The Future of Deduplication…Round Two

I can’t believe that a year has gone by since I blogged about Dell’s point of view on deduplication, but I am not surprised in the least that the vision we laid out then is moving closer to fruition. It is with a great sense of excitement that I can (finally) talk about our intent to acquire Ocarina Networks and the benefits  that we’ll be able to bring to customers of all sizes with this truly innovative deduplication and compression technology.

If you haven’t been following them, Ocarina Networks has changed the paradigm in how deduplication works – instead of just dividing up files into the same small chunks and looking for duplicates, they recognized that different types of files have different structures, and that these differences can be patterned so that each type of file gets a customized approach to deduping and compressing it. With over 100 algorithms that support 900 different file types the space savings can be tremendous, translating into the opportunity for real savings when it comes to storing the ballooning amount of data that organizations of all sizes are facing. And the savings don’t stop there, management, network, power, bandwidth and cooling costs also have the potential to be reduced. Finally, there are the implications to optimizing your storage by utilizing one technology to manage data throughout its lifecycle and across different storage platforms. A lot of the choices in the market today work on their own or only do dedupe in one way – this is different and exhilarating when you consider the possibilities for intelligently managing you data.

I encourage you to check out Ocarina Networks to learn more about their technology, and to stay tuned as we talk more about how we’ll be continuing to develop and integrate it into our storage portfolio portfolio and complement our EqualLogic ecosystem. I’ll let Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell’s storage business, close out this post with his thoughts on our announcement, plans and what it all means to you. I don’t think it will be another year before there’s more to talk about on this subject…

Note: This acquisition remains subject to customary closing conditions.

About the Author: Greg White