Data-reduction specialist Permabit Technology has been busy lately. On Dec. 1, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company advanced its storage efficiency wares to a higher level with the release of a new data optimizer for original equipment manufacturers and service providers.
Last month, Permabit added two new patents to its portfolio of technology innovations—the third and fourth awarded to the company this year—bringing the total number of patents issued since the company’s inception to 37.
First, the data-optimizer news. This is something an enterprise storage maker or service provider could add into an existing system to fill functionality gaps in Red Hat Linux deployments.
Called Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer 5.2, the package combines a bevy of high-end storage features: fine-grained thin-provisioning, inline data deduplication and the company’s proprietary HIOPS compression for Linux-based storage systems. Plenty of basic storage systems lack this enterprise functionality; in fact, it could be added by a storage administrator after the fact, if necessary.
The company claims an average 6:1 data reduction across mixed storage environments using the optimizer.
VDO 5.2 provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and adds further enhancements to its industry-leading performance and resource-efficiency metrics. Solutions using Red Hat Atomic Host, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage can all take advantage of VDO data-reduction capabilities.
On the intellectual-property side, Permabit was awarded patents for the following storage tech:
–U.S. Patent No. 9,177,175, which describes techniques by which a storage client can securely write data into a data repository without necessarily being able to access or delete items from that repository. One application of the patent could be to build a backup agent capable of backing up a system, but where a security compromise of that system would not introduce risk to the other data in the storage repository.
–U.S. Patent No. 9,104,716, which covers data retention in a distributed storage system where data retention is enforced by maintaining multiple non-decrementing reference counts corresponding to different ranges of time in the future, as opposed to, for example, having a fixed expiration point.