GreenBytes Solidarity Maximizes SSD Performance
After starting out in 2007 with software dedicated to Sun servers, GreenBytes wanted to sell their own turnkey appliances, so the company debuted a single-controller product that is still in use within tier two storage environments. Last October, the ambitious vendor unveiled its first dual controller product, the HA-3000, which use HDDs for capacity and the rapidly rising SSDs for performance.
Now, with the debut of GreenBytes Solidarity, the company has a dedicated, highly available SSD product for small and medium users that is aimed at virtualization and storage and offers benefits of SSD at magnetic capacities and prices.
Many of these SMB customers -- or departments in larger enterprises -- are finding that as they adopt virtualization, they are encountering new storage tiering challenges that require them to offer comprehensive systems that address a wide range of storage capabilities. In order to meet those challenges -- specifically reducing the storage footprint of virtual images -- GreenBytes has worked on deduplication engineering with VMware and Citrix.
Via the GreenBytes GO OS (Globally Optimized Operating System) , which features real-time, inline dedupe and compression, Solidarity packs enterprise-class features into a dual controller unit completely outfitted with SSD, offering 3.5 TB (25 TB effective) to 13.5 TB (60 TB effective), and delivers 70,000 R/W 8K IOPs with deduplication and hardware-assisted compression added.
In addition to combining green capabilities such as lower power consumption and less rackspace along with reduced costs and enhanced TCOs, GreenByes says "Solidarity offers large, virtual storage pools for single-tier storage, eliminating traditional tiering and the need for complicated tiering software processes and heuristics. Additionally, the Solidarity GO OS utilizes unique Smart White technology to coalesce writes and transactional/synchronous I/O to maximize system endurance and performance." This write-coalescing feature extends the life of SSDs.
Go OS also provides iSCSI SAN connectivity that integrates apps requiring high performance storage, while the StorageManager administration interface provides graphical tools and wizards to configure and provision iSCSI LUNs and file systems, along with subsequent monitoring.
Pricewise, three Solidarity nodes range in price from $59,000 to $120,000, and include dedupe and compression capabilities not found in competing products .
GreenBytes has 110 active customers, one-third of which are in Europe, while the other two thirds are in North America. Breaking them down by function, one third of customers utilize data protection, one third use virtualization, and one third employ general file and block storage.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/24/2012 at 12:48 PM