In a move to beef up its networking business, Dell has signed an agreement to acquire Ocarina Networks. With the purchase, Dell gets access to storage-optimization technology — including compression and deduplication — that promises to reduce data-management costs and streamline operations for its EqualLogic customers.
Ocarina offers what’s called “content-aware optimization technology” that reduces storage space demands by reducing redundant data. The market for this product class is driven by the exploding volume of data from the Internet, e-mail and images even as requirements to retain data get stricter. The technology works to reduce the costs of disk capacity, network bandwidth, power and cooling, data-center space, and management.
“Content-aware deduplication allows us to provide a true global approach to deduplication across the data center and has a tremendous ripple effect of cost savings that frees up budgets for strategic investments,” said Brad Anderson, Dell senior vice president of the enterprise product group.
Complementing EqualLogic
Dell pointed to the “virtual era” and its strategy to drive an open and integrated approach to data management as a key reason for the Ocarina purchase. The company said Ocarina deduplication technology complements its EqualLogic solutions. Ocarina CEO Murli Thirumale said the Dell acquisition will bring deduplication technology to “not only primary storage, but also to key storage work flows, including backup, replication, migration and tiering.”
Photobucket, a customer of both Ocarina and Dell, is excited about the possibilities. James Goss, vice president of operations at Photobucket, sees the opportunity for Dell to take Ocarina’s technology and expand capabilities for the online photo site’s business, which manages billions of unique image files that consume petabytes of storage.
“Ocarina solutions are reducing our storage footprint by over 40 percent, over and above the existing JPEG compression, which is making a big impact on our storage and networking costs,” Goss said….