Thousands of companies rely on high-performance transactional databases to power mission-critical operations such as e-commerce, customer management, asset monitoring, real-time analytics, and much more. For those businesses, data security and continuity are vital to success, but essential best practices like backups can divert valuable computing resources and increase the risk of broken SLAs. Data compression software can reduce backup times, but it can still pull computing power away from core business functions. 

Intel has developed a different approach—a hardware acceleration solution called Intel QuickAssist Technology (Intel QAT). Intel QAT offloads compute-intensive compression and decompression tasks—freeing the main CPU to improve overall system efficiency and performance. If an organization’s servers are equipped with new Intel Xeon 6 processors (or older 4th and 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors), they can benefit from integrated QAT technology at no additional cost. 

To show how QAT on servers with Intel Xeon processors can improve backups—as opposed to using servers powered by AMD processors with software compression—we compared backup times for a SQL Server 2022 database on VMware vSphere 8 in both idle and transaction workload scenarios. In the scenarios we tested, we found that enabling Intel QAT can speed backup times by up to 41.5 percent over software compression alone—whether your servers continue running workloads during backup or remain otherwise idle during scheduled backup windows. 

If you manage databases, hardware-accelerated compression on servers with Intel QAT-capable Xeon processors can help protect your data assets through faster backups—while still ensuring SLA-compliant performance. 

For more details about our data backup performance comparison study, check out the report below.