Quantcast
Channel: Permabit » Jered Floyd, CTO
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 15

A Star is Born

0
0

In his post, Tom wrote about the top three things we heard from customers about deduplication. Given the wildfire success of deduplication for backup storage, everyone now wants deduplication to optimize primary storage, but nobody is willing to sacrifice performance, functionality, or safety.  This is absolutely sensible – deduplication should be a valuable, cost-saving feature and not a tradeoff against other core functionality. Nobody has been able to deliver this – until Albireo.

Permabit has been in the deduplication business since 2000, more than ten years, and we’ve learned a great deal about both technology and customer requirements. In fact, we’ve explored delivering deduplication to the OEM storage vendor market for some time, after including it for many years in our Enterprise Archive product. If you’re not familiar with it, our Enterprise Archive is a complete stack solution for efficient value-tier storage, delivering our own file interfaces, file system, RAIN-EC data protection, and hardware.  When talking with tier 1 storage vendors we were told many times, “we’ve invested millions in our file systems and data protection; yours is great, but we really just want deduplication.  Can you give us just that?”

For a long time I, along with the rest of the industry, thought the answer was “no”. When our engineers explored just providing dedupe we ended up with complex “bump-in-the-wire” appliances that sat in front of the storage and treated it almost like JBOD, masking performance and functionality, and jeopardizing integrity through data lock-in to the solution. We didn’t find this acceptable, and refused to try and sell it.  Others weren’t as resolute and have tried to bring solutions like this to market and have found it challenging and less than rewarding.

Then, a bit over a year ago, I had an idea. What if we could provide a development kit that delivered the core technologies in deduplication and integrated into the vendor’s existing storage stack, rather than sitting outside it? We could avoid competing with our partners on functionality, and eliminate the concerns that Tom explained so clearly. That’s what Albireo is – the core technologies that make fast, scalable deduplication possible, packaged in a way that they can be integrated into any storage vendor’s stack in a matter of days to weeks. Our engineering team took this idea, extracted several years of deduplication effort from our core research, enhanced it further and packaged it as a complete SDK, all in under a year.

I named this project Albireo, after the most visible binary star system. I thought this captured the basic idea of the product; a technology that works alongside an existing storage stack to deliver a powerful deduplicating storage solution that looks and acts as a single product. And of course, it also makes multiple data instances appear as one.

In the process of developing Albireo we learned seven key requirements for an integrated, deduplication solution. Be sure to read my next post to find out how these have all been critical to the success of Albireo with our partners.

The post A Star is Born appeared first on Permabit.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 15

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images