The Zettar zx Appliance · Engineered by Zettar · Delivered on the enterprise platform you trust

Move petabytes at wire speed — turnkey.

One validated box. Rack it and move data at wire speed on day one. zx moved 1 PB in 29 hours over 5,000 miles at 96% utilization in September 2018 — encrypted and checksummed — and ships pretuned, so your team never tunes any hardware or software.

What it is

The data-transfer engineering, already done.

DIY on commodity servers takes months of NIC, PCIe, NUMA, storage, and software tuning — and still falls short of wire speed. We did that work and shipped the result as a turnkey data-transfer appliance. Hardware and software are co-designed, validated, and supported as one solution — nothing to integrate, tune, or troubleshoot, except mounting your production storage.

// PRETUNED

Wire speed, no tuning

The zx software is optimized with machine learning to the matched hardware, so it runs at line rate out of the box — nobody on your team or your vendor's tunes a thing.

// SYSTEM-ENGINEERED

Matched end to end

CPU, NIC, PCIe lanes, NUMA, storage, and software matched to saturate the network — the co-design that hits ~10× typical movers.

// SUPPORTED

Enterprise-grade & supported

Enterprise hardware with global support and supply chain — one accountable solution, the procurement path you already trust.

The data-movement layer: storage pool to a switch to Zettar zx appliances to a switch to a router to external connections; aggregated storage IOPS and throughput exceed the target transfer rate.
The appliance is the data-movement layer between the production storage and the wire. Source: Fang et al., arXiv:2512.15028 (CC BY 4.0).
The engine inside

One appliance. Every data path.

Powered by the Zettar zx unified data mover — file, object, local sync, and high-speed streaming, all in one.

zx File

Bulk file and file↔object (coupled with zx Object) transfers at petascale, with massive parallelism.

zx Object

S3-compatible — object↔object and file↔object, high concurrency with multipart movement.

zx Single-Site

Scale-out local copy and sync — a far more efficient rsync counterpart for cluster-scale data.

zx Streaming

Stream live, fast-growing data at line rate the moment it's produced — scaling out with no software ceiling.

Product strength

The only unified mover proven at petascale.

Most movers do one thing, then stall at scale. zx is one architecture that moves files, objects, and live streams — and it won the Supercomputing Asia 2019 Data Mover Challenge.

Unified · petascale-proven

One mover, every workload

The only unified scale-out data mover proven at petascale — file, object, and streaming in one stack. Winner of the SC Asia 2019 Data Mover Challenge.

Symmetric · peer-to-peer

Self-healing scale-out

Every node both sends and receives. Clusters self-organize and self-heal, and throughput scales linearly as you add nodes.

Multitenant · secure

Isolated and verified

Per-user data isolation for shared environments, with unconditional end-to-end checksums and TLS on every transfer.

Bulk · stream · distribute

Move it any pattern

Bulk transfer, live streaming, and smart distribution — broadcast to many endpoints or use bandwidth-efficient chain patterns.

One architecture, every scale

From a compact edge box to datacenter scale-out — and beyond.

The same co-designed data mover, packaged for wherever your data lives — vendor- and form-factor-agnostic, from resource-constrained edge sites to the datacenter core.

Edge · 1–10 Gbps

Mini Appliance

A compact, low-power mini-PC that brings high-efficiency transfer to hospitals, clinics, and remote labs — no specialist IT or exotic hardware required.

Core · 100 Gbps

HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 11

The enterprise core appliance: dual Intel Xeon, a multi-terabyte NVMe burst buffer, and 100 Gb networking — fully supported by HPE.

Scale-out · 400 Gbps+

Multi-node & 2U2N

Linear scale-out across nodes for 400 Gbps and beyond, optionally in a dense single chassis — the same architecture behind the 1 PB record.

Embedded

DPU & instrument-resident

zx embeds directly in NVIDIA and Intel DPUs, creating a high-performance data path that bypasses the cloud software stack. It also embeds in high-speed instruments such as CryoEM microscopes and genome sequencers.

Every appliance configuration shares one co-designed software/hardware stack and a high-speed NVMe burst buffer for staging — so the engineering stays consistent whether you move data at the edge or scale out to fill a 1.6 Tbps link.

How it's delivered

Turnkey — on the platform you already run.

The zx Appliance arrives pre-integrated, validated, and pretuned — racked and moving data at wire speed on day one. Zettar delivers and supports the complete system as one solution, on the enterprise server platform your organization already standardizes on.

Single solution

Delivered and supported as one

Record-setting Zettar software and enterprise server hardware — quoted, delivered, and supported together as one appliance, with a single point of contact.

Validated build

Engineered, not assembled

One configuration, integrated and tested end to end — it racks as a single unit and runs at wire speed, with nothing to source, assemble, or tune on site.

Platform-neutral by design

On the hardware you trust

Qualified on HPE today, with AIC and MiTAC builds already engineered — and extensible to enterprise platforms like Supermicro, Dell, or others you run.

Engineered with HPE

Enterprise hardware. One accountable solution.

Zettar selects, matches, and pretunes every hardware component to the zx data mover, then delivers and supports it as one solution. The proven core configuration is the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 11 — pairing zx with enterprise hardware, global support, supply chain, and the procurement path your organization already trusts. The result: one accountable solution, a lower total cost than a DIY transfer stack, and far less engineering time to stand up and run.

Talk to us about the appliance →
Security & governance

Built to satisfy your security team.

Secure data transfer that fits the controls you already run: encryption and integrity on every transfer, access through your existing identity provider, bandwidth you govern, and data that stays in your own formats.

Encryption & integrity

Every byte verified

Trust what lands — no silent corruption, nothing exposed in transit.

Transfers are encrypted in flight and checksummed end to end, so integrity is confirmed on every move.

Identity & access

Your IAM, not another silo

Access follows the directory you already manage.

Supports Active Directory, OpenID Connect (OIDC), and Bearer tokens — no separate user store to provision or audit.

Bandwidth governance

Control what moves, and when

Movement that respects the rest of your network.

Built-in Quality of Service (QoS) governs how much bandwidth each transfer takes, so production traffic is never starved.

Data sovereignty

Your data stays yours

You decide where data lives, and in what shape.

Vendor-agnostic by design: data moves in native formats across your hardware and clouds — no proprietary lock-in, no exit toll.

Configurations are published and reproducible — Our configurations are published and independently reproducible, so your security team can validate behavior before deployment.

Plan your deployment

How many appliances — and what would they save us?

FAQ

Common questions

FAQ

What is the fastest way to move a petabyte of data?

Move it in parallel at line rate, not with single-stream tools. The Zettar zx Appliance moved a full petabyte in 29 hours at 96% link utilization with SLAC and the U.S. DOE — about a petabyte a day on a 100 Gbps link — turnkey and supported as one solution.

FAQ

What does line rate, or wire-speed data movement, mean?

Moving data at roughly 90% or more of what your end-to-end path — storage, hosts, and network together — can sustain, instead of the small fraction single-stream tools like rsync or scp reach. zx is co-designed to realize line rate; it hit 96% of a 5,000-mile link in the SLAC and ESnet petabyte record.

FAQ

What is a data-movement appliance?

A turnkey system that co-engineers hardware and software to move data at wire speed out of the box — no integration or tuning. Zettar selects and matches the hardware components, then the hardware and the zx software are optimized together. The entire resulting system is delivered as one supported solution.

FAQ

How fast is the Zettar zx Appliance?

It runs at line rate — realizing the bandwidth your end-to-end path can sustain, not a fixed per-server number — and scales out with no software ceiling. Proven in production: 1 PB in 29 hours at 96% link utilization under a hardware-imposed 80 Gbps limit with SLAC and ESnet.

FAQ

Does my team or hardware vendor have to tune it?

No — nobody on your team or your hardware vendor tunes anything. Zettar has already done the optimization and ships it preset, validated to hold at line rate over any distance. The appliance arrives ready to move data at wire speed the day it is racked.

FAQ

What do you mean by scale-out, and is there a bandwidth ceiling?

zx is symmetric and peer-to-peer: every node both sends and receives, clusters self-organize and self-heal, and aggregate throughput grows as you add servers. There is no software ceiling — performance is set by your whole environment (storage, hosts, and network together), and zx is co-designed to realize it. Where the path is capable, it scales out to fill very large pipes — up to 1.6 Tbps, as on Taiwan's research networks.

FAQ

What hardware does it run on — am I locked into HPE?

No lock-in. The proven flagship configuration is the HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen 11; AIC and MiTAC builds are already engineered, and zx can be qualified on the enterprise platform you standardize on, such as Supermicro or Dell. It also runs on standard x86 and ARM servers and embeds in NVIDIA and Intel DPUs.

FAQ

What exactly has Zettar proven?

With SLAC (U.S. DOE) and ESnet, in 2018 zx moved an actual petabyte in 29 hours over a 5,000-mile loop at 96% link utilization — line rate — encrypted and checksummed end to end. It won the Supercomputing Asia 2019 Data Mover Challenge. For more examples, see Fang et al., arXiv:2512.15028 (CC BY 4.0).

FAQ

How is it different from rsync, Globus, or Aspera?

Each fails differently at scale: rsync is single-stream; Globus, Aspera, and other movers have never been proven at petascale with a single instance at each end. zx is petascale-proven, turnkey, and roughly 10x faster — open hardware, no lock-in — instead of a months-long DIY tuning project.

FAQ

How do we buy and support it?

It is quoted, delivered, and supported as one appliance — Zettar software plus enterprise hardware support and global supply chain from your platform vendor (HPE today), through the procurement path you already trust. One accountable solution, backed by enterprise support.

FAQ

What can the appliance move?

Files, objects, and live streams across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud — encrypted and checksummed end to end.

Get started

See it move a petabyte.

Schedule a demo and watch the zx Appliance saturate your network — then map it to your environment and a deployment plan.