Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC), a
leader in intelligent storage for the open systems market, is to
acquire fellow storage firm Rocksoft for £36m.
Rocksoft’s patented data de-duplication software finds and
eliminates redundant data, changing the fundamental economics of
disk-based data protection and data transmission by improving the
utilisation of disk resources and data transport networks. With the
acquisition, ADIC expects to help customers manage, move, retain
and protect their data more effectively on different kinds of
storage resources.
ADIC believes that data de-duplication is an emerging technology
that will play a major role in a broad range of applications for
protecting and retaining data, including back-up and recovery, long
term archiving, continuous data protection, and secure retention
for compliance. The company also believes that it offers
significant advantages for applications that benefit from efficient
data transmission, such as remote replication and wide area network
optimisation.
Rocksoft delivers its patented technology using its Blocklets
software de-duplication engine designed to be integrated into
storage and data transmission products. ADIC plans to integrate the
de-duplication software into its branded products and offer it to
licensees.
ADIC regards Rocksoft’s data de-duplication technology as
representing the most important technical advance over conventional
compression techniques in 20 years. It points out that whilst
conventional compression can eliminate modest amounts of redundant
data from file-sized blocks, offering typical gains of 2:1,
Rocksoft’s technology applies flexible, large-scale de-duplication
techniques both within files and across large data sets, finding
duplicated elements among many different files and storing them
only a single time. The results can be compression gains of 20:1 or
more.
Besides reducing the storage needed for a given data set, ADIC
sees the technology as enabling efficient transport of data over
networks because it eliminates the need to send repeated elements.
For applications that require higher levels of security and
compliance, the software engine offers additional data services,
including data integrity checking and encryption.