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Ocarina dedupes better than NetApp

Says commissioned Swiss tester

Ocarina is better at data reduction than NetApp according to a commissioned Swiss Tester, being better with just deduplication and much better when its compression (content-aware optimisation) is switched on.

The report (pdf) was commissioned by Ocarina from Storage Switzerland, and compares Ocarina deduplication and compression to NetApp's ASIS deduplication as both, it says, apply to primary data. There is the proviso that this is less active or near active primary data, the unstructured Word docs, slide decks and spreadsheets, and not the high transacton rate stuff.

Storage Switzerland's George Crump set up five data sets. There was a Home Share for office documents and the like; Internet Media for GIF and JPEG images and e-mails; Media & Entertainment for PhotoShop, OpenEXR, MotionBuilder, and similar files; Oil & Gas with SEG Y files only, Life Sciences with SRF, TIFF and DICOM files; and an Archive set. Only the Home Share and Archive sets had duplicate data in them.

Broadly speaking, Ocarina - with its content-aware optimisation, which the report refers to as compression, switched off - had the edge over NetApp in deduping all these data set types.

It reduced the data by an additional 7 to 10 percent compared to NetApp. Specifically, the Home Share data set was reduced in size by 27 percent with NetApp and 37 percent with Ocarina. The Internet Media data set was reduced in size 2 percent by NetApp and 9 percent by Ocarina. The Media & Entertainment data was shrunk 21 percent by NetApp and 29 percent by Ocarina. Neither supplier reduced the Oil & Gas data set in size at all.

Then Ocarina's compression was switched on, resulting in 27 to 49 percent better data reduction performance than that which was found with the NetApp technology. The most spectacular result was with the Oil & Gas data, which it almost halved in size, getting rid of 48 percent of the data. The Home Share score was 49 percent, Internet Media 51 percent, Media & Entertainment 49 percent, and Life Sciences 46 percent.

You get the picture. Storage Switzerland added comparisons between NetApp and Ocarina on specific file types to emphasises its finding, and it makes the point that customer's mileage may vary. It also says that Ocarina de-duped data can be moved to a lower storage tier without having to be re-hydrated and deduplicated and compressed a second time, which was not possible with NetApp.

The exercise did not look into deduplication and compression performance rate or time, and the finding was clear. Looking at data reduction alone, and ignoring all other factors, Ocarina is better than NetApp in this Ocarina-commissioned report.

A NetApp spokesperson said: "With deduplication technologies now deployed on 37,000 systems worldwide, storage vendors recognise that NetApp’s approach to storage efficiency sets the benchmark against which they are judged. Whilst we welcome these comparisons, it is important to recognise that deduplication is just one component of storage efficiency and that factors such as performance need to be taken into consideration. NetApp’s solutions are applicable to a wide variety of environments and deliver broad storage efficiency capabilities that do not require end-users to build a whole new infrastructure." ®

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