- Huawei claims backup compression ratios reach an extraordinary level of 90:1
- Proprietary algorithms are at the center of Huawei’s reduction strategy
- Four separate reduction stages reduce data before long-term storage
Huawei has unveiled a hardware compression card that claims to have a data reduction ratio reaching up to 90:1 under suitable workloads.
The figure specifically applies to backup data with high redundancy, such as daily full virtual machine backups accumulated over time.
Huawei says this result is 20% higher than the leading alternative currently available in the enterprise storage market.
A proprietary algorithm built around a nonlinear transformation
The card is part of Huawei’s all-flash OceanProtect backup storage systems, including two recently announced models, the X8100 and X9100.
The compression is based on a family of proprietary algorithms that Huawei calls HZU, which the company describes as a fast nonlinear transformation combined with lightweight context prediction methods.
Huawei says this approach surpasses the long-established Lempel-Ziv compression paradigm, increasing the achievable compression ratio by about 30% under comparable conditions.
The dynamic technique is patented and covers both deduplication and compression methods used throughout Huawei’s broader backup architecture.
Selecting the most appropriate algorithm depends largely on the specific backup policy and underlying data types involved in each implementation.
Previous generation OceanProtect systems achieved a comparatively modest 72:1 turndown ratio, meaning the newly announced generation also runs up to 50% faster.
Reduction process depends on dense SSD implementation
Reduction occurs in four distinct stages, beginning with preprocessing designed to clean incoming data before further processing occurs.
This is followed by multi-layer, inline, variable-length deduplication, then HZBC compression, and finally byte-level compaction applied to the remaining data.
The compression card also offloads up to 22% of the main CPU processing demand of the backup system during operation.
That offload is important because OceanProtect systems rely on all-flash media rather than cheaper disk-based storage alternatives.
Huawei specifically uses QLC storage media combined with an adaptive SLC zone reserved for hot, frequently accessed data.
This combination is intended to support faster data recovery once backups eventually need to be restored during outages.
Since SSD capacity costs considerably more than disk capacity per terabyte, extracting more effective storage from the same physical drives directly improves the economics of an all-flash backup system.
In that sense, the compression algorithm and the SSD architecture work together: the algorithm does the actual reduction, and the flash media determines why that reduction is worth it.
Potential customers will likely need to test the OceanProtect platform directly with their own supporting data sets.
Whether customers experience reductions close to 90:1 will likely depend largely on data sets, retention policies, and real-world deployment conditions.
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