Figures that speak for themselves
According to a survey conducted by the Meta Group in 2005, expenditure on storage currently accounts for around 13% of a company’s total IT expenditure. For the same budget position, demand for storage is expected to increase by between 50 and 75% in 2006. As much as 22% of your total IT expenditures could go into storage in future. Moreover, experts forecast a significant steady rise in demand for storage over the next few years.
infinity³ has the know-how to develop, in cooperation with you, an appropriate cost-effective solution for your data storage and data management requirements. A network of experts is at your disposal. Any time.
Concrete thinking: digital media
What matters in data compression, especially music and video data, is the highest possible loss-free reduction of the data.
MP3, one of the standard formats now in use, performs very well in that respect: the original format can be reduced down to 10%. This is achieved by specifically exploiting psychoacoustic effects (nuances not subjectively perceptible), in conjunction with data compression standards. Unfortunately, though, the quality is also inevitably reduced.
So when fidelity in further processing is important, none of the techniques currently available on the market fully meet the requirements. Even the best publicly available loss-free audio compression techniques currently only achieve a 55% reduction compared to the original volume.
State-of-the-art
infinity³ has developed a method for compressing MP3 files by a further 30% with totally loss-free compression, i.e. with no further quality impairment.
Like the MP3 process for audio data, the MPEG4 technique for video data likewise reduces the quality of the original for the sake of improved compression properties.
In this case too, the process developed by infinity³ can optimise MPEG4 coded files by an additional 15% in terms of size – with no loss of quality. Results on the basis of uncompressed data are not yet available. However, one can certainly guess what the results of the tests still to be conducted will be.
Fine tuning
Possible products for you might be, for example, the development of specific audio and video codecs. In all cases of the infinity³ algorithm we are concerned with generically applicable versions, that is, far higher compression rates can still be achieved by source data-specific adaptations.
A further advantage of the efficient, loss-free data compression solution is clear on the Internet digital data distribution market: the distribution of compressed data and decentralised decompression on the users’ client systems also perceptibly reduces the necessary bandwidth for on-demand methods. As well as cost savings for consumers, this advantage also means an ad hoc enlargement of the catchment areas for high-speed DSL (for instance ADSL2+) for TK suppliers/carriers, without additional technical effort.
A secure lead
Security aspects have not been neglected, either. The i³-compressed files can be encrypted by an implicit process using own applications without significant extra expense.
The lower the redundancy of an encrypted message, the better and the more securely the encrypted content is protected.
Concrete thinking: storage solutions
With regard to large storage systems the infinity³ algorithm has another strength not yet mentioned: both compression and decompression can be very efficiently parallelised. New hardware architectures support this trend.
Parallelisation for top performance
Solutions where the data for storage are asynchronously compressed in the background are thus possible. On re-accessing the compressed data, decompression takes place “on the fly” in real time. Due to parallelisation and the hardware architecture used and the associated computer capacity, all this happens without any measurable waiting times for the user.
Compression, not figures
Fully transparent solutions can be created that are cost-neutral – more later – by reducing the storage capacity necessary. It is not unusual for up to 20% of the costs actually anticipated to be saved while storing the identical volume of data.
The calculation is a simple one: today (Q1/2006) the standard market cost of storage varies according to the quality standards of the storage solution used per terabyte of data volume to be stored between €7,000 for simple solutions to €30,000 if using high-availability HDS systems. That does not even include the cost of housing and hosting such solutions.
Not to mention the extra added value for the customer’s benefit, such as data classification, encryption or efficient searching of the compressed data.
Innovation in research and science
… the example of bioinformatics
At the time of writing, as far as we know, the infinity³ GmbH algorithm is the only data compression solution to achieve noteworthy results when applied to protein files. In this research segment, where very large data volumes are handled, every gigabyte that can be saved immediately means a corresponding cost saving.
As well as pure data compression, another strength of the infinity³ algorithm comes into play in the field of bioinformatics: it can be used within the framework of compression for quick recognition of recurring patterns and thus for classification purposes. Picking out particular character strings within the compressed data is no problem, either.
… the example of medicine
Like in many other fields, digitalisation is progressing all the time in medicine, too. Already many hospitals today are no longer viewing their X-ray images on film, but store them in digital format only. Bearing in mind that each patient’s images have to be stored for years, it soon becomes clear that huge data volumes are involved.
Benchmark – proven efficiency
With the data compression solution, infinity³ has created a solution that not only reduces the data volume to a very small minimum – according to scientifically recognized international benchmarks, less than 1/16 of the original size – but what is more, allows the possibility of searching for patterns etc. within the compressed data. That enables a picture data archiving system to be established the advantages of which far exceed those of conventional archiving systems.