News

posted on 14 April 2008 15:20

In what could be the first of several hardware-accelerated de-duping VTLs, Cofio Software has announced its ViStor product can use Hifn's Express DR deduplication hardware card. 

A VTL or virtual tape library presents itself as a tape drive or library to backup software but is actually a hard drive array. Consequently it runs backup and restore sessions at disk speed instead of slower tape speed. This is especially attractive with restore operations that no longer have to sequentially stream through a tape but can go direct to a file because hard drives are random access devices.

The effective capacity of a VTL can be greatly enhanced if repetitive block patterns can be detected and replaced by pointers, which is what de-duplication technology does. It is CPU-intensive and can result in 20:1 or better reductions of backup file sizes. Backups typically contain a lot of redundant information as a lot of previously backed up information is backed up afresh in each backup session.

To keep backup windows short de-duplication processes are typically run after a backup session has concluded (post-process). The Hifn PCI/PCIe card  performs deduplication in hardware and therefore accelerates it.

Cofio says its ViStor 2.0 VTL software, incorporating Hifn's Express DR card technology, provides enterprise-class VTL performance at an affordable price for small and medium enterprises (SME).

John Matze is Hifn's business development VP and said: “Containing data growth and improving backup reliability are two of the biggest storage challenges facing SME IT operations, and the Cofio ViStor VTL with integrated Hifn Express DR capabilities addresses both of those issues in a single integrated solution. With the massive data loads facing SMEs and the huge processing overhead required for software-based data compression, it is inconceivable that any company would willingly deploy a VTL solution that lacks hardware-advantaged capacity optimization.”

Why Matze says 'software-based data compression' instead of de-duplication is unclear. It could be that thecard doesn't exactly duplicate software de-duplication technology. But anyway, if he is right and it truly is inconceivable that customers would deploy SW-only de-duplication then we can expect more such announcements as this.

Hifn states that the the DR cards have 'multiple processors to deliver unprecedented compression hardware-offload performance with high reliability and intelligent data reduction features'. They are designed for storage server environments ranging from continuous data protection (CDP) to network-attached storage and storage area networks (NAS and SAN) and virtual tape library applications (VTL).

The cards 'accelerate hashing, compression and encryption algorithms in hardware to off-load these heavy lifting functions from host CPUs and speed up performance to provide multi-gigabit acceleration functions for data de-duplication and data reduction applications'.

Overland Storage has given a strong hint that it is developing a HW-accelerated de-duping storage array with Hifn technology.

Cofio's president, Tony Cerqueira, said: “Hifn’s Express DR cards deliver an immediate customer benefit by taking the performance of our ViStor VTL -- already the fastest VTL solution on the market – to the next level.”

Real world performance figures will, no doubt, be eagerly awaited.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}