Exar With Backup-to-Disk Hardware Compression for Windows Server 2008

Exar Corporation introduced the industry’s first hardware-accelerated backup-to-disk data compression solution for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 servers and appliances. The addition of Exar’s BitWackr C Series to a Microsoft Windows Server equipped with popular backup software typically cuts backup-to-disk capacity requirements in half while reducing backup time by as much as two-thirds.

Until now, the use of hardware compression has been restricted to tape drives while disk and RAID data compression has been performed by software running on a server’s CPU. The value of hardware compression in tape drives is well established because it reduces the backup data footprint – typically by half – while improving backup performance. By adding hardware compression to disk and RAID with the BitWackr C Series, storage managers can now bring the performance and capacity reduction benefits formerly seen only with tape to disk-based backup.

“In today’s IT environment increasing efficiency is the name of the game,” said Bob Farkaly, director, storage product marketing, Exar. “The BitWackr C Series provides OEMs, System Integrators, and Value-Added Resellers an opportunity to deliver a new optimization tool to their customers. Additionally, combining the BitWackr C Series with newly-emerging deduplicating backup software offerings from Symantec, CA Technologies, Commvault, BakBone and others can turbo charge the data reduction ratios reported by these products.”

Disk storage can be either internal to the server or appliance, directly attached to the server or appliance via SCSI or SAS, or SAN attached using iSCSI or Fibre Channel. Offering high levels of both single and multi-stream performance, an off-the-shelf server equipped with BitWackr C Series compression is capable of backing up Enterprise data at line rates and is compatible with all popular backup software offerings. After installation and configuration, BitWackr C Series reduces backup data stored on disk transparently and in-line – typically by 2:1 – while improving backup performance. In addition to backup to disk, the BitWackr C Series is suitable for a broad range of applications including NAS, SharePoint and System Center Data Protection Manager.

Lab Testing
Exar tested both traditional backup software products and the latest generation of backup software products that feature data deduplication. As detailed in the test results, the BitWackr C Series for Windows Servers simultaneously reduced the amount of backup data that needed to be stored (by nominally 2:1) while improving backup performance, hence shortening the backup window. Average four stream traditional, non-deduplicating backup performance was enhanced by the BitWackr C Series by 52% above that delivered by the same backup software backing up the same data using the same OS, backup server and disk subsystem.

Availability
The BitWackr C Series is comprised of software and a PCI-Express acceleration card and is available for purchase. Samples and evaluation kits are available now.