Page 1 of 2
Permabit Technology on Monday unveiled new technology aimed at helping other storage vendors add the ability to deduplicate primary storage data with little or no performance impact.
Permabit’s new Albireo data optimization software is an embedded technology that allows other storage vendors to add data deduplication to any storage arrays in any IT environment, said Tom Cook, president and CEO of the Cambridge, Mass.-based company.
Deduplication, also called "dedupe," removes duplicate information as data is stored. It is usually done when data is backed up, as such data changes less often than data on primary storage arrays.
However, when data is deduped for primary storage, there is typically an impact to performance, Cook said. Also, storage array vendors’ features, such as the ability to take snapshots of data for replication purposes, might not work with deduplicated data. Furthermore, deduplication could become a single point of failure in a primary storage array, he said.
“Our solution is to take dedupe out of the data path in order to solve all three of these issues,” he said.
While other companies have developed dedupe technology for primary storage, those solutions typically sit between the data source and the storage arrays, a method Cook said is fundamentally flawed.
“It impacted storage,” he said. “Customers built their workloads on high-speed storage I/O. And vendors have spent millions of dollars on R&D for performance.”
Albireo, on the other hand, lets primary storage array vendors integrate dedupe without impacting performance or feature sets, said Jerred Floyd, CTO and founder of Permabit.
Block or file data is still written directly to the storage device, and at the same time goes through the Albireo application via its API where it is hashed for comparison to up to hundreds of petabytes of storage to look for duplicates in under 17 microseconds, Floyd said.
Next: Implementing Albireo In Three Different Ways
