IceWEB, a provider of unified data storage and cloud storage networks, said a amjor US electric and natural gas company in the Midwest has selected its Storage System for a Geospatial platform.
The IceWEB storage appliance will be used to support the energy provider’s Geographic Information System (GIS) that will increase the input, processing and distribution of GIS information throughout the company to support various requirements from logistics, tracking assets and pipeline and electrical utilities.
Compression to some degree is a standard feature of IceWEB system, while it is used extensively with photos, images and videos. Every time user zips a file they are compressing it.
IceWEB’s Inline compression uses technology to reduce the size of all the objects that are written to the array, where repeating patterns of "1s" and "0s" are reduced by using a counter like five hundred "0s" in a row would be represented by 500(0) rather than writing all 500 "0s."
Compression works on files of any size and composition, as contrasted with deduplication where a whole block must be identical to be a match. The degree to which the data is compressible depends on how many repeating patterns the data has.
The compression algorithms used with an array must be lossless, which means the data is not deleted to make data smaller, the company said.