- Huawei claims backup compression ratios that reach an extraordinary 90:1 level
- Patented algorithms are at the center of Huawei’s reduction strategy
- Four separate reduction stages shrink data before long-term storage
Huawei has unveiled a hardware compression card that claims a data reduction ratio that reaches as high as 90:1 under suitable workloads.
The figure applies specifically 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 across the enterprise storage market.
A patented algorithm built around a non-linear transformation
The card is part of Huawei’s all-flash OceanProtect Backup Storage systems, including two recently announced models, the X8100 and X9100.
Compression relies on a proprietary algorithm family Huawei calls HZU, described by the company as using a fast non-linear transformation paired with lightweight context prediction methods.
Huawei says this approach outperforms the long-established Lempel-Ziv compression paradigm, increasing the achievable compression ratio by around 30% under comparable conditions.
The dynamic technique is patented and covers both deduplication and compression methods used throughout Huawei’s wider backup architecture.
Choosing the most suitable algorithm depends heavily on the specific backup policy and the underlying data types involved in each implementation.
Previous generation OceanProtect systems achieved a relatively modest reduction ratio of 72:1, meaning the newly announced generation also runs up to 50% faster.
Reduction pipeline relies on dense SSD deployment
Reduction occurs across four distinct stages, beginning with preprocessing designed to clean incoming data before further processing takes place.
This is followed by multilayer, inline, and variable-length deduplication, then HZBC compression, and finally byte-level compression applied to the data that remains.
The compression card also offloads up to 22% of the processing needs away from the backup system’s main CPU during operation.
This offloading matters because OceanProtect systems rely on all-flash media instead of cheaper disk-based alternatives for storage.
Huawei specifically uses QLC storage media paired with an adaptive SLC zone reserved for frequently accessed hot data.
This combination is intended to support faster data recovery when backups ultimately need to be restored during outages.
Since SSD capacity costs significantly more than disk per terabytes, squeezing more efficient storage out of 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, with the algorithm doing the reduction itself and the flash media deciding why that reduction pays off.
Prospective customers will likely need to test the OceanProtect platform directly against their own backup data sets.
Whether customers experience reductions approaching 90:1 is likely to depend heavily on datasets, retention policies, and real-world deployment conditions.
Via Blocksandfiles
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