More Drive Reduction with Compression

We wrote about the growing trend of customers trying to reducing their disk footprint in The End of An Antidote. We also covered this in earlier posts on Driving Down Drives and Drive Reduction.

Last week a new startup, Ocarina, emerged to tackle compression. This adds to a growing list of solutions to help customers reduce sprawling disk footprints.

Technologies/solutions that help customers with drive reduction:

1. De-duplication - eliminate copies of data to help reduce the total amount of capacity/spindles required
2. Thin provisioning - minimize disk purchases and use by exposing volumes larger than the physical storage present
3. Compression - compress/reduce persistent data to minimize capacity/spindles
4. Performance caching - use fast memory to achieve high IOPS and throughput instead of over-provisioning disk spindles for performance

A common question people ask is, "won't the large storage vendors be against these kind of solutions since it causes them to sell less disk?"

Dave Hitz from NetApp addressed that point recently in a post titled, How Data De-Duplication Fits into our Master Plan. Specifically he stated:

"Buying less storage is the small picture. The big picture is that we want to help customers create a disk-based copy for all of their primary storage."

There are more comments in a post titled Does Helping Customers Use Less Disk Hurt NetApp's Business? where he proposes that it does not hurt for several reasons.