Lortu Software of Bilboa, Spain, has introduced software components to provide deduplication and replication through its Kondar deduplication technology. The vendor claims that this obtains a data reduction ratio of between 10 and 100 times.
| Lortu Software Kondar Byte-level Delta Deduplication Technology
Improves storage, replication, and WAN communication products with deduplication technology that can obtain a data reduction ratio of between 10 and 100 times
www.lortu.com |
This is particularly important when it comes to backup. Typical backups gather up dozens of copies of the same files. If 50 people save one document, every version will be stored on tape. Each weekly backup compounds the felony by sending all those copies to tape again and again.
Obviously, such unnecessary traffic can exact a huge bandwidth penalty. Deduplication frees up the network by eliminating the transmission of duplicate data. Only one instance of each data item is stored.
File deduplication operates at the file level. It recognizes changed files and backs up only files that have been changed. Block-level deduplication spots changes to blocks of data. When changes are located, only changed blocks have to be backed up.
Byte-level deduplication goes even deeper. It can spot changes to each byte of information so it only has to back up the bytes that have been changed. Obviously this type of deduplication reduces traffic much more than file or block deduplication.
The likes of EMC (www.emc.com), CA (www.ca.com), and Symantec (www.symantec.com) have added deduplication to their storage products. The main company that has deduplication capabilities comparable to Lortu, however, is Data Domain (www.datadomain.com) of Palo Alto, Calif. Its DD560 appliance is a disk-based backup system that also makes it possible to replicate data over a WAN to a disaster recovery site at about 1/10 the bandwidth. Both Data Domain and Lortu claim scanning numbers as high as 100Mbps. While the former has sub-block-level capabilities, Lortu takes it a stage further with its byte-level functionality.
“Kondar comes into its own when you need to work with large blocks of data or need a high throughput,” says Carlos Ardanza, CEO of Lortu. “Our technology is specialized upon deduplicating large blocks of data with high throughput and at byte level.”
However, the company doesn’t directly compete with the vendors mentioned above. In fact, it may end up being incorporated into some of their products in the near future. Rather than packaged software, it develops software components that it licenses to be integrated into independent software vendor products. 
by Drew Robb
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