EARTH SCIENCES

Altior has announced the availability of its AltraFlex Compression-Decompression File System (CeDeFS) Accelerator solution, which uses the industry-standard GZIP/GUNZIP data compression/decompression protocols to increase disk space and boost disk capacity utilization, seamlessly and transparently. It combines high performance data compression, advanced hardware acceleration technology, and device drivers for high-density primary storage. CeDeFS requires no modification to either applications or workflows, eliminating the effort-intensive task of custom system integration. The solution is targeted at applications that generate large and ever-growing amounts of data, such as enterprise storage applications, multimedia storage, and Web content management.

"The AltraFlex CeDeFS Accelerator benefits high performance storage solution OEMs and their customers with significant data compression, immediately increasing their return on investment for data storage capacity and appreciably reducing their future capital expenditures," said Robert Zecha, vice president of operations of Altior Inc. "Storage OEMs can now offer tangible cost-savings and ease of use to their customers as a competitive advantage in their marketplace."

Overcoming the Limitations of Software-Only Compression

The AltraFlex CeDeFS Accelerator is an integrated systems solution that is transparently layered over the native file system, which can be easily implemented into current and future designs, enabling faster time to market. CeDeFS enables application or flow modifications, allowing OEMs' customers the ability to deploy it rapidly and seamlessly, saving time, valuable resources and future storage hardware costs.

CeDeFS can be installed over any Linux file system. It is the industry's first hardware acceleration solution to process compression protocols in Linux file systems and scales in 10 Gbps increments by the addition of multiple accelerators. CeDeFS preserves all native file system semantics such as journaling, atomic writes and access control to ensure that no application or workflow modifications will be required.

Unlike software-only compression techniques, the AltraFlex CeDeFS:

• Integrates data compression with the native file system, both increasing existing storage capacity and reducing future capital expenditures.
• Transparently overlays the native file system, thus requiring no changes to applications or workflows, and resulting in a low cost of adoption and ownership.
• Executes data compression with advanced hardware acceleration technology that imposes no performance degradation.  
• Increased I/O operations throughput with existing channel bandwidth.

"Customer tests have shown up to a 3X performance improvement over software-only compression, with a corresponding reduction in CPU and memory usage," said Hank Cohen, director of product marketing of Altior Inc. "Many software-only approaches suffer performance degradation because they compress files and folders on a whole-file basis, and opening and closing such files can waste CPU cycles. Even software-only systems that compress extents, rather than files and folders, suffer degradation. The AltraFlex CeDeFS Accelerator alleviates that problem."