GreenBytes Announces HA Inline De-Dupe iSCSI Appliance

GreenBytes, Inc. announced the HA-3000, a high availability inline deduplicating SAN appliance designed for primary storage applications.

The HA-3000 combines the performance of SSD with the density of enterprise-grade magnetic disk in a fault tolerant, dual controller form factor. Paired with GreenBytes’  deduplication features, the HA-3000 is for primary storage missions including block-based back office databases and virtualized environments. GreenBytes provided live demonstrations of the HA-3000 at IP Expo in London, UK, October 19-20, 2011.

Features Include:

• Dual Controllers: The HA-3000 product class delivers dual controller high availability features that are well suited for applications that require this level of availability such as a virtualized iSCSI SAN. The Xeon-based controllers are redundant and can operate independently (Active/Active).
• Redundant Networking Capability: Each HA-3000 controller comes equipped with four 1GbE and two 10GbE network ports for flexible connectivity and redundancy options for customer environments.
• SSD Performance with Magnetic Density: SSD-powered storage systems have typically been prohibitively expensive or too small in capacity to tackle real-world storage missions. With GreenBytes’ Hybrid Storage Architecture (HSA), the intelligent SSD-based cache layer provides advantages of low-latency flash without compromising utility in environments deserving high performance storage. Additionally, with virtual pool and thin provisioning features, users can dynamically grow storage and simultaneously opt to accelerate performance by adding additional SSD to the intelligent cache layer configuration.
• Inline Deduplication: There are few appliance products that claim to be ‘inline’ deduplication systems, and most of those are relegated to data protection missions because of their inability to handle diverse I/O profiles. With the HA-3000, deduplication and compression figure into the utility of the appliance. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments benefit from the reduction associated with deduplication, yet the appliance delivers the write-IOPS required for the extremes of boot, login and virus scanning storms in production VDI environments.
• Enterprise Management and Features: With the GreenBytes StorageManager graphical management tool, storage administrators can configure and provision the HA-3000 for use as a HA iSCSI SAN. With the built-in snapshot and replication manager (all software features are included with no optional licenses), the HA-3000 can be paired to work with other GreenBytes systems (including the GB-X Series), all from a single-pane-of-glass interface.
• HA-3000 Configuration Options: The HA-3000 can be configured as a dual-controller, general-purpose iSCSI SAN or enhanced with additional intelligent SSD cache for virtual environments. In either configuration, the system can be configured for Active/Passive or Active/Active access to the storage pool(s). When configured Active/Active with the optional HA-3000 storage expansion unit, the controller design accelerates achievable IOPS, broadening the range of target storage applications within the single product family.
• Performance: The HA-3000 performance envelope is greater than other iSCSI SANs in the same price class. With GreenBytes’ Hybrid Storage Architecture (HSA), an intelligent SSD-enabled cache layer accelerates read and write IOPS for the most demanding of virtual infrastructure projects, including large enterprise VDI.
• Scalability: The HA-3000 series offers a range of capacities aimed squarely at the challenges of virtual infrastructure projects and other business-critical applications requiring highly available SAN storage. The HA-3000 has raw capacities ranging from 26 TB to 78 TB. With additional optimizations of deduplication and compression, the real-world capacities of the systems are typically much greater, especially in the area of desktop virtualization.

"The challenges with building storage infrastructure leveraging solid state storage to support a virtualized server or desktop environment relate to cost of the tier, capacity of the tier and reliability of solid state appliances, and many solid state storage products fall short in all three areas," said George Crump, Chief Steward, Storage Switzerland. "The GreenBytes HA-3000 reverses this trend by intelligently leveraging solid state disk and balancing its use with mechanical drives for less performance-sensitive data to keep the system cost effective. The HA-3000 then completes the puzzle by offering a no single point of failure design that ensures the critical uptime that virtualized environments require."

"The European market is looking for more performance and capacity for their growing data, and the virtualization of servers and desktops requires both at a fair price," said Jur Faber, CEO of Consolidate IT. "The primary storage market is currently demanding and lacking an appliance like the HA-3000, and with inline deduplication and hybrid storage features, we expect that it will have a significant impact on the European storage market."

"The HA-3000 represents a new paradigm of HA storage economics that yield greater capacity and performance without breaking the bank," said Bob Petrocelli, CEO of GreenBytes. "With the adoption rate of virtual environments on the rise, along with the associated storage performance challenges, the HA-3000 platform is perfectly positioned for this continued growth by providing IT managers and administrators with an infrastructure that will meet the demands of the rapidly changing IT landscape."

HA-3000 will be available in January 2012.