Compressed Data Search Tech Goes Mainstream

SOURCE: ComputerWord

After selling its data compression and search technology to the auto industry for six years, WindSpring is eyeing the storage market with a compression management technology that can find information while the data is still compressed.

The company was just awarded a U.S. patent (download PDF) for its Data Management Tools (DMT) product, which allows direct access to compressed data sets without the need for decompression.

WindSpring CEO Tom Hunt said by the end of this month his company will begin shipping products to storage equipment manufacturers and other firms. Hunt sees WindSpring’s offering as being particularly valuable to the mobile market, where the more data you can store in a smaller space the better. That typically means compression is needed.

Hunt claims most popular compression algorithms, such as PKZIP, haven’t changed much since the 1980s. They provided good methods for reduced data storage requirements, but offered no efficient way to search the data — other than to first restore it to a primary system and then decompress it.

“It’s literally the same codec that’s been around 20 to 30 years,” he said.

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