Why is the recent qualification for NetBackup with Symantec OpenStorage Technology important?

GreenBytes will always look to provide better value to our customers by developing integrated technology solutions with industry leaders such as Symantec. This integration leverages the programming interface provided by Symantec to its partners to increase speed, productivity and reduce administration overhead while leveraging deduplication within the DR infrastructure. NetBackup Administrators are able to leverage the GreenBytes deduplication appliance and its replication capabilities, off-loading this task from clients or media servers while maintaining NBU catalog awareness. This is a critical step for DR in a NetBackup environment. The OST integration also provides the appropriate filters to align the data reduction capabilities of GreenBytes to the customers’ actual data, increasing the efficiencies of how well the data is reduced. GreenBytes also looks forward to Symantec’s expected support of OST for its Backup Exec product family. GreenBytes, combined with Backup Exec, will bring the benefits of high performance inline deduplication to the SMB back up market.

Your company talks about deduplicating production storage, really? Tell us why and how GB can do this? What scenarios would one want to avoid this?

GreenBytes has developed considerable intellectual property and combined this with several technologies to produce our current product today. Our foundation is built from a modern day file system like Sun Solaris ZFS and then leverages SSDs for speed and performance, along with 2 ½ disk drive technology for increased power efficiencies. The sum total of all these parts are a storage system that offers very high I/O rates for both random and sequential access and allows for concurrent, non-blocking access from many connections, either via NAS or SAN or both.

There are some data sets that do not lend themselves to high levels of deduplication (video, previously compressed images, etc.). In these environments, GreenBytes technology allows customers to disable inline deduplication on a per volume or file system level should they so desire.

What defines the mid-market deduplication space and makes it so special?

The mid-market has the same IT challenges and objectives of larger organizations but they are typically more budget conscious and personnel resource constrained. The mid-market does not want “dumbed down” enterprise solutions. Instead, it is looking for cost effective, flexible (not special purpose), easy to manage, feature rich (not “a la carte”) solutions that don’t require an expensive professional services engagement to install and configure. GreenBytes is uniquely positioned to offer the above value proposition to the mid-market.

How do virtualizing servers and desktops come in to play?

Server and Desktop virtualization is growing by leaps and bounds and GreenBytes is delivering solutions to address many of the scale and resource issues associated with these virtual deployments. Specifically, virtual machines have a tendency to have many common files. Operating system images, as well as other common applications, are simultaneously deployed in hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of virtual machines. While virtualization technologies have resulted in high server utilization and efficiency, they have also introduced some performance challenges at the storage layer. In many cases, back-end storage design for virtual environments had to ensure the aggregate of virtual machines could be serviced by a specific number of spindles. The net result has typically been a gross over provisioning of storage capacity as large numbers of spindles are being deployed in order to meet the performance requirement for multiple concurrent virtual machines.

Server and Desktop virtualization environments ideally require a cost effective high performance storage sub system that can support concurrent access for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of virtual machines while in real time eliminate all of the redundant data contained across all of those virtual machines. This is exactly the GreenBytes value proposition. GreenBytes’ ability to provide non-blocking, concurrent access to production type volumes and be able to rapidly provision new virtual machines or desktops without an explosion of storage on the back-end and sustain the required performance levels to the environment as a whole – this is GreenBytes’ game-changing advantage.

For the technologist reading this or the storage engineer who appreciates “the deep dive”, can you tell this person something that he would really appreciate about the GB-X Series?
Imagine a system with an internal bandwidth capability of processing more than 4.3TB per hour and maintain tens of thousands of transactions per second for multiple users or access methods. This device can be used to reduce data, in-line, and maintain the performance characteristic over time as the repository fills up. More important is the ability to match or even better the read or restore speeds versus the write or ingestion rates – a problem many deduplication engines have today. Imagine being able to do all this at a fraction of what current technologies cost, and set the whole thing up in an afternoon?

So where does GreenBytes go from here?

We view our expanding GB-X Series as being revolutionary and evolutionary in the data storage marketplace, so I would look for GreenBytes to continue developing products that are both cutting-edge and disruptive as we position ourselves to become the leader in next generation storage architecture.

Norman St.Pierre has worked in the technology industry for over 28 years, focusing on hardware, software and services. Norman holds a BSCS from Strayer University and has worked for companies such as Lockheed Martin, EMC, Veritas/Symantec, Pillar Data Systems, IBM and now GreenBytes. Norman has focused the later part of his career in computer storage HW/SW and most recently on Backup/DR, HA and deduplication technologies. His focus has been in customer facing roles helping design simple to complex solutions that solve business problems, reduce costs and bring immediate value to customers with his engagements.

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