Pocket Soft Enters De-Dupe Market

HOUSTON -- Byte-level differencing software pioneer, Pocket Soft, entered the deduplication market with its new dfc-gorilla technology. dfc-gorilla is offered to the storage industry for integration into commercial deduplication features and products under OEM licensing.

How deduplication products discover duplicate data is determined by the deduplication algorithm which lies at the core of all deduplication features and products. There are two types of core deduplication algorithms: block-level and byte-level. Block-level deduplication eliminates duplicated data at the sub-file level by removing repeated blocks of information. Byte-level deduplication examines files at the sub-file level by identifying repeated, variable length strings of data, as well as partially matched, or "fuzzy matched" strings of data. Both block-level and byte-level are lossless compressors, i.e., restorations are exact (100%) images of the original.

According to Pocket Soft CEO, Bill Wise, "The granularity of byte-level deduplication engines, versus that of block-level provides the basis for a superior compression ratio; however, the challenge is to accomplish this without massive amounts of system resources such as disk and memory consumption. The genius behind dfc-gorilla is that it is able to perform byte-level deduplication in linear time, with no backward seeks on the data, in a memory restricted environment." As to which deduplication engine technology is superior block or byte, Wise says, "I think Diligent has it right – the correct answer is both."

Pocket Soft Inc.