HP and its channel partners are going to resell Ocarina's unique image-aware deduplication to its customers, along with HP NAS arrays.

Ocarina's deduplication software works on various image format files, such as JPEGs, MPEGs and TIFFs, that other deduplication products can make no impression on.

Ocarina has similar partnerships with BlueArc, EMC and Isilon. It looks almost inevitable that every other filer supplier must be looking at the Ocarina product and thinking a reseller deal might be a good idea. Otherwise, it could lose sales to the competition when a lot of image-type data is being stored.

Ocarina is extending its functionality to handle other file types that standard deduplication makes little impact on. The technology, viewed as a form of specialised deduplication, might be attractive to a deduplication vendor looking to broaden its offering, as well as to filer sellers. Were NetApp to license or resell this software, then IBM would get access to it too - as it resells NetApp storage - and Ocarina would have a virtually clean sweep of filer vendors. Then an IPO could be on the cards once the recession was clearly out of the way.

HP and Ocarina say the Ocarina ECOsystem software for HP runs directly on each server node, or performance block, in an HP Scalable NAS cluster. They say the combined offering also allows customers to seamlessly move data from expensive tier 1 storage to more cost-efficient tier 2 storage platforms, such as HP’s ExDS9100, and compress and dedupe the data as it is being stored on tier 2.

Customers can select files for optimisation (deduplication) via policies based on common attributes such as file type, date, owner, or location.

The Ocarina ECOsystem software is available immediately from HP. No pricing information was released. ®

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