BlueArc and Permabit Technology have announced a new partnership today, enabling BlueArc to expand its deduplication offerings. The deal revolves around a long-term OEM partnership, with BlueArc utilizing Permabit’s Albireo technology specifically for its deduplication capabilities.

BlueArc will embed the Albireo technology into its own upcoming solutions, focusing on a few key areas:

* High performance – Albireo provides the fastest data deduplication technology, critical for BlueArc’s high-performance storage systems.
* Scalability – Albireo can scale to multiple petabytes of storage capacity, meeting the requirements of even the largest BlueArc customers.
* Zero impact on performance – Albireo operates entirely outside the read path, meaning that there is zero performance impact on data reads. In BlueArc’s implementation case, there is also zero impact on write.
* Data safety – Albireo does not alter the data in any way, allowing for BlueArc storage systems to maintain full control of data integrity.
* VMware optimized – Albireo and BlueArc storage will provide the industry’s fastest primary storage solution with built-in data deduplication. This will allow VMware customers to dramatically increase performance and achieve enormous cost savings.

With the growth of enterprise interests around cloud computing, optimization and transfer, we’re seeing a number of partnerships facilitated between companies. With Permabit’s OEM-specific features driving the design behind Albireo, the company has been able to form strategies around its core competencies. BlueArc has also found a niche addressing the needs of a rapidly expanding market for unstructured data, with strong OEM ties. Dave Vellante, Senior Analyst at Wikibon.org, conveys the potential behind this newly forged relationship;

“This is the first win for Permabit Albireo and a nice one. The company’s technology will allow Blue Arc to compete more effectively with array-based deduplication technologies, in particular those from NetApp. NetApp has been embedding deduplication into its system for years and the capability has allowed NetApp to differentiate based on a very strong efficiency message.

Its key challenge is that many large OEM’s such as EMC, NetApp and HP already have their own solutions that while not as performance-intensive are good enough for the job. Permabit will have to either convince these companies to use its technology or find other OEMs that will take the product. BlueArc is a big win for the company and could spur others to oem the technology. Good candidates include Isilon, a fast-growing storage company that competes with Blue Arc, LSI and Dell.”

The importance of deduplication support is only growing, and it’s becoming a point of differentiation for startups, and within larger entities’ toolkit offerings. It plays a critical role in the virtualization journey, and will be a necessary consideration for maintaining the benefits of transferring and retaining enterprise customers to the cloud.