TMCnet Speaks to RainStor About Big Data and Reducing Your Company's Storage Footprint

TMCnet columnist and partner at CrossFire Media, Carl Ford (News - Alert), got to speak to RainStor Inc. as part of a series of special On the Road interviews in San Jose, CA (News - Alert). Deirdre Mahon, VP of marketing at RainStor, discussed the concept of Big Data and how RainStor offers a unique approach to data storage and retention for large enterprises.

According to McMahon, the Big Data concept means that IT groups in large organizations throughout the world are looking for cost savings as pressures mount to keep data records for much longer than ever before. She added that depending on the specific industry sector and its compliance regulations, companies are required to keep huge amounts of data that is many years old online and available for query.

For the telecommunications industry, for example, call detail records and other information must be kept available for 10 years in India, and for seven to 10 years in Europe. This includes smartphone information, iPad usage data and various other types of information. Storing this volume of information in a traditional database can end up being extremely costly.

RainStor is “addressing that problem and making the economics of data retention must more efficient and cost effective,” said McMahon. The company's strategy is to use massive compression and de-duplication, and to search for common patterns among data so that it is only stored once. The company has a series of pointers to continuously search for those patterns to avoid duplication.

As a result, “the footprint becomes much less, 95 percent less the original size if it were stored in a traditional database,” said McMahon. Storage costs are slashed dramatically in comparison to a traditional storage environment like Oracle (News - Alert). The company's partners are large companies like HP, Dell and Teradata, and they are working to integrate their specialized database technology into partners' product offerings.

One of the key advantages of RainStor's solution is that it is always online and available for queries, unlike large offline databases. The company is currently working to integrate with the Dell (News - Alert) DX unified storage device, to enable companies to store structured and semi-structured datasets in one device, thereby reducing their storage footprint.

RainStor may also be deployed on the Hadoop Distributed File System, ensuring data is allocated to the proper place for maximum availability. Data may also be partitioned to address security and privacy concerns as needed.

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