Seagate, Intel back tech that obliterates redundant data before it’s written

Seagate Technology and Intel’s venture capital arm lead a $15 million funding round for Reduxio Systems, a start-up whose technology deletes redundant data even before it’s written to a tiered storage system’s cache.

Israel-based Reduxio invented a storage operating system called NoDup that identifies duplicate data at the block level and discards it before it’s written.

By eliminating duplicate data “in-line” (before it’s written to storage), NoDup maximizes DRAM, solid-state drive and hard drive capacity.

“Reduxio has built an architecture that can truly leverage the capabilities of hard disk drives, solid state storage, and future non-volatile technologies together in a single system,” Rocky Pimentel, president of Global Markets and Customers at Seagate, said in a statement.

Tiered, or hybrid storage systems, like NoDup’s, automatically prioritize data based on pre-set corporate policies and store it on the most appropriate media, such as SSDs, hard drives or tape drives.

NoDup also performs compression on data before it’s written, further economizing storage capacity on data center-class storage systems.

“This contrasts with other deduplication technologies which, paradoxically, eventually end up with uncompressed duplicates,” the company states on its product description site. The latest round of funding follows a $12 million series A infusion last year.

Reduxio was founded by former employees of IBM, EMC, NetApp and Dell. With its most recent funding contribution, Seagate has obtained a seat on Reduxio’s board of directors.

Reduxio’s storage OS implements active tiering across multiple tiers, NoDup in-line deduplication and compression, and BackDating for data recovery.

Reduxio said it will use the venture capital funds to accelerate product development and support marketing.

“Seagate’s investment … will help us to bring our products to customers earlier,” Reduxio CEO Mark Weiner said in a statement.

The latest round of VC funding for Israel-based Recuxio also included Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and Carmel Ventures.