AccelStor, the manufacturer of award-winning all-flash arrays (AFAs), this November announced the latest version of its intelligent firmware, NeoSapphire OS version 4.0. New to the platform, version 4.0 features snapshot image backups to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, delivering integrated device-to-cloud data protection capabilities and increased storage efficiency.

AccelStor adopts the Redirect-on-Write (ROW) and differential backup mechanism in snapshot technology, and customers can configure the automatic backup schedule to fit their needs. In contrast with the traditional copy-on-write method, with ROW the actual data activity involved in taking the snapshot is drastically reduced, greatly eliminating the double write performance penalty while also providing storage space-efficient benefits. The snapshot backup and recovery features are invaluable tools for backing up snapshot images to the public cloud, NFS/CIFS shares of another storage device, or for rolling back to data from a specific point in time.

"The explosion of data and the need to protect it, combined with new threats are reshaping customer expectations and fostering a new demand for consistency," said David Kao, AccelStor Vice President of Worldwide Sales. "AccelStor AFA solutions are designed to give freedom and confidence to organizations by enabling them to mount a powerful, data-centric defense spanning both local devices and the public cloud."