New iteration in Data Reduction

Ascava Inc., no web site yet neither a logo, is making progress in their mission to change the Data Reduction landscape. The company, founded in 2007 and incorporated in Delaware, has raised $1.59M in Nov. 2014, the team is currently located in Los Altos Hills, CA. I had the privilege to meet at SNIA DSI conference 2 key executives of the company: Harsh Sharangpani, CEO and CTO, and Rajesh Patil, VP Business Development and Operations. LinkedIn shows 5 people in addition to Rajesh not listed as Ascava.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, the product is about data size reduction what the company named Data Distillation with ratio 1.5 to 2x better than the best DeDup + Compression ratio existing on the market. Ascava has made several innovations in that sector and is not ready yet to announce anything but developments are in sync with the plan.
The product is a software running as a separate standalone application you operate on any node able to shrink file size and return a super optimized reduced file. The outcome is obvious less consumed space for a fraction of additional cpus cycles. Of course you need a "reader" able to unpack the file to give you back the original content before any application reads it in its original content. We can imagine multiple usages of this such data archiving, data analysis and file tiering/HSM/migration stuff. It reminds me a bit what Ocarina Networks did in the past even if here Ascava is doing radical new things to achieve this reduction ratio. For whose who wish to read a few things about Ocarina, I wrote a few posts, sorry in French at that time, available here: Aug. 2007, Apr. 2008 and July 2010. Scava was a good meeting even a surprise and illustrates that some initiatives and companies continue to dig in that space. CPU and memories continue to be super fast and affordable, we then imagine that some innovators wish to move forward and propose something new, Ascava is one of these. Good Luck.