BridgeSTOR Releases Free Data Reduction Analyzer

When talking to people who don't have a strong technicalbackground, I find that their reactions prove that Arthur C. Clarke was rightwhen he said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable frommagic." To them, any technology that lets them store 10TBytes of data on a 1TByte driveis magic. Then I start to explain tothem that I can't really predict how much their data will dedupe because itdepends on the data and that "your mileage may vary," and they start wondering if it'smagic or snake oil. With BridgeStor'snew deduplication simulator, we can finally predict how much reduction you canget with your data.

BridgeSTOR's VS-ADR (virtual storage-advanced datareduction) simulator will scan your real production data and determine how muchit would shrink if you stored it on one of BridgeSTOR's appliances. At the end, it creates a report showing howmuch data reduction you can expect to see on your data and how much of thereduction is due to deduplication and compression. It even comes with an Excel spreadsheet thatgenerates pretty graphs that you can show your management to convince them that thismagic stuff is worth having.

Of course BrideSTOR is giving the simulator away to helpit sell its deduplicating storage appliances. BridgeSTOR founder John Matze also founded iSCSIvendor Siafu, and he was a key player in the development and marketing of HiFn'shardware assist technology for deduplication, compression and encryption. AtBridgeSTOR, he's combining those technologies into HP server-based appliances that are preconfiguredand optimized for Windows Storage Server, Data Protection Manager and BackupExec.

The VS-ADR simulator installs on a Windows system and willanalyze the data in a SCRATCH folder on whatever drive you point it at. BridgeSTOR says it will process about 28GBytes ofdata an hour on a modern server and about half that on a laptop. As always, your mileage will vary based on theprocessor and storage system you choose. Since it's running in software, and since it's free, we have to assumethat it's not terribly optimized software, and since the real BridgeSTOR appliances usehardware assist, the simulator's performance shouldn't be used as an indicationof how fast a real appliance will reduce data.

While I'd have preferred to be able to point the simulatorat my production data, I'd probably be upset when it took five days to processseveral terabytes of data and loaded my production systems with all thatI/O. All in all, I'm grateful to have atool that will help me estimate the data reduction I can get on real-world dataand will have to stop looking a gift horse in the mouth.