There’s this pride that you feel when you are working on something revolutionary, which you believe would change a small portion of how the world operates. Our team at Skcript, felt that every single day for the past one year. Last year, today, the discussion about building a product that would compress unstructured data to a level that could only be achieved by a team is passionate engineers, began. We’ve been working on that single idea ever since with our partner company in Dubai, and its time to take the wraps off from this beast we’ve created.
The launch
We launched SHRINK at the world’s largest IT Expo, GITEX 2015 in Dubai World Trade Center a few weeks back, with huge response from experts working in industries like Media, Healthcare, Government and Education. Today, we’re proud to reveal some of the plans, details and other essential information for the public & our potential customers, about our road ahead.
Understanding the market
We spent enormous amount of time understanding how the files are basically being stored, read and retrieved in a file system, and the way computers see and respond back to the user. This helped us understand and build a system that can handle some of the most complex performance-intensive tasks that the enterprises demand. The data explosion has been so high in the past few years that the IT admins of major enterprises are starting to realize the importance of a dedicated compression system to handle their storage landscape with ease, still cutting down the cost drastically.
Creating SHRINK
On knowing and understanding this problem, we dreamed of a machine, that could run specific algorithms for major file types. We dreamed of a machine that could set the standards of efficiency, and privacy. We dreamed of a mechanism that does not just de-duplicate the files on a file system level to save disk space. Our hunger for seeing and understanding individual files the same way a computer sees, was humongous.
SHRINK is a reflection of that dream, we all had about solving the single problem of data explosion.
So to create the best compression server on the planet, we had to take some basic laser-focused goals that we worked towards. The server should:
- Cater the best suitable algorithms for each and every file type that a computer can read
- Reduce the data explosion and allow the organization to re-use their existing storage space
- Cut down cost for the company, and act as a one-time investment
- Work at scale, with 99.999% uptime
- Showcase how cutting edge technologies can change the way enterprises operate
These were the only goals we worked towards, and I think we’ve acheived all these goals in the initial run we are having currently with some customers.
Today, having processed PBs of data, at different scale and environment, we’re confident that SHRINK has set a standard for itself in the data compression industry. Somewhere in the near future, we believe that SHRINK will inspire people to create something that solves a large-scale problem, that always had a solution in theory.
The learnings and the experiences we’ve had in the past one year is something incomparable. Here’s to the experiences that are coming our way. And here’s to the team who worked on the product of their lifetime.