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  5. Primary Storage Data Reduction Heats Up: Page 2 of 2
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Primary Storage Data Reduction Heats Up: Page 2 of 2

Things have been heating up in the primary storage data reduction market as a management change at Storwize has made them a lot more aggressive, leading to a whole new round of tweets, white papers and the like arguing the merits of fast LZW type compression vs. the hot and sexy technology of data deduplication. While they've been fighting with Ocarina, EMC and NetApp for the enterprise Nexenta, GreenBytes and HiFn have brought primary storage deduplication to the masses.
Howard Marks
April 23, 2010

HiFn's has just started shipping samples of their BitWackr, which combines a PCIe card with HiFn's compression, encryption and hash-generation chip, which has software for Windows Server or Linux to create a data volume that's deduped, compressed and optionally encrypted in real time. Since BitWackr is designed to be installed in systems that aren't dedicated to providing storage services performing hash generation and compression in hardware leaves more CPU available for other things.

It's important that a system using hashes for Deduplication has the ability to do hash-table lookups quickly, and BitWackr can use an SSD to store the hash tables. BitWackr installs as a disk/RAID controller so data is still stored in the OS's native file system, so it can support applications like Exchange that insist on running with NTFS.

HiFn's parent company Exar, who recently snapped up 10Gbps Ethernet NIC maker Neterion, is peddling BitWackr as an OEM product for around a kilobuck, so while you might not see it on the store shelves any time soon, it just might be included as part of some of your favorite products. I've received an evaluation kit, complete with SSD for hash tables, from HiFn and will be setting it up in the lab after Interop. Watch this space for an update. Disclosure: At the time of publication, I am working for EMC and NetApp, but I'm not
working for any other mentioned vendors. 

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