News

posted on 07 April 2008 16:49

Startup Ocarina Networks has announced its Ocarina Optimizer appliance to shrink photos and other files by a factor of ten, claiming that de-duplication and generic compression products aren't effective on such data.

The companion Ocarina Reader is software that expands files that have been compressed or shrunk by the Ocarina Optimizer before being stored on drive arrays. It can run on Web servers, and other Linux-based systems.

The Optimizer, presented as a NAS client, uses technology described as a 'three-step file-aware optimization process,' the files being image formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, etc. The steps are ECO: Extract; Correlate; and Optimize, and Ocarina says the process works on already compressed files. It is also bit-for-bit lossless.

Here is how an Ocarina white paper describes it: "Ocarina’s image object optimization process is an out-of-band solution that reads images from your existing storage in to the Ocarina Optimizer, optimizes them, and writes them back in an image storage codec to the same storage. The image storage codec is Ocarina’s highly-efficient online image format."

It continues: "the ECO process extracts the full rich image data from an existing image file in to a full Discrete Cosine Matrix (DCT space), correlates related image information like chrominance and luminance boundaries around like areas in an image, and then applies Ocarina’s patented image optimization compressor to the grouped areas. The ECO process is able to compress already-compressed JPEGs up to 40%, and sets of scaled images - common on web sites - up to 80%."

This is pretty CPU intensive and a 4400 box has 16 64-bit CPU cores with an Ocarina Linux-based O/S running things. A pair of 4400s can process up to 5TB of media files a day. Clusters of 4400s can be set up to process more data.

Ocarina is selling its products to online photo storage providers such as Photoways Group in Europe which gets 1.5 million digital photographs uploaded each day. Graham Hobson, CTO of Photoways Group, is enthusiastic about the product: "Based on our initial testing we are confident that the Ocarina solution will allow us to defer a significant portion of our storage purchases this year, resulting in a drastic reduction on capital spending as well as operational expenses. Bottom line, we believe that Ocarina will pay for itself within six months of installation, save us millions of Euros over the next few years, and change the way we buy storage and the overall economics of our business in the future."

Murli Thirumale, the CEO of Ocarina Networks, said: "Ocarina can provide immediate benefit to organizations that are struggling to contain rising storage acquisition costs as well as operational expenses such as power, cooling and data center space. Ultimately, we help customers achieve the holy grail of increased data capacity with little or no new investments in additional storage infrastructure."

Prices were not disclosed.

Think of Ocarina Networks as providing specialised sub-file-level deduplication for picture image files.

The name by the way refers to an ancient wind instrument, shaped like an egg with finger holes in its shell to vary the notes it can output as you blow into it - nothing to do with picture file de-duplication at all.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}