Between the roughly half a dozen startups leading the transition towards flash storage and all the traditional vendors that have jumped aboard the bandwagon, there isn’t much room left for new contenders. But Reduxio Systems Inc. thinks that the industry could make do with another hybrid array. 

The venture-backed startup is entering the game with the HX 550, a hybrid system that launched this morning with the promise to up the ante on the efficiency of flash storage several notches, starting at the most fundamental system level. The homegrown software that powers the array. dubbed TimeOS, automatically compresses data as it’s written to disk.

That means that the bits don’t have to be moved into memory before performing the operation like with traditional approaches, which kills two birds with one stone, saving resources while speeding up the optimization process considerably. Similar functionality is available in competing arrays from the much-better established Tegile Systems Inc., but Rudexio goes a step further and extends that compression to cache.

As a result, any given data block that repeats itself across multiple files will only be stored once on the expensive DRAM where the most frequently accessed information is kept, which allows organizations to accommodate more information. That functionality come tremendously handy in virtualized environments, where each instance comes with a dedicated operating system images.

The benefits become even more pronounced for virtual desktops, which typically not only share the same platform but also productivity tools and other software used by employees. Rudexio claims that its technology could theoretically enable organizations to serve hundreds of instances directly from cache, potentially saving workers many precious minutes of waiting during the morning boot storm.

But it’s administrators who stand to gain the most from the HX 550, which records every read and write operation to provide a rewind option akin to Apple Inc.’s Time Machine. That makes it possible to restore a storage volume to literally every moment from its creation, removing the need to spend time on planning and implementing snapshot schedules.

The system automates tiering too, automatically placing data in the most appropriate medium – whether it’s cache, flash or disk – to save administrators the hassle of optimizing capacity utilization on their own. Rudexio is currently showcasing its array at VMworld 2015, where SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE is streaming live from the show floor.

Photo via Reduxio