Greenbytes Targets Excessive IOPs
Greenbytes was a data storage vendor for some five years, and during that time the company was butting heads with competitors like EMC and HDS that were many times larger and wealthier than them. Then, Greenbytes made an abrupt about face, turned competitors into compatriots, and put a "laser focus" on VDI vendors by offering them an appliance to help them with their IOPs problems.
Specifically, the company is complementing its former foes via its new IO Offload Engine, a small footprint plug-and-play device which was designed to accelerate conventional disk storage systems. Greenbytes, which now bills itself as "a developer of cloud-scale IO-offload solutions that enable organizations to meet VDI performance requirements using their existing architectures," created this new network infrastructure product to drain off transient IO associated with VM booting, rapid provisioning and disk swap.
The beauty of the system is its ability to enable SANs -- which have been widely criticized for creating shared-storage nightmares -- to accommodate only lower IO loads which are required to store and protect application and user data, "dramatically improving performance and driving down expenses commonly caused by VDI/VM environments."
According to Mike Lehrer, Greenbytes' west coast sales director, the IO Offload Engine doesn't touch user data, it just offloads the boot, which has stopped more than one VDI system in its tracks, and performs the swap, without requiring users to alter their existing infrastructures, including their VMware View stacks. The product is purpose-built for managed service providers, telcos and enterprises.
Lehrer says these days, his company is competing with its hardware-based product against companies like Atlantis Computing, which he says employs a more expensive, software-based tool that requires user involvement.
Senior Analyst Mark Bowker of the Enterprise Strategy Group, says that the Greenbytes IO Offload Engine leverages existing infrastructure investments without forcing IT organizations to rip and replace costly IT equipment or redesign the architecture, adding, "It captures the IO-intense data stream and processes it in a more effective and efficient manner without interrupting performance of the integrity of the data stream. The offloading can dramatically help streamline desktop provisioning, eliminate boot storms and erase the pain associated with desktop images constantly swapping to disk."
The company also received a patent for primary deduplication technology in April, and $12 million in series B funding in May. Most recently, it announced that it is expanding its business operations in the European market by enhancing its London presence and opening an office in Amsterdam.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/03/2012 at 12:48 PM