SANTA CRUZ, CA / ACCESSWIRE / November 8, 2021 / Think of your most recent Cloud storage bill. Now, imagine lowering that bill by 50% - not just once, but every month. What could the extra cash do for your business? More marketing? Boost product development? Hire more software developers?
Extracting business-transforming cost savings from optimized data storage isn't as difficult as people might expect. Cost-reducing storage technology (lossless compression) is available to and accessible by enterprises that use Cloud storage. IaaS Cloud vendors are more likely to use lossless compression to increase IaaS Cloud storage profits than to reduce end-user enterprise Cloud storage costs. After all, shouldn't IaaS vendors reduce costs for their end-users if it also maximizes their profit?
Taking lossless compression mainstream
Enter Anacode, founded by former Amazon principal engineer Al Wegener. Anacode reduces consumer Cloud storage costs for both IaaS vendors and enterprises via massively parallel lossless compression (like gzip on steroids). With its patented lossless compression technology, Anacode empowers its customers to proactively reduce their Cloud storage costs with technology not previously nearly as easy to access.
Using patented technology (US patents #10,972,125 and US #11,064,055), Anacode compresses stored objects or files to lower storage costs for private, co-location, and public Cloud storage vendors and/or users alike.
It's like trying to pack for a trip. You can shove your clothes in bags and pay for extra luggage - or you can fold each piece and use fewer bags. To further increase your storage efficiency (and avoid extra baggage costs), you could use a vacuum bag to take air out and compress your bags. Think of Anacode as a little robot that ‘folds' your files, taking the air out so that you don't have to pay for extra baggage/storage space. Anacode compresses most files more than 4:1 losslessly, resulting in storage costs that are 50% lower than today's public (or private, or co-lo) storage prices are.
The journey towards compressing the world's data
So, how does Anacode do it? Well, lossless data compression technology has existed for around 40 years in the form of the Lempel-Ziv (LZ; gzip) algorithm (average lossless compression 2:1), initially developed by Israeli engineers Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv. More recently, Yann Collet, a Facebook engineer, developed LZ4 and Zstandard (zstd) lossless compression for faster, scalable data compression. Zstd averages 3:1 lossless compression. Anacode does much better, at > 4:1 average lossless compression. Unlike gzip and zstd, which are both open-source, Anacode's lossless algorithm is proprietary. It offers features that neither gzip nor zstd offer - like the ability to have Byte-accurate random access into the compressed data and the ability to parallelize decompression as well as compression.
With over 60 patents under his belt, Al Wegener, Anacode's founder and CEO, has made unique contributions to modern lossless and lossy data compression techniques. Al's patented lossy compression technology gave birth to Samplify - Al's first start-up (2006-2014) that compressed large volumes of numbers (popularly called IoT and HPC data). Samplify successfully compressed millions of gigabytes of raw imaging data from CT scanners for medical imaging companies like GE Healthcare, Siemens and Philips, and wireless base station vendors like Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent.
In 2011, Samplify also helped Schlumberger (an oil & gas exploration conglomerate) lossy-compress large amounts of seismic, acoustic data from Schlumberger seabed surveys. Samplify reduced the size of Schlumberger's raw acoustic data (integers) while also reducing the size of similar floating-point (data with decimal points) versions of that data, that Schlumberger's supercomputers crunched on.
Rising above setbacks
An unfortunate series of events, including the blatant copying of one of Samplify's patents by an unscrupulous vendor, led to Samplify shutting its doors in 2014. Al then went on to work helping design chips (ASICs) behind facial recognition technology that was going to be used in Amazon's Fire Phone. Al later moved into Amazon's machine learning group. In Fall 2015, Amazon Web Services asked Al to evaluate the effectiveness of lossless compression of Amazon customer data stored in (as of 2014) AWS' 45 data centers, which could have helped Amazon save hundreds of millions of annual storage costs. Instead, Al left Amazon to use his compression experience to help enterprises and IaaS vendors alike save storage dollars, using Anacode software and multi-core hardware.
Fast-forward to 2021, Anacode helps enterprise beta testers lower monthly Cloud storage costs by compressing data objects and files. Anacode reduces data storage costs by 50% - but it doesn't stop there. Anacode also speeds up data transfers by > 4x, turning East-West Ethernet data center links from 100 Gbps PHY speeds to 400 Gbps effective speeds.
Ready for the future
Al's personal challenge for Anacode is to beat its own cost reduction records and to get all storage users to try Anacode. If you want to become an Anacode beta tester, sign up today.
Anacode plans to launch its storage service with a "freemium" offering for a limited time: try Anacode for free, and reduce your monthly data storage costs by exactly 10%. After trying the free version, Al hopes that you become an Anacode customer, reducing your data storage costs by 50% and speeding up your GETs by 4x.
Anacode has been designed without fanfare, with no need to change common software working practices - you must send your PUT (compress) and GET (decompress) API calls to the Anacode endpoint, vs. the (for example) AWS S3 endpoint, but that's easy.
P.S If you're interested in all things tech and compression, join Anacode's mailing list for Al's words of wisdom via Anacode's monthly newsletter.
Media Contact:
Al Wegener
+1 (408) 221-1191
[email protected]
SOURCE: Anacode