Data Compression: Benchmark & ROI Analysis

Technical Whitepaper
Data Compression -
Benchmark and ROI Analysis
Jim PetersonChief ScientistPKWARE, Inc.Technical White Paper
Data Compression Benchmark and ROI Analysis
Table of Contents Page
Making the Case for Data Compression 1
Data Compression Primer 1
The Case for Transfer ROI 4
The Case for Storage ROI 4
Compression and Security 5
Putting Theory into Practice 6
Conclusion 7
2 Copyright© 2004 PKWARE, Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Trademarks of other companies mentioned in this documentation appear for identifi cation purposes only and are property of their respective companies. SecureZIP is a trade mark and PKZIP is a registered trade mark of PKWARE, Inc.Technical White Paper
Making the Case for Data Compression In today's enterprises, information is a key corporate asset. Much In addition to adding to mounting costs, any time data is of this information ends up stored in digital format and made transmitted, the risk of corruption is increased. Compression available online. This information is accessed and exchanged can help reduce this risk, as well as save space. The smaller countless times using common business applications such as the fi le, the less likely that data integrity will be compromised in document editors and word processors, spreadsheets, databases transmission. A good compression product can also check data or email programs. This routine exchange of digital information after transmission to ensure that the data received matches exactly has become the life-blood of many organizations. with the data sent.
Enterprise information is more likely to travel through one or Data Compression Primermore networks. Distributed organizations, extended supplier- The purpose of data compression is simply to make fi les smaller. manufacturer networks, and customer relationship management During compression, reduction in a fi le's size is achieved by applications are examples of business trends that rely on a steady eliminating redundant patterns and by encoding the contents transfer of information across the Internet. of the fi le using symbols that require less storage space than was originally required . After a fi le is compressed, its content Sending daily reports from the mainframe to regional offi ces, is changed to an encoded form, and the fi le cannot be used until updating corporate inventory systems from local offi ces, and it is decompressed. The decompression process is the inverse of ubiquitous email communications are examples of the constant compression. It restores a fi le to its original state. data transfer required to effi ciently run an organization. As a simple example of the data compression process, consider Most businesses today are accustomed to the convenience of this sentence: these streamline communications, but many are unaware of what takes place below the surface. Few users realize how their actions she sells sea shells by the sea shore impact the budget and ROI of the IT organization. This sentence consists of 37 characters, including spaces. The Hidden Costs spaces are important and cannot be simply thrown away since All of the information entered into a document, regardless of the removal would change the meaning of the original message. application or format, becomes digital data. Once a fi le is created, its data must be saved within the storage facility of the underlying The science of compression recognizes the repeating patterns in computer system. If that fi le is exchanged with co-workers, it will this sentence. The combination 'se' appears three times, 'sh' three most likely be stored on a number of other systems, depending on times, and 'lls' twice. In fact, the 'se' pairs all have a space in front how many people received a copy of the fi le. It will also end up in of them, and can be represented by 'se'. These patterns defi ne the the mail server storage facility, and ultimately in archival storage. redundancy of the message.
Digital storage and transfer information assets comes at a price- she sells sea shells bbyy tthhee sseeaa sshhoorree both in terms of transmission bandwidth and storage costs. Most organizations must buy or lease suffi cient storage capacity to hold all of the data generated and used by their extended network. Many technology options exist today for this task, yet all of t... [download for more]