AHA Improved All-Flash Array Performance With Data Compression Accelerators

AHA Products Group (AHA), part of Comtech EF Data Corporation, , a wholly-owned subsidiary of Comtech Telecommunications Corp. and part of Comtech’s Commercial Solutions segment announced that Juan Deaton, research scientist, AHA, will present ‘Smashing Bits: Comparing Data Compression Techniques in Storage‘ at the Storage Developers Conference.

 AHA 374

As all-flash array technology matures and moves into full feature platforms, early adopter applications, such as server virtualization and on-line transaction processing, will be surpassed by industrial internet-of-things applications. These future applications are expected to generate peta-bytes of ephemeral data that require large compression rates and data write throughput. In these applications, storage controller overhead from data compression can lead to significant performance impacts. This presentation compares the performance of different data compression algorithms (LZO, LZ4, GZIP, and BZIP2). Comparisons will be shown in terms of throughput, CPU utilization, and power.

Based on performance experiments, the AHA374 GZIP accelerators can provide the same compression throughput as 14 Xeon cores performing LZO/LZ4. Additionally, the AHA374 GZIP accelerator increases flash memory cycle lifetime and storage capacity by almost 50% by providing higher compression ratios than LZO/LZ4.