Ocarina in the News and Blogosphere

Beth Pariseau writes in SearchStorage how e-discovery service provider LDiscovery LLC uses BlueArc storage and Ocarina Networks data reduction technology to dramatically reduce storage cost and improve services to end-users.

"Our oldest BlueArc file system -- just one 100 terabyte file system, [which was] pretty much packed solid when we first deployed Ocarina -- has seen a 70 TB savings," Wolfinger said. "That probably translates into about a $200,000 investment or more in additional spindles had we needed to add 70 TB of available space to another file system to make space available for ongoing work."

An article in reviews purchase considerations for customers considering the deployment of deduplication solutions for NAS and other forms of primary storage. The article addresses architectural considerations such as in-band vs post process, and the requirement for more aggressive algorithms vis-a-vis what is found in common dedupe products used for backup applications.

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An article in Storage Switzerland reviews the use of Ocarina optimization in Brigham Exploration , an innovative oil and gas exploration and production firm. Brigham leverages the latest in 3D imaging technology including Schlumberger GeoFrame to develop new petroleum finds, but 3D visualization of data-sets brings new challenges in terms of server and storage scale requirements. Ocarina was able to shrink their data by over 90% for certain file types, and 30-40% overall savings. This was a substantial achievement given most of the data was compressed data in specialized formats including SEG-Y, for which Ocarina developed a specialized compression algorithm.

According to IT Manager David Kirchoff, "The ability to optimize the data and leave it in place appealed to us. Many of the geo-seismic applications that we use have very specific and somewhat elaborate directory structures, and moving that data around has proven to be problematic for the software. The last thing I can afford is to have one of our projects come to a halt because a file can't be found. The exploration process is too time consuming and too competitive to afford that risk"

"Overall we are very satisfied with Ocarina Optimizer thus far. We will likely free up 20 to 30TBs worth of data, which will be the fastest return on investment I've ever seen in IT, but most important is the time this saves us by not having to constantly move data back and forth between different system. Everything can now reside, cost effectively, in one place." concluded Kirchhoff.
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Computer Technology Review published an article authored by Ocarina's VP of Products Carter George that emphasizes the anticipated progression of data reduction technologies from point solutions focused on data backup to end-to-end solutions that contribute value across the entire data lifecycle.

"what we’re seeing is the emergence and transformation of deduplication (and some other related data reduction techniques) as a new storage fundamental," says Carter, "Rather than being a standalone solution that customers pay a premium for, dedupe is becoming something that will be a standard feature on most mid-market and enterprise storage products by 2012."

"A good deal of the I/O workload in a given shop is driven by a handful of common storage management workflows – backup, replication, migration, and tiering – and all of those workflows would be more efficient if they could be done using data that had been compressed and deduplicated."

An article in SearchSMBStorage reviews data reduction as one of the key components of NAS management. The article includes an interview with Brian Wolfinger of LDiscovery , an E-discovery firm with 250TB of BlueArc NAS storage:

..."In the DAS world, we had a very straightforward methodology for storage management: If you ran out, you bought more. With the cost of NAS, there is definitely a point of diminishing returns so that strategy doesn't work. We couldn't just continue to add storage when we exceeded our storage pools," said Brian Wolfinger, vice president of electronic discovery and digital forensics at LDiscovery

He added that the world of e-discovery, even at his almost 100-employee company, rivals that of video editing in terms of data storage needs. "We create an archive of evidence -- documents, images, and databases -- for massive criminal and civil litigation." LDiscovery uses the NAS devices as a holding pen for client data while it is processed and formatted for e-discovery.

To ensure these sensitive tasks would not be compromised by degrading performance on overloaded NAS devices, Wolfinger deployed software from Ocarina Networks. The Ocarina EcoSystem integrates with the firm's BlueArc Corp. Mercury devices and includes an appliance, data management software and data compression tools...

"In the first two weeks it was deployed, we saved 8 TB of space and in the first month we saw a 72% rate of compression. We were only looking for 20% to 40% to regain the cost of the tool, so going that far over was unbelievable," he said. He credits the deduplication [data reduction] for a lot of that reduction. "In our industry, there is a high rate of duplication, so to manage that and eliminate it saves a lot of heartache," he said...