| Hi Nihil, This definitely helps, in fact this was the nicest post I've seen and I will try to reply equal care. Sceptical - Yes I expected this, I didn't expect as much skepticism though. benchmark - It is difficult to compare to something else as there's no one doing something similar (afaik) and would be comparing apples and oranges, nonetheless I will provide a comparison details at the bottom which is easy to understand to general public. DATA - The disks have a clean installation of Windows XP, chosen due to relatively small size of 1.5GB compared to Windows 10 with 10GB and makes processing of the model much easier. If you compress the Windows XP image with Winrar it shrinks to ~500MB so around 30%, my method requires only 200MB physical space so down to 13%. It also differs from traditional compression in that with more powerful hardware I can shrink the storage further preserving fast I/O, but it gets exponentially more expensive for each %. Still large companies can afford the benefit which is multiplied for thousands VMs. Sparse file system - no, it's much better :-) Additionally I'm having trouble to name my technology, it has much similarity with compression but it is not traditional compression, it uses some math functions such as number pairing function and others (I can't disclose the sweet secret) and achieves an I/O much better than a traditionally compressed file system. Performance is in fact better than plain NTFS as can be seen in the third video, a Windows 10 boot in 5-8 seconds is better than an SSD can do (around 25 seconds). Ultimately apps and systems can be written to take most advantages of the technology characteristics. Your last paragraphs were the most helpful I agree I need to get people excited, I was hoping I could do this mostly anonymously but perhaps not (don't need people to know my name). I will need to think what is best strategy. Some benchmark.
HOST
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OS: Windows 10 Enterprise
Processor: Intel Core i5 8 Gen
Memory: 16GB DDR
Base Storage: SSD
-----------------------------------
GUEST 1 (Normal)
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OS: Windows 10 Education
Processor: 8 Virtual Processors
Memory: 2GB dedicated
VM Storage: SSD
Boot time: 18 seconds
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GUEST 2 (New technology)
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OS: Windows 10 Education
Processor: 8 Virtual Processors
Memory: 2GB dedicated
VM Storage: Enhanced File System
Boot time: 8 seconds
----------------------------------- Lastly, this is not only application for VMs, same technology can be used for e-mail servers, databases, etc.
Any more comments are greatly appreciated. Thanks |
Regarding benchmarking - I think boot-time is not a very good test, as it varies greatly depending on the guest VM. A fresh install will be pretty consistent, but it's not a very reliable and repeatable test.
You need some hard data - graphs, charts and counts. Maybe check out DiskMark or some other tool like it, Then run test inside normal VM and your encrypted-disk VM.
Second - I wonder if there's a way you could let people experiment with your solution without "giving it away". for example-
1. Compression-As-A-Service - a simple website, people can upload a file, get the compressed file back. This way they can compare the size to Zip/7Zip/whatever, And you don't actually give them the algo (You'll probably say - "without my algo they can't open the file or use it, so they won't see the crazy fast IOPS." , But it might be enough, at least as a first step).
2. Compiled algo, limited distribution - I have a feeling you wrote this in some low-level programming language, not Python and such. Could it be compiled to a binary? If so it might be safe to distribute, as it will require serious reverse-engineering to decipher. You could also "watermark" each executable you send someone, so it has to "dial-home" via internet before it works, and will help you identify who released it to the public in case someone does.
Hope this helps, and please feel free to connect with me on other channels as I'd love to help some more :) my mail is nihil75 at gmail.com And I'm "nihil" on mastodon.sdf.org