Home > Data Protection > PowerProtect DD Series Appliances > Dell EMC PowerProtect DD Series Appliances: Hardware Assisted Compression > Technical overview
DD series appliances use hardware assisted technology that delivers higher compression at higher performance than the previous generation of DD appliances. This new technology typically yields 30% more logical capacity per physical TB[1] and allows the system resources that would otherwise be used for compression/decompression operations to be used by the system to reduce customers’ backup and restore windows.
The DD6400, DD6900, DD9400, and DD9900 are equipped with a hardware accelerator card that is used for compression.
The card allows the DDOS to offload compression and decompression processes to the hardware accelerator and free up CPU resources to improve appliance performance (only for gzfast and gz, lz continues to use the system CPUs). The gzfast compression algorithm is the default local compression method used on the DD6400, DD6900, DD9400, and DD9900. No additional configuration is required. This algorithm yields higher compression compared to the previous generation of Data Domain appliances which by default use the lz algorithm.