Permabit Does Primary Storage Deduplication

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Permabit has unveiled primary storage deduplication technology, and the company claims that there are already a number of OEMs signed up to deliver storage solutions based on the software by the end of the year.

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) owes its recent market share gains in part to its early lead in primary data deduplication, while EMC (NYSE: EMC), Exar, GreenBytes, Nexenta, Ocarina, Storwize and the Sun-Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) ZFS file system also offer the technology, which is of particular value in server virtualization environments.

Now Permabit claims to have advanced the technology further with its Albireo High Performance Data Optimization Software.

“Albireo-enabled OEMs will vastly exceed the capabilities of NetApp’s dedupe in their primary data storage products,” claims Permabit CEO Tom Cook. “Albireo deduplication performance is orders of magnitude faster than NetApp’s and it scales to petabytes vs. NetApp’s 16TBs — that results in massive savings advantage for OEMs. NetApp set the market vision for primary dedupe, but with the launch of Albireo, many OEMs will leapfrog NetApp’s dedupe capabilities by year-end 2010.”

Analysts say they like what they’ve seen so far.

“Traditional data deduplication approaches have suffered from high CPU overheads, slow performance and limited scalability, making them unusable for primary storage,” stated Wikibon analyst David Vellante. “The appeal of Permabit’s Albireo is that it is fast, requires low overhead and scales out, meaning organizations can realize substantial business value for production systems. The other really important attribute of Albireo is its integration approach, which is appealing to storage array OEMs because it makes the technology seamless and transparent to IT staff and applications.”

Permabit says its high-performance index engine offers a scale-out grid storage architecture that can support petabytes of information, a two layer memory/disk index structure that delivers duplicate identification in microseconds, and a 140 megabytes per second per CPU core.

Permabit says variable-chunk segmentation with content-aware scanning provides typical dedupe rates of 50 percent to 70 percent, while VMware images can be reduced by 90 percent or more. The company says data integrity is maintained, as data written to disk is not altered and integration occurs completely out of the data read path.

To make implementation easy for OEMs, the company offers a software development kit that can be integrated in as few as six API calls. Albireo offers block, file and unified storage support and inline, parallel or post-process integration.

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Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

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