Earlier this week on Twitter, we experienced what it’s like to have real time, public discussions with bloggers, analysts, and journalists about our product. It was a great example of why Twitter is such a powerful tool for talking about technology–not to mention one that can be a little hair-raising.
It started when Martin Glassborow, known to us all as Storagebod, tweeted about his results with the Ocarina Networks Simulator, OcaSim. We were of course aware that Martin was running these tests, but somehow none of us realized he would be releasing his results as they came in — all on this highly public forum. In short, this was one of those real rubber hitting the road type moments for a young company. Either Ocarina’s compression solution was going to knock his socks off, or it wasn’t.
As it turned out, his results were impressive. While he was less than amazed by our results on video files (which we make no claims to compress), he saw a 22% reduction on a fileset that was completely made up of JPEGs. As many people know, JPEGs are notoriously difficult to compress, as they are already compressed files. He noted this in his tweet.
Then things got a little crazy.
SearchStorage reporter Beth Pariseau retweeted his original tweet, while Stephen Foskett reported that he had seen 20% savings using the OcaSim on a set of family photos. At this point, a few analysts jumped in. Steve Duplessie from ESG said he’d be interested in running the OcaSim, while Greg Schulz of Storage IO suggested a challenge. He wrote:
“@pariseauTT @storagebod how about run against some PPT/PDF briefing/sales slide decks c which 1s compresses most, blind results of course 
”
This raised an issue that we are getting more and more familiar with. One of the biggest challenges we face at Ocarina is getting past the disbelief factor. For so long, there have been rules about what can be compressed or deduped.
Customers will often say, “but everyone knows you can’t compress an already compressed file. It’s impossible.” Or, “I’ve tried dedupe for primary storage, and it hardly makes any difference.”
Much of what we are doing is helping people open their minds to the fact that the impossible is now not only possible, but fully operational and installed with major storage vendors such as BlueArc–which also tweeted during this exchange–and Isilon.
Oh, and Steve and Greg, we’re more than happy to send you the OcaSim. This is getting to be fun!
