Altior Announces State-of-the-Art Compression-Decompression File System Accelerator for High Performance Primary and Secondary Data Storage Applications

Update: Exar Corporation Acquires Altior Inc. to Provide Additional Growth in Data Compression (February 19, 2013)

New AltraFlex™ Compression Decompression File System (CeDeFS) Accelerator Solution Significantly Increases Disk Capacity Utilization Without Performance Degradation

EATONTOWN, NJ — Sept. 20, 2011 — Altior™ Inc., an innovative developer of advanced network and storage embedded systems solutions, has announced the availability of its AltraFlex™ Compression-Decompression File System (CeDeFS) Accelerator solution, which uses the industry-standard GZIP/GUNZIP data compression/decompression protocols to increase disk space and boost disk capacity utilization, seamlessly and transparently. It combines high performance data compression, advanced hardware acceleration technology, and device drivers for high-density primary storage. CeDeFS requires no modification to either applications or workflows, eliminating the effort-intensive task of custom system integration. The solution is targeted at applications that generate large and ever-growing amounts of data, such as enterprise storage applications, multimedia storage, and Web content management.

“The AltraFlex CeDeFS Accelerator benefits high performance storage solution OEMs and their customers with significant data compression, immediately increasing their return on investment for data storage capacity and appreciably reducing their future capital expenditures,” said Robert Zecha, vice president of operations of Altior Inc. “Storage OEMs can now offer tangible cost-savings and ease of use to their customers as a competitive advantage in their marketplace.”

Overcoming the Limitations of Software-Only Compression

The AltraFlex CeDeFS Accelerator is an integrated systems solution that is transparently layered over the native file system, which can be easily implemented into current and future designs, enabling faster time to market. CeDeFS enables application or flow modifications, allowing OEMs’ customers the ability to deploy it rapidly and seamlessly, saving time, valuable resources and future storage hardware costs.

CeDeFS can be installed over any Linux file system. It is the industry’s first hardware acceleration solution to process compression protocols in Linux file systems and scales in 10 Gbps increments by the addition of multiple accelerators. CeDeFS preserves all native file system semantics such as journaling, atomic writes and access control to ensure that no application or workflow modifications will be required.

Unlike software-only compression techniques, the AltraFlex CeDeFS:

• Integrates data compression with the native file system, both increasing existing storage capacity and reducing future capital expenditures.
• Transparently overlays the native file system, thus requiring no changes to applications or workflows, and resulting in a low cost of adoption and ownership.
• Executes data compression with advanced hardware acceleration technology that imposes no performance degradation. 
• Increased I/O operations throughput with existing channel bandwidth.

“Customer tests have shown up to a 3X performance improvement over software-only compression, with a corresponding reduction in CPU and memory usage,” said Hank Cohen, director of product marketing of Altior Inc. “Many software-only approaches suffer performance degradation because they compress files and folders on a whole-file basis, and opening and closing such files can waste CPU cycles. Even software-only systems that compress extents, rather than files and folders, suffer degradation. The AltraFlex CeDeFS Accelerator alleviates that problem.”

The AltraFlex CeDeFS Accelerator is available as a plug-in, PCI Express card with a half-length, half-height form factor. For more information about the AltraFlex CeDeFS Accelerator solution, please visit http://www.altior.com/products/altraflex/altraflex-compression-file-system-accelerator.html for the product brief and white paper.

Price and Availability

For pricing and availability, please contact Altior sales at +1 732-440-1280 ext. 219, or email sales@altior.com.

About Altior

Founded in 2004 as CebaTech, Altior™ offers a broad range of industry-leading hardware and software solutions for the networking and storage markets. Altior products deliver high performance for increased throughput, significant energy savings, and effective network and storage optimization. Altior AltraCores™ are self-contained standalone silicon intellectual property (IP) cores that deliver high-performance offloading of computing-intensive functions from the CPU(s), without data loss. Altior AltraFlex™ is a scalable and flexible platform solution that is easily integrated into networking and storage devices. Altior’s platform solutions are designed to be cost-effective, energy-efficient, and deliver realizable value to customers by enhancing system performance, reducing development time, and achieving faster time to market. For more information, please visit http://www.altior.com.