Archive for the ‘Jered Floyd, CTO’ Category
Data deduplication is like the big brother to lossless compression; it also depends on identifying redundant stretches of data, but does it across a much larger pool of data. While compression identifies duplicates of a few bytes within a file, deduplication locates much larger duplicate chunks, perhaps 4 KB or more, across the entire pool of storage, thus working across files, or even file systems and LUNs. This provides the opportunity for mu...
Unlike thin provisioning, compression allows for space savings on storage actually in use for data, and different variants can operate at both block and file storage levels. Compression technologies fall broadly into two categories: lossless and lossy. Lossless compression works by identifying redundancies within a short stretch of data, such as a file or block, and eliminating those duplicate parts. As the name implies, all of the original...
In my last post, I identified the three biggest challenges to implementing primary storage optimization - avoiding performance degradation, supplementing all existing functionality, and preventing data lock-in. Over the next few posts I will go into more detail on the first, performance.
Any storage optimization method is based on finding and eliminating data that doesn't need to be stored. This can take many forms, and the different forms p...
Introduction to The CTO Series
Primary storage optimization consistently ranks as one of the top interests for storage purchasers today, and it's no wonder why; this term encompasses a variety of technologies that can greatly reduce the effective cost of primary storage on magnetic disk or SSD. These technologies range in effectiveness from thin provisioning and zero elimination to compression and deduplication, but all involve making more spa...
Yesterday The Storage Alchemist at Storwize posted a complaint about Tom's discussion of compression and deduplication. We certainly aren't savaging compression technologies -- I think perhaps it's clearer to consider our points not so much as a criticism of compression, but as a list of concerns regarding bump-in-the-wire optimization appliances. We absolutely agree with Steve the Alchemist that data compression and data deduplication are two te...
In my last post, I gave the history of Albireo and I mentioned that we came to recognize seven key attributes that are absolute requirements for an integrated primary deduplication solution.
First, Albireo supports block, file and also new unified or converged storage platforms. By addressing all types of primary storage, we avoid leaving huge amounts of users' data unoptimized. Additionally, next generation storage platforms put block and f...
In his post, Tom wrote about the top three things we heard from customers about deduplication. Given the wildfire success of deduplication for backup storage, everyone now wants deduplication to optimize primary storage, but nobody is willing to sacrifice performance, functionality, or safety. This is absolutely sensible - deduplication should be a valuable, cost-saving feature and not a tradeoff against other core functionality. Nobody has be...
by Jered Floyd, CTO & Founder...
Until now, I've chosen to stay out of the little tempest in a teapot that's going on over at Chuck Hollis' blog, but it doesn't seem to be quieting down. He basically says that Data dedupe has no place on primary storage, which flies in the face of where the dedupe market is going... but it's not a bad position to take when you're company makes a lot of money off of very expensive primary storage.
Their biggest NAS competitor took the bait, an...
I spend a lot of my time talking with Permabit customers and more and more recently I have heard questions on proper use of encryption in their storage environments. Lost customer data is a huge risk to businesses, and risk often directly translates to cost, either from legal penalties or in cleanup. For example, companies which handle credit card data have been scrambling to comply with the PCI Data Security Standards, and still in the news we...
