Permabit Compression Shrinks Data Without Performance Compromise

Software-Defined Storage: Driving a New Era of the Cloud

Given the amount of data that IT organizations will be struggling with in the years ahead, the most significant advances in storage technologies may have a lot more to do with software than hardware.

Permabit laid claim to one of those advances today with the launch of an inline data compression technology that can be applied to primary storage.

Permabit CTO Jered Floyd says that while compression has been routinely applied to backup and archiving, using compression to reduce the amount of storage space being consumed on primary storage has been a challenge because of its adverse impact on performance.

The HIOPS Compression software developed by Permabit addresses this issue by enabling storage arrays to achieve 650,000 IOPs while simultaneously reducing storage costs by a factor of 35 when combined with data deduplication. Part of the achievement is made possible by eliminating the need for garbage collection during the compression process, says Floyd.

Most IT organizations have never heard of Permabit because it doesn’t sell its software directly to IT organizations. Instead, its software is incorporated by storage vendors that bundle it with their arrays. What that means for IT organizations is that some time in the months ahead, they can look forward to storage vendors rolling out some significant advances in primary storage capacity that were made possible by an actual software advance instead of trying to plug a larger drive into the same basic controller.