Storage Optimization – The Trend Picks Up

Several news articles in the past week are responding to reports about the continued skyrocketing growth of unstructured data, and the technologies that are coming up to meet this new set of demands under today’s economic circumstances. 

Here are a few of the articles that jumped out at us:

Processor

Storage Essentials – George Crump, Storage Switzerland

NetworkWorld

Thinking Outside the Storage Box – Joanne Cummings

InternetNews

Some Bright Spots in the Storage Market Outlook – Drew Robb

As we’ve often mentioned, a combination of solutions is called for when it comes to capacity optimization, one of which is content aware compression, such as that offered by my company Ocarina Networks. Given the state of the economy and everyone’s focus on cost savings, we have no doubt that this trend will pick up in 2009 –dealing with the costs of growing data by having it take 90% less space to actually store is a win-win all around.

This year’s big storage story

My company Ocarina Networks is one of Network World’s “10 Storage Companies to Watch.” We’ve been given this honor before, by Byte and Switch in 2007. This is not just to toot our horn, but to mention that more and more, we’re confirming our hunch that primary storage is where there is an immense need for new and innovative optimization solutions.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the kind of data that’s driving much of today’s storage growth–files–demands a file-aware solution for shrinking them down. It’s clear to me that there is an emerging set of opportunities in this space, and we are only beginning to see where this will lead.