- Huawei claims backup compression ratios reaching an extraordinary 90:1
- Patented algorithms are at the center of Huawei’s reduction strategy
- Four distinct reduction stages reduce data before long-term storage
Huawei has unveiled a hardware compression card claiming a data reduction ratio of up to 90:1 under appropriate workloads.
This figure applies specifically to backup data with high redundancy, such as daily full backups of virtual machines accumulated over time.
Huawei claims that this result is 20% higher than that of the leading alternative currently available in the enterprise storage market.
A patented algorithm built around a nonlinear transformation
The card is part of Huawei’s OceanProtect all-flash backup storage systems, including two recently announced models, the X8100 and X9100.
Compression relies on a family of proprietary algorithms that Huawei calls HZU, described by the company as using a fast nonlinear transformation combined with lightweight context prediction methods.
Huawei claims that this approach outperforms the long-established Lempel-Ziv compression paradigm, increasing the achievable compression ratio by approximately 30% under comparable conditions.
The dynamic technique is patented and covers both deduplication and compression methods used across Huawei’s broader backup architecture.
Selecting the most appropriate algorithm is highly dependent on the specific backup policy and the underlying data types involved in each deployment.
Previous generation OceanProtect systems achieved a relatively modest reduction ratio of 72:1, meaning the announced new generation also works up to 50% faster.
The reduction pipeline relies on a dense deployment of SSDs
Reduction occurs in four distinct stages, starting with preprocessing designed to clean incoming data before further processing takes place.
Next comes multi-layer, inline, variable-length deduplication, then HZBC compression, and finally byte-level compaction applied to the remaining data.
The compression card additionally offloads up to 22% of the processing demand from the backup system’s main processor during operation.
This offload is important because OceanProtect systems rely on all-flash media rather than cheaper disk storage alternatives.
Huawei specifically uses QLC storage media combined with an adaptive SLC area reserved for frequently accessed hot data.
This combination is intended to support faster data recovery once backups eventually need to be restored in the event of a failure.
Since SSD capacity costs considerably more than disk per terabyte, extracting more efficient storage from the same physical disks directly improves the cost effectiveness of an all-flash backup system.
In this sense, the compression algorithm and the SSD architecture work together, with the algorithm doing the actual reduction and the flash media determining why that reduction pays off.
Potential customers will likely need to test the OceanProtect platform directly on their own backup data sets.
Whether customers receive discounts close to 90:1 will likely depend heavily on actual data sets, retention policies, and deployment conditions.
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