Rainstor Leverages Compression to Change Enterprise Computing Economics

At the core of Rainstor’s technology is an advanced compression algorithm that reduces the amount of server infrastructure a company needs to process data by 20 to 1 and reduces the amount of storage a customer needs by 40 to 1, said Ramon Chen, vice president of product management.

While most storage vendors are pushing data deduplication as the best approach to reducing storage costs, Rainstor is advocating the adoption of more efficient data compression algorithms to fundamentally decrease the cost of enterprise computing.

According to Chen, Rainstor works on standard server and storage hardware using a system that manages queries against any distributed sets of data that now consume much less bandwidth as they move around the enterprise.

The 3.5 release of Rainstor, launched as the Software Vendors Saas Migration Conference today, improves the underlying compression algorithm while adding support for SQL query tools and the ability to work with structured data.

According to Chen, usage of Rainstor will primarily be focused on data warehousing applications that consume huge amounts of storage, as opposed to high-performance transaction processing environments.