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Ocarina Networks brought out the second major release of its storage optimization product in September. Ocarina's Extract, Correlate and Optimize (ECO) System combines compression, dedupe and more than 100 file-specific information extraction algorithms. But even though ECO makes some use of dedupe, "their optimizer doesn't work like a dedupe engine at all," says Burgener. "And they get some of the highest reduction ratios in primary storage."
According to Carter George, VP of products at Ocarina, primary storage data reduction is all about shrinking the size of files. "The file types driving storage growth are already compressed," he says. "You can't compress the same file twice with generic algorithms."
Ocarina offers what it calls content-aware compression. "It's easy to see the advantage of shrinking a file, but what about performance?" asks the firm's George. Application performance is far more critical in primary storage, since backup and archiving tend not to be performance oriented. George defines primary storage performance as "time to first byte," and says it differs by market and user. "You might be able to take 30 seconds to open Word, but in HPC, 1 [millisecond] latency might be death," he says.
According to Taneja Group's Burgener, anyone trying to figure out if it makes sense to do data red...
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uction in primary storage has to answer two questions. What am I paying in terms of dollars/GB on the primary side? And how much less primary storage will I have to buy over time? "If you're buying EMC and paying $20/GB to $25/GB, you have 200TB of data and you can get a 10:1 reduction level, then it's simple to figure out if it will be worth it," he says.
George notes that shrinking files change other things in the storage equation. "The first wave of users will be people avoiding disk purchases," he says. "The second wave will be people storing things they never thought of archiving before, like transferring seismic archives from tape to disk."
Right now, the group of vendors offering capacity optimization for primary storage is small. In addition to the three vendors mentioned, NetApp bundles optimization into its Ontap GX OS; Greenbytes offers an appliance that combines the Sun Fire x4540 server and the ZFS file system; and Riverbed has announced a box that sits in the WAN pipeline. But Burgener thinks all of the major storage vendors will offer data reduction for primary storage in some way in a few years. Yet array vendors may be caught in a bit of a vise: "If they have it in their arrays," he says, "that means you buy less storage."
--Peter Bochner, with additional reporting by Rachel Kanner
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