemented the most exciting advances in modern compression mathematics. My company Ocarina is quite frankly one of the few exceptions. The compressors found in tape drives or in dedupe appliances represent the best of the evolution of the generic compressor. The thing to look for going forward is the emergence in storage products of the next generation set of file type aware compressors, which is where all the action has been over the last ten years.

Tis the week for the “out of office” email messages. But the storage blogo-tweet-osphere waits for no man. Here are a few posts that caught my eye this week.

Bas Raayman sees CPU power hitting the wall: The RAM per CPU wall

Rick Vanover says 2010 could be the year for 10GigE - Will 2010 see 10 Gigabit Ethernet go mainstream?

It being the end of a year–and a decade–predictions abounded. We’re pleased to note that when it came to summarizing the top storage stories of 2009, deduplication for primary storage, the specialty of this blog’s parent Ocarina, made the big lists:

Infostor: The top 5 storage technologies of 2009 (and 2010?)

“Storage optimization (or data reduction) technologies such as data deduplication and compression can significantly reduce capacity requirements and costs … Consider data reduction for primary storage.”

SearchStorage - Beth Pariseau: Top 10 enterprise data storage news stories of 2009

“10. Data deduplication branches out. As deduplication settled into a comfortable role in backup, data-reduction technology started working its way into other parts of the data storage infrastructure, including primary as well as nearline and archived data … Ocarina and Isilon Clustered NAS help visual effects studio archive images, cut costs.”

For sheer inventiveness, blogger Stephen Foskett wins the prize with his 2009 predictions post, in which he turns the clock back and takes advantage of 20-20 hindsight: My 2009 IT Industry Predictions.

Meanwhile, social media and tech watcher Louis Gray takes himself to task and looks at all of his 2009 predictions to see how well he fared: My 2009 Tech Predictions: Mixed, But Nailed Real-Time.

OK that’s all for now. Here’s wishing all of you a happy, healthy, green and techy new decade.

It’s been a tough year — a worldwide recession, a sluggish housing market, rising unemployment … and on top of all that, the tarnished image of one of sports’ most squeaky clean players. Well, actually, there have been some bright spots. As DCIG blogger and storage analyst Jerome Wendt notes while looking back at the past year, “Deduplication is the Big Success Story of 2009.”

Wendt writes: “Deduplication is arguably one of the most notable trends of 2009 as it has been widely adopted by users after bursting onto the scene just a few years ago and has grown to be included in both software and hardware products.”

Wendt focuses on dedupe for backups, where there has been much publicized activity over the past year. The big storage story of 2009 was of course the battle between storage titans EMC and NetApp over backup dedupe specialist Data Domain. He cites an industry survey from SearchDataBackup that indicates that 41% of enterprises either are or are seriously considering dedupe to control data growth and costs. He also notes that the despite the predicted demise of Quantum, that dedupe company remains strong.

Dedupe for backups is one part of the cost reduction puzzle. Another part is to reduce data at the source, in primary storage. This is of course the specialty of this blog’s parent Ocarina, which implements a unique combination of content-aware dedupe and compression to achieve startling results. It focuses on the very types of unstructured data that are driving storage growth today–emails, images, documents, and so on. The company has been partnering with almost every leading storage provider, including HP, EMC, HDS, BlueArc, and Isilon. Another  leader in this space is NetApp, which has a strong dedupe for primary offering that has also garnered a great deal of attention.

Here’s the thing, the economy might be slowing down, but data growth continues apace. This is one reason that the storage industry has been thriving this year. But rather than standing still, what is spells is a concerted effort to keep that data under control. As Wendt notes, another of the year’s big trends is cloud storage, which offers companies more flexibility for storing some percentage of their data. I would also add that virtualization has taken a huge leap forward, not only in terms of the technology itself, but also in terms of adoption over the past year. Yet another way to attack the problem.

So if 2009 was all about dedupe for backups, I’m going to guess that 2010 will be very much about data reduction at all points on the data life cycle. What do you predict?

Image: Gizmodo

Dell’s Inside Enterprise IT blog has identified “10 Trends to watch carefully.” The post is from the Gartner Data Center conference that wraps up today in Las Vegas. One of the biggest and most important trends? The coming “data deluge” that will pile onto company IT departments like a load of bricks.

Over the next five years, enterprise data growth will increase by a whopping 650%. And here’s the kicker: 80% of this data will be unstructured. That means emails, documents, photos, and all the other files not in databases. The answer, according to the experts: attack with virtualization and deduplication.

Might we also suggest that a combination of content-aware deduplication and compression would yield even better results? The modern enterprise is dealing with all manner of data. These are the types of files that often stymie traditional block-level dedupe. What can it do with images, video, audio–not to mention compound documents such as PDFs and Zip files? Often, very little.

As we showed at a recent event, Tech Field Day, Ocarina reduced the toughest data sets by an average of about 30%. (Final results will be out soon.) In fact, the only ones that stymied the system were those that were deliberately encrypted using unusual or outdated methods–not a typical use case to say the least!

What this means is that over the next few years, the flow of data will not only increase, but it will become far more complex to handle. If you think about the speed of innovation, there’s a strong chance that there will be files we aren’t even aware exist yet. What do you think? How is your enterprise handling unstructured data now? What will it do differently in the next five years? Comments encouraged!

Two items jumped out at me this week. First, Francine Hardaway’s post on being an early adopter, “Do You Write in the Cloud?” and second, this New York Times story about Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter.

Hardaway, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Stealthmode Partners talks about how she and other bloggers compose their text. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, along with Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis and Gina Trapani all write in the cloud. Hardaway either writes directly in Gmail or sends one to Posterous from her Gmail account. If there is a bad wifi connection, she uses Evernote and synchs it to the cloud before moving it to Wordpress. (Am I the only one who composes directly into Wordpress?)

The main point here is that Hardaway illustrates how she was ahead of the curve each time, and was able to show successfully that you could still think and write using the latest “newfangled” tech–whether a manual typewriter or a word processor. Hardaway recollects:

“…50 years ago, I started composing on a manual typewriter when most other people composed in longhand and transcribed.  Many famous authors wrote in longhand their entire lives. People thought I was crazy for going straight to the typewriter. But I’ve gone seamlessly from the typewriter to the word processor (we could dictate into a  Digital Equipment Corporation word processor in the Maricopa Community Colleges in the 70s, when I was a professor.)  They thought I was crazy for dictating instead of typing when I did that.”

All of this was sloshing around in my brain when I came upon the aforementioned story of Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter. McCarthy is the author of a number of bestselling books, including the recent “The Road“–now a movie, and “All the Pretty Horses,” among many other award winners. How did he compose his text? On a portable Olivetti typewriter he bought at a pawn shop in 1963. He moved on from long hand, but after that he just stopped.

We’re talking about two ends of the spectrum. The early early adopter. And the … well, I don’t think we can call Cormac McCarthy a late adopter now can we? Of course, most people are somewhere in the middle. Enterprises are managing an influx of data that is based on what would be considered the median behavior–a need to store all manner of files, from Office documents to family snapshots to the latest Lady Gaga download. Oftentimes, the response is to try to ignore the problem. More and more files are shoved onto expensive primary storage. Suddenly, the problem reaches massive proportions and emergency measures are taken, rather than a well thought out tiering/deduplication plan or a move to a reliable cloud storage platform. But I digress. The main question here is, what kind of adopter are you? And what are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach?

Lots of special treats awaited the participants of Gestalt IT Tech Field Day. While visiting the offices on November 13 Goutham Rao, CTO of Ocarina Networks stood at the whiteboard and offered a deep dive into the technology behind the company. It was a big hit with the participants. For those who would like a peek under the covers to discover what content-aware dedupe and compression entail, this video is quite a find. Thanks to Simon Seagrave at TechHead for allowing us to repost this video, which he took during the event. We hope you enjoy it.

Ocarina Networks - De-duplication & Compression Deep Dive from Simon Seagrave on Vimeo.

For the entire library of Tech Field Day videos, go to this Vimeo page.