Carter George presents Ocarina Networks capacity optimization in 2009 at TFD1

Recorded at Tech Field Day 1 on November 13, 2009, Carter George presented Ocarina Networks’ capacity optimization technology. He discussed various data deduplication and compression approaches, contrasting them with Ocarina’s “application-aware” technology. Ocarina Networks, which was later acquired by Dell, focused on creating free space on existing storage rather than selling new storage solutions. George emphasized the importance of integrating their technology with existing storage vendors to ensure seamless operation and user transparency. This presentation is part of the “Best of Tech Field Day” series.

Carter George explained that Ocarina’s solution, named the “ecosystem,” stands for extract, correlate, and optimize. This process involves decompressing files to their raw data, deduplicating them, and then applying content-aware compression. Unlike traditional deduplication methods that operate on the zeros and ones stored on disk, Ocarina’s approach extracts and decompresses data to find duplicates that standard methods might miss. This is particularly effective for files that are already compressed, such as Office documents, videos, and images. By identifying and removing duplicates at a more granular level, Ocarina can significantly reduce storage requirements.

George also highlighted the flexibility and efficiency of Ocarina’s technology. The solution can be deployed as an appliance or software, depending on the storage environment. It reads files from existing storage, processes them to reduce size, and writes them back, ensuring data integrity through checksum comparisons. The technology supports various file types and can be tuned for specific use cases, such as photo sites or virtual machine environments. Additionally, Ocarina’s algorithms include specialized methods for images and videos, offering both lossless and visually lossless compression options. This comprehensive approach allows Ocarina to provide substantial storage savings and improved data management for large-scale data centers and diverse storage environments.