By Ann Silverthorn
—Hifn this week announced the addition of two members in its Express DR family—the Express DR 250 and DR 255. Besides encryption and compression, the cards include hardware-accelerated data de-duplication.
"Today, most de-duplication products are software-based, which is slow," says John Matze, Hifn's vice president of business development. "If a company is already using encryption along with compression, adding de-duplication to the mix throws a lot of work onto the CPU."
The cards include two key functions for reducing the amount of redundant data: SHA-1 or MD5 hashing algorithms and single-pass LZS data compression, which provides a 2.5:1 compression ratio on average, according to Hifn officials. An optional encryption engine is also available.
The full-height DR 250 is for 64-bit PCI-X systems and the low-profile DR 255 is for PCI-Express (PCI-e) systems. Hifn claims a throughput rate to 250MBps, which meets the performance requirements of IP SAN and NAS appliances running data de-duplication.
The Express DR 250/255 cards also support a variety of hardware-based data security and authentication functions combined with AES256 encryption, which is considered to be the strongest non-military cryptography technology. The cards also provide a hardware-based ANSI X9.17 random number generator.
MSRP for the Express DR 250/255 accelerator cards is $1,195.
The cards are targeted primarily at ISVs that want to optimize performance of their software-only algorithms, and at end users that need performance acceleration.
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For more information on data de-duplication, see
"Data de-duplication: Questions and answers"
"User survey: Data-protection trends"
"Survey shows rapid adoption of data de-dupe"
"Evaluation criteria for data de-dupe"