Hifn announced a partnership with Cofio Software Inc. to create advanced Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solutions for Small and Medium Enterprise Customers. The Hifn-Cofio VTL platform leverages Hifn’s Express DR data reduction cards and Cofio’s ViStor VTL software to create backup solutions that deliver market-leading, VTL performance with the industry’s only hardware-accelerated capacity optimization.

ViStor 2.0 VTL platform, incorporating Hifn’s Express DR card technology, provides an enterprise-class, yet cost-effective, VTL solution designed to meet the performance, reliability and affordability requirements of the SME secondary storage market. The combination of disk-based backup, Hifn’s hardware-advantaged and patented capacity optimization technology, and Cofio’s powerful ViStor VTL software enables SMB and SME customers to dramatically improve their backup reliability, ensure data integrity and shrink the backup window while leveraging their existing backup infrastructure, polices and procedures.

“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,” said John Matze, vice president of business development at Hifn. “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.”   

“Our partnership with Hifn adds a strong strategic asset to our long-term outlook with their proven leadership in capacity-optimized storage technology,” said Tony Cerqueira, President of Cofio. “Additionally, 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.”

Hifn’s Express DR cards are the industry’s first enterprise-class data storage reduction accelerators, providing VTL ISVs with a unique go-to-market advantage with an easy-to-integrate capacity optimization solution that leverages multiple processors to deliver unprecedented compression hardware-offload performance with high reliability and intelligent data reduction features. Designed for critical data 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), Express DR improves overall performance and the system total cost of ownership (TCO) while ensuring zero-defect data.  The Express DR product line includes Hifn’s powerful DR 250 and 255 cards, the industry’s first cards that accelerate hashing, compression and encryption algorithms in hardware to off-load the heavy lifting functions and speed up performance to provide multi-gigabit acceleration functions for today’s most demanding data de-duplication and data reduction applications.

Cofio’s ViStor VTL emulates a physical tape library, allowing backups to travel from disk to disk, speed up backup and restore times, and reduce TCO   by seamlessly integrating with an existing backup infrastructure. ViStor provides the ability to split the VTL into multiple libraries, allowing several backup applications to share the same disk resource, and to stage disks to ViStor for centralized backups. The ability to co-exist in the iSCSI and FC worlds gives ViStor a unique edge over other solutions. ViStor is targeted at the system integrator and OEM market, enabling them to extend their disk solution offerings.
 

Cofio Software, Inc.

Hifn, Inc.