Hifn announced the addition of two new members of its Express DR card family, the Express DR 250 and 255, specifically designed to accelerate data de-duplication and data reduction applications. The Express DR 250/255 cards are the industry’s first hardware accelerated data de-duplication cards.

With today’s geometric explosion of data volumes, keeping IT budgets from increasing requires that redundant information in data files be reduced as much as technically possible. Hifn’s Express  DR 250/255 accelerator cards accomplish this goal in two ways: first, with built-in powerful and fast SHA-1 or MD5 hashing algorithms, and second, single-pass LZS 2.5:1 data compression (on average) with an optional encryption engine.

 “Sustaining data rate performance is a challenge for many companies that attempt to deploy extensive data de-duplication solutions," said Richard Villars, Vice President, Storage Systems at IDC. “Solutions like Hifn's new Express accelerator cards will make it easier for data de-duplication solution suppliers to offer higher performance data de-duplication with the added bonus of data encryption.”

The 250 Megabyte per second throughput of the Express DR 250/255 is ideally suited for IP SAN and NAS appliances running data-de-duplication. The DR 250/255 family is offered in a full height   PCI-X 64 bit slot or a low-profile, four-lane PCI-e form factor respectively. Express DR 250/255 cards also support a full complement of hardware-advantaged, data security and authentication function combined with AES 256 bit encryption (Advanced Encryption Standard), the strongest non-military cryptography available today, at over 250 Megabytes per second to support real-time protection of sensitive data. It also provides a high-quality hardware ANSI X9.17 random number generator.

“Hifn's Express DR 250/255 uses state-of-the-art security and data compression technology to enable the next generation of data reduction and de-duplication applications,” said Greg Collins, CEO of Optica Technologies, a Louisville, Colo.-based developer of connectivity and security solutions. “The combination of these technologies with the PCI Express interface ensures market-leading features and high performance.”

Data de-duplication can deliver data reduction that is more than an order of magnitude greater than traditional byte-oriented lossless data compression techniques alone. The remarkable level of data reduction represented by Hifn’s DR 250/255 family can be achieved even with image and sound files that are not compressible using typical methods. The price of this level of data reduction is large amounts of computation, yet the Hifn Express DR 250/255 cards accelerate these time-consuming de-dupe computations.

“The expansion of our Express DR family with the DR 250/255 cards should greatly appeal to two customer groups: de-duplication ISVs looking to maximize their performance over software only algorithms and end-users who will be looking for appliances that include the acceleration card for performance gains and support of corporate green initiatives,” said John Matze, vice president of business development at Hifn.

Pricing and Availability
The Express DR250/255 cards are available now, at a manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $1,195.00


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