Dell's dedupe story still unfolding Dell's spreading of Ocarina dedupe goodness across its storage platforms has to overcome several obstacles, none of which are show-stoppers. Ocarina deduplicates files – or more accurately, optimises and compresses files – and is content-aware so that it can work its specific magic on JPEGs and cast different spells on PACS …
The challenges Dell is seeing now with Ocarina is that Ocarina technology is not truly "native" - it requires a reader if you wish to get significant data reduction as much of the optimization technology works ACROSS files and not INSIDE. Truly native format optimization happens INSIDE files without needing a reader leaving the original file 100% intact is mandatory for reducing active data.
It is an illusion to think other storage platforms will integrate the ocarina reader which would be necessary though if Dell doesn't want to lock in the end user with the technology.
Unless stored as raw DICOM, which would be rare, PACS images are already compressed, either using lossless or lossy algorithms. I would be surprised if Ocarina could take a compressed data stream and achieve any sort of additional compression/deduplication. These images are all unique so there is no hope to get any file dedupe as one would in a standard office environment with email attachments and such.
Native format optimization technology such as Ocarina or balesio is able to reduce file sizes of pre-compressed content efficiently by applying more intelligent methods than what standard document creators (people or applications) usually do, and that is the great advantage. However you need to do it right. Ocarina does it ACROSS files mixing up dedupe with optimization and ending up with the need to have a reader...Dell's big problem now although they won't admit that. balesio stays INSIDE the file offering true native format optimization which is compliant...
Generally, NFO is able to compress precompresssed content further, we have realized this with clients where Image data shrank from 85TB down to 30TB without a reader...
Chris, do you work for balesio? That would be quite relevant to know. I don't work for any storage vendor; I am the storage architect for an ISV in the Medical Informatics space.
I'm setting up my own tests to verify vendor claims that they can reduce the size of compressed files. I'll believe it when I see it.
I did not want to do a commercial here, rather I want people to change their perspective on data reduction and focus on the source, which is the single file. I am sure we can help you a lot with your efforts to reduce your data and of course we don't sell magic in a black box... you are welcome to contact me if interested...
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