Why create a new company? Aren’t there already many suppliers of data deduplication?

In short, yes there are many companies trying to ride the coattails of the deduplication craze. Deduplication, in one context, solves some very specific issues around massive amounts of data growth, protection, retention and compliance while balancing a shrinking IT budget. As with most technologies introduced to solve one problem, our collective customers have a tendency to push that technology into a new direction, a kind of technical evolution. Deduplication is no different. With its initial focus on target-based backup, we began seeing client side deduplication emerge as well. The natural next step was to have these data reduction technologies evolve and merge with replication technologies and provide a viable electronic vaulting capability.

What we have seen most recently is a push towards the production data space. Instead of having deduplication as an afterthought, why not have this capability integrated into the storage subsystem and provide real-time efficiencies in data reduction at the source. The short answer is that current deduplication technologies do not have the performance capability necessary to operate without negatively impacting production applications– they just aren’t fast or responsive enough.

GreenBytes has developed groundbreaking, next generation technologies to address production level performance AND data reduction.

Tell us about how the company started and your executive team?

Robert Petrocelli founded a company called Heartlab in 1994 that did pioneering work in medical information technology and storage in the FDA regulated healthcare IT market. As the market grew, storage became strategic with a number of patents awarded. Heartlab technology eventually became the industry-standard method of long-term storage and interchange of large cardiac data sets. Heartlab was acquired by Agfa in 2005 and the original Heartlab management team founded GreenBytes in 2007. Robert Petrocelli is GreenBytes’ CEO and CTO and Richard Petrocelli serves as president and COO. Matthew Aitkenhead, who was also with Heartlab, is GreenBytes’ VP, Product Marketing and Technical Alliances, and former Dell/EqualLogic area vice president, Rich Shea, is VP, Worldwide Sales.

How will GreenBytes products be different?

GreenBytes is an integral part of the evolution of deduplication technology by addressing and solving the performance impact of deduplicating production data, in-line and before storing data onto the spinning disks. The GreenBytes architecture facilitates many concurrent connections into the storage device without impact or delay to the requester – application or user. This architecture, with its in-line deduplication capability and very high I/O characteristics, lends itself well to production NAS, Virtual Environments and yes, target based backup as well. The other key to the GreenBytes architecture was to build a platform that uses components designed to be extremely power efficient and in a small, affordable footprint.

What market segment are you targeting?

The GreenBytes GB-X Series of storage appliances offers capability that can compliment many environments, both large and small, but we feel the small to medium sized business will realize the biggest return as they look to adopt enterprise capability at affordable prices. Although we are in our third release of our product, we will continue to develop capabilities that may further blur which market segment is appropriate for GreenBytes and our customers.

Your thoughts on storage virtualization?

Storage virtualization has been around for many years and I suspect for many years to come. Much of the storage hardware available today – controllers, hard drives, cache, etc, is complimented by the software that ties them all together for ease of use, management, availability and performance considerations. It has always been the software, micro-code, firmware or application code, regardless of where in the I/O stack it resides, that provides value to the end users, but how those components are assembled into a system are not all the same.

GreenBytes will continue to leverage, integrate with and enhance storage virtualization with our unique approach and intellectual property, continuing the evolution of data reduction techniques and providing value to our customers, in terms of ease of use/deployment, management, availability and performance. And now we are adding power and space efficiencies to the storage virtualization space.

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