Offloaded data transfers (ODX) support was added in release 3.0.53 of the storage virtualization software. As with VAAI, offloaded data tranfers enables high speed copy operations by offloading the entire copy operation to the array. This feature is beneficial for virtual machine (VM) clone operations, significantly reducing host CPU and network utilization. Users of ESXi will notice the similarities with VAAI third party / full copy primitive.
QUADStor storage virtualization takes the ODX feature to another level by with its integrated data deduplication feature. The benefits of data deduplication during a hardware offload copy operation is detailed in http://www.quadstor.com/vstorage-apis-for-array-integration-vaai.html
More information on QUADStor's ODX implementation at http://www.quadstor.com/offloaded-data-transfers-odx.html
4K sector VDisks
While 512e (512 sector disk emulation) needs to be enabled for a VDisk for ESXi datastores, XenServer volumes and for Hyper-V 2.0, the recommendation is to stick with the native 4K sector VDisks for Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3.0 since 4K sectord disks are fully supported by Server 2012 and Windows 8. More on this at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510009