BridgeSTOR Makes Available Free Data Reduction Simulator

BridgeSTOR, a new company that makes modular enterprise storage appliances that start at 3TB capacities and can scale to about 30TB, is trying to entice potential customers by offering a free storage information instrument.

The Poway, Calif.-based company, which launched only last November, on Feb. 15 started shipping its Virtual Storage-Advanced Data Reduction Simulator tool, which enables storage managers to predict the effects of deduplication and compression on their primary storage capacity requirements.

The freely downloadable (with registration) VS-ADR Simulator provides detailed information about the effectiveness and value of primary storage data reduction technologies using samples of actual production or test data, BridgeSTOR founder and CEO John Matze said.

Results of the Simulator scan are provided in a text file report and graphically depicted in an Excel spreadsheet to visually show how BridgeSTOR's VS-ADR appliances can reduce both structured and unstructured application data stored by a business in primary data volumes, Matze said.

"The explosive adoption rate of VMware is causing small and medium businesses to rethink their storage strategies. Racks that were once filled with servers have been replaced by a handful of VMware ESX servers. Now, with BridgeSTOR's VS-ADR, racks filled with disk drives are becoming an endangered species," Matze said.

"The Simulator gives the storage manager insight into how aggressively VMware VMDK files, SQL data, shared home directory and other data can be size-reduced, saving both capital and operating dollars. BridgeSTOR's Advanced Data Reduction is today's answer to controlling the growth of primary and application storage capacity."

BridgeSTOR's VS-ADR aggregates primary and secondary storage deduplication, compression and "Disk on Demand" thin provisioning to reduce storage requirements, Matze said.

Depending on the data, the deduplication component of BridgeSTOR's VS-ADR typically reduces unstructured application data by 10 to 80 percent, Matze said.