Dell Adds Ocarina Network Software to Hardware

By Matthew Dublin

Dell is now packaging its DX6000 storage racks with software that uses Ocarina Network's data compression solution.

Ocarina uses a deduplication that compresses a multitude of supposedly incompressible image files and its approach is so effective that Dell bought the startup last year. Ocarina began making an appearance at Bio-IT World a few years ago and has been turning heads with its innovative compression software and has an entire suite tailored made for bioinformatics.

Ocarina's ECOsystem includes over 100 algorithms that support over 600 file types, such as large, graphics intensive genomics files like Affymetrix’s .dat, .arr, and.cel outputs, for which the Ocarina ECOsystem achieves an average of 50 percent compression; and Illumina files such as tiff and .txt, for which it achieves 45 percent to 85 percent compression.

The can be single or multiple clustered nodes. It is anticipated that there will typically be from one to four nodes, but there can be more and the system has been tested with up to 2.5PB of data stored across 46 DX6000 storage nodes. The DX6000Gs contain up to 8TB of disk capacity for scratch files using SATA or nearline SAS disks.

The DX6000G Storage Compression Node (SCN) can be either single or multiple clustered nodes, although they will eventually go up to four nodes. The DX6000G has been tested on 2.5 petabyte of data but contains up to 8TB of disk capacity using SATA or nearline SAS disks.