Monday, August 30, 2010

Although we have not been formally briefed on the full details, my speculation is that BlueArc will use the product in what I would describe as a “near parallel” mode but, for all intents and purposes, it is inline. This in large part gives BlueArc the ability to offer the best of both worlds; no performance impact to the user and almost instant space optimization when redundant data exists. This highlights what I think will become the primary implementation of the Permabit Albireo deduplication engine, at least initially, a near real-time parallel mode. That provides storage optimization while alleviating one of the key customer concerns -- performance impact.

Reads are all managed through the BlueArc file system, essentially using the same extent management system that they would use to read the correct blocks from a snapshot or a clone. As with writing data, there is no performance impact as a result. Most importantly, the format of the data is not changed or altered. If in the unlikely event the Permabit system stops, data is still accessible to the user without the need to run some sort of special reader or agent.

BlueArc is considered an ideal customer, since they are known for high performance IOPS. It is safe to assume that they evaluated very carefully the entire deduplication playing field looking for the solution that would least impact performance. Permabit being the winner leads one to believe that they indeed have set the deduplication performance bar.

BlueArc is potentially an even bigger winner here. As the solution rolls out and they are able to prove that primary storage deduplication can be delivered without scaling and performance limitations while keeping the data safe, it allows for a massive advantage when they compete with vendors for high performance NAS storage business within the data center. Every other vendor is going to have to provide 60% or greater more capacity and justify the extra cooling and power costs in order to compete with the new BlueArc offering using Albireo. Not only is this an advantage in BlueArc's traditional customer base but should be a significant advantage as they move into more mainstream environments like server virtualization.

With the adoption of Permabit's deduplication engine BlueArc has a very compelling offering for the virtualized customer. Not only can they offer NAS and iSCSI based storage to virtualized environments but, they also can offer potentially the most complete space optimization feature set in the industry. They can do this by combining their own technology that includes their JetClone space efficient writable clones, automated tiering with their Data Migrator, third-party storage repurposing with Cross Volume Links, and content-aware compression and optimized metadata management with Permabit's Deduplication engine. I don't know of anyone in the storage industry doing more to allow their customers to buy less storage, reduce spindle count and use the capacity they do have more efficiently.

George Crump, Senior Analyst