• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Enterprise storage / Data Reduction: the Condensed Version

Data Reduction: the Condensed Version

September 22, 2011 By Stephen 1 Comment

Data Reduction can be hazardous to your health!

I’m not a big fan of data reduction technology, yet I found myself talking compression and de-duplication all week. Between Storage Decisions and my recent posts over at SearchStorage and The Storage Community, I’ve had quite a bit to say on the subject. Funny enough, I’m not really a fan of data reduction technology for primary storage. Too often, data reduction is more expensive and difficult than just storing raw data.

You should also read Deduplication Coming to Primary Storage and Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows

Storage Decisions

My Storage Decisions presentation on data reduction was hilarious, if I do say so myself, even though turnout was poor at 8:30 AM on Tuesday morning. Maybe it was this “intimate” group, but I found myself really getting into the discussion. And the nods and hollers from the audience helped, too!

My basic thesis at Storage Decisions was the same as always: Don’t throw good money at technology that will have little ROI. Considering that disk capacity is incredibly cheap, and dropping all the time, data reduction doesn’t look like a great fit except in certain situations. Why spend money to reduce utilization? Why put in the effort when most primary storage data reduction technologies don’t do anything to address the “multiplier effect” of archiving, DR, and backup storage?

This is not to say that all data reduction technology is worthless. In fact, the free compression and de-duplication built into many SSDs and even some enterprise storage devices make perfect sense. I just don’t understand spending a bunch of money to address storage capacity when most applications are starved for storage performance.

You might like reading my two other posts on the subject from last week:

  • Interest in data reduction methods needs to keep pace with data growth (SearchStorage.com)
  • Has the Time Finally Come for Data Reduction? (The Storage Community, sponsored by IBM)

You’re Losing Me

On the other hand, I do see quite a bit of value in something many people would overlook out of hand: Lossy compression of office files. Every systems administrator knows that end-users do “stupid stuff” like embedding massive photos and videos in PowerPoint presentations and Word documents. But not everyone knows that there are technological means to address this “PEBKAC” issue.

Some office applications already automatically reduce the size of embedded content, and operating systems can do the same. One of my more popular blog posts, in fact, is a technique to create a filter to reduce the size of PDF files in Mac OS X Preview. And the Microsoft “X” Office file formats include lossless compression as well.

An application that recently caught my eye is the FILEminimizer Suite by Balesio. This inexpensive application reduces the size of Office and media files while leaving them in their native format. It re-compresses image files, reducing them to optimum size for use in presentations, documents, or printouts. A companion product, FILEminimizer Server, can be used on enterprise file servers to perform the same magic across the whole range of users.

Stephen’s Stance

Native Format Optimization (NFO) makes a lot of sense, since it addresses a common user error in a practical way, and allows capacity savings to “trickle-down” to backups, e-mail systems, and archives. But wholesale compression and the duplication of primary storage may not be worth much, especially since the cost of disk keeps dropping dramatically.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!
  • Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

Filed Under: Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage Tagged With: Balesio, compression, data reduction, deduplication, FILEminimizer, IBM, SearchStorage, Storage Decisions, The Storage Community

Primary Sidebar

Information retrieval consists of four main stages: Identifying the exact subject of the search; Locating this subject in a guide which refers the searcher to one or more documents; Locating the documents; Locating the required information in the documents.

Douglas John Foskett

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5.1

    September 4, 2012

    Why Buy a NEX-7? Why Sony NEX At All?

    October 17, 2011

    New England Takes On Seattle To Determine Who’s Number 2 … In Tech!

    January 19, 2015

    What’s the Deal with Containers?

    October 21, 2016

    Go Get a ProtonMail Account and Protect Your Online Life!

    July 19, 2017

    Cisco’s Trojan Horse

    September 15, 2014

    My 2012 Project: Improving Energy Efficiency

    January 3, 2012

    Faster Ethernet Gets Weird

    June 19, 2015

    Microsoft’s Overlooked Innovation

    February 15, 2010

    The Rack Endgame: Open Compute Project

    September 17, 2014

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in