Like BASF in their TV commercials, Hifn is one of those companies that doesn't make the storage and computing products you buy, they make the parts and ingredients that make them better. Amongst those that know it at all, Hifn is best known as patent holder for the LZS compression algorithm used in everything from Cisco routers to just about every tape drive you own. Hifn's main product nowadays are compression and encryption chips that speed up everything from VPN gateways to most of the major virtual tape libraries. Now it is shipping a card, four-way PCIe or 64-bit PCI-X, that in addition to compression and encryption also generates hash values for deduplication.

The mind sort of boggles at the possibilities. Vendors with source server deduplication products like EMC's Avamar and Symantec's PureDisk can relive the main processor of the servers they're backing up, making their solutions acceptable for a wider range of servers. The conventional backup players like Atempo and BakBone that built the logic to make a disk volume look like a VTL can add deduplication. We might even see some lower cost backup appliances.

Hifn's SDK supports up to 4 DR255 cards per server. Each card costs $1200 and supports up to 250 MBps of hash generation, encryption, or compression.

Hifn also is in the clustered iSCSI array business, so we may even see it enter the backup target business directly.