There was an interesting announcement today regarding Permabit who is now providing primary storage optimization through OEMs and having their solution embedded into the storage system. This further drives home the point of where capacity optimization should live. I do have a couple of questions however:
1) What is the performance like? I see phrases such as “High Performance Data Optimization Software” but don’t see any performance metrics – such as ‘no performance degradation’ for customers utilizing the solution. Or testing metrics from their ‘partners’ (as it probably isn’t in production yet) – which brings up another question:
2) Why were none of the ‘design win’ partners quoted in this announcement?
3) Rehydration – Mr. Floyd states:
Permabit’s Floyd claims Albireo can maintain data integrity because data written to disk isn’t altered, and the reduction takes place out of the data path. When parallel processing is used, deduped data doesn’t have to be rehydrated when it’s accessed.
The question is – if it doesn’t need to be rehydrated, then how does the application read it? I can only assume that Mr. Floyd means the data doesn’t have to be rehydrated on disk, which is fine, the question become: a) how does the application know what the data is? (Ocarina uses an agent to help them understand the data, but this is another thing to manage) and b) What is the performance of the system looking up all of the hash keys to reassemble the data on the fly, so how much more storage resources will this consume?
4) Back to performance – Permabit states:
When done inline, data will flow to the Albireo library before going to disk. Post-process deduplication will write data to disk first, then scan and eliminate duplicated data. The parallel option sends data to disk while still in memory, and applies updates the same way as post-processing without having to read data off disk. Each method has different amounts of latency and reduction efficiencies.
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