VMware Performance and Deduplication

Published by Louis Imershein | Filed under Louis Imershein, Director PM, Uncategorized

Last week I talked about deduplication and its advantages for VMware environments.  One question I heard from a reader, “if the savings are as great as you’re saying, why isn’t deduplication in VMware environments everywhere today?”  And on the surface, I think the answer is simple, the key challenge to VMware deduplication is performance.   IT organizations have come to understand how deduplication saves on storage costs, but they are generally concerned about any resulting performance impact.   The good news is that Albireo is specifically designed for highly efficient primary storage deduplication.   Read the rest of this entry »

Cherry Garcia and Deduplication

Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM

Deduplication (data optimization) is a hot topic these days because its promise to reduce storage consumption and its associated costs is compelling to today’s high data growth businesses. Impact on IT budgets, CAPEX and OPEX as a result of applying dedupe in primary and/or secondary tiers of storage can be substantial!

Lost in all the hype is the fact that there are as many flavors of dedupe as Ben & Jerry’s has flavors of ice cream! Read the rest of this entry »

Interoperability is OK, but Optimization is Optimal

Published by Tom Cook | Filed under Tom Cook, CEO

We are at VMworld this week and it should be interesting as VMware continues to press their aggressive growth agenda. We are here because our OEM data optimization solution, Albireo dedupes VMDK and VDI environments like nobodies’ business (up to 100X) and this is a great week to talk with OEM customers and vendors who are serious about storage efficiency.

We have two announcements at the show. The first is around Permabit extending our VMware Alliance to the Select level.  That means we are partnering more closely with VMware and their ecosystem. We are the only OEM data optimization partner of VMware.  Our second announcement is of our new OEM relationship with BlueArc. Interestingly, the VMworld theme of every storage vendor, save two, is about ‘interoperability’. While good, interoperability or integrating with the VM management console isn’t that exciting to me. The real value is in optimizing the storage of VM. That brings me back to my main point - only two storage companies are talking about optimizing VMware environments - NetApp and our new OEM partner BlueArc and that sets them apart from the rest of the storage crowd.

Read the rest of this entry »

Latency, Latency, Latency…

Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM

A few comments have been made regarding latency, most recently in a Search Storage piece from Dave Raffo, when comparisons were being made between compression and deduplication applied to primary storage. The concern expressed is that deduplication may be inflicting latency in the write or read process for primary storage. That may have been an astute observation a year ago but today its simply just not a valid observation! Read the rest of this entry »

The Case for VMware and Deduplication

Published by Louis Imershein | Filed under Louis Imershein, Director PM

We’ve all watched over the past several years as VMware virtualization has revolutionized IT, instigating the most significant consolidation of computer hardware assets in history. What you may not know is that VMware deployments offer one of the most attractive use cases for data optimization in a primary storage environment. A great example of this comes from our friends over at NetApp®. Shortly after releasing their deduplication feature, NetApp’s customers began to report tremendous success with deduplicating VMware virtual machines (VMs). Their users were seeing storage savings of 50% or more with little performance impact and some were seeing savings approaching 90%. Let’s take a look at how primary storage deduplication works in VMware environments with Permabit’s Albireo™ OEM High Performance Data Optimization software. Read the rest of this entry »

Data Safety - It’s the ONLY issue

Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM

In my last two posts, I have emphasized key Albireo features. NOT in the Read Path and Flexibility in deployment. These really do set Albireo apart from the early days of deduplication and other similar approaches being discussed today. However, I believe the most important issue with data storage is and always will be - how safe is my data? After all your business depends on your data and you need to be confident data is available and can be accessed even if some of your storage technology fails or becomes obsolete.  Read the rest of this entry »

Albireo Flexibility

Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM

As we talked to potential OEMs for our Albireo Data Optimization offering several key requirements kept emerging. One was ‘don’t impact performance’, followed by ‘don’t impact my existing feature set (because I’ve invested $$$ in it)’ and finally ‘please make your deduplication easy and flexible to deploy.’ As we developed Albireo, we kept these in mind and have succeeded in addressing each!   Read the rest of this entry »

NOT in the Read Path or ‘Performance Matters’

Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM

In Mike’s Blog a couple of weeks ago, ‘Get Out of My Way’, he accurately portrayed our Albireo offering as ‘not in the read path’.  In primary storage implementations, it’s critical to ensure the most efficient access to data. ‘Out of the read path’ has been one of our key messages that bear repeating because it’s so significant. Albireo is embedded in the storage vendors stack so we have been extremely careful not to impact their operations. As such, we have developed Albireo around three key principles: performance, simplicity of deployment and data safety. Read the rest of this entry »

Why ‘The Summer of 2010′ changed the storage landscape…

Published by Wayne Salpietro | Filed under Wayne Salpietro, Director PMM

Usually summer is a time for reflection and sun tanning at the beach. From a business perspective things tend to slow down a bit while each of us takes a second breath and spend some quality time with our families away from the business side of our lives. There is usually not much industry news few ‘big deals’ occur that were not already in play. Technology shift announcements are typically saved for September when everyone is back, so there is as much traction as possible. Not the case for the summer of 2010! Read the rest of this entry »

Summer Heat, Baseball and Data Optimization

Published by Tom Cook | Filed under Tom Cook, CEO

Whew…things are certainly heating up. Last week, Dell agreed to acquire Ocarina Networks for an undisclosed amount. As I mentioned to Chris Mellor at the Register, this was a good indication of how primary storage is, “moving from ‘bump in the wire’ compression/deduplication solutions to integrated capacity optimization”.

And, yesterday, IBM announced the acquisition of Storwize. This is another great proof point for primary data optimization going main stream. Here’s how we view these developments: Read the rest of this entry »