A company named Ocarina is making waves through the image processing and storage industries with claims of a new “Lossless Image Recompression” technology, that can take the previously-thought uncompressable (JPG, TIFFs, MPEG’s, etc) and recompress them in a lossless manner. The details are a bit sketchy aside from the note that is uses a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to analyze the image. For those not in the know, the DCT is already the foundation of JPEG compression.
The process does, however, take some beefy hardware to do the work. Currently they deploy a dedicated applicance, the Ocarina Optimizer, which contains dual quad-core Xeon 5400 chips with 16G of RAM (upgradable to 32G of RAM). They claim they can compress 2TB per 24hour day, and is resold by Bluearc. Already certified by Hitachi, HP, Ilison, they’re working with Nirvanix, EMC, and DataDirect.
Ocarina makes waves with lossless image compression • The Register.
