Exar Delivers Hardware-Accelerated Compression Solution

Exar Corporation announced AltraHD, a hardware-accelerated compression solution for Apache Hadoop.

AltraHD functional diagram with Haddop Stack

It enables all applications in the Hadoop stack to be transparently compressed using hardware acceleration, delivering performance and storage efficiency.

It combines Exar’s software technology with hardware compression accelerators to remove costly I/O bottlenecks and optimize the storage capacity for Hadoop.

AltraHD integrates into the Hadoop stack, and is able to transparently compress all files, including files that are stored using the file system as well as files stored locally as intermediate data outside of the file system.

It is compression solution for Hadoop offering:

• Application transparent file system filter that sits below the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to compress all files that are using HDFS.
• Compression codec that compresses intermediate data during the MapReduce phase of Hadoop processing.
• PCIe-based hardware compression card that accelerates all compression operations, maximizing performance while offloading the host CPU. A single card provides up to 3.2GB/s of compression throughput.

“Exar has taken big data analytics to the next level,” stated Rob Reiner, Exar’s director of marketing for data compression and security products. “AltraHD typically improves Terasort performance by 50 – 100%, and typically provides a 3x – 5x savings in storage capacity, enabling unmatched Hadoop cluster performance and efficiency, and establishing AltraHD as the industry leading solution.”

AltraHD is available.