GreenBytes: The Dawn of Hybrid Storage Architecture
Posted by Jim Jenkins on Wed, Apr 28, 2010 @ 09:25 AM
Just as in the automotive industry, where combinations of computing power, electric motors and internal combustion engines are being combined for positive results, the storage industry is ready to enter a new phase where use of multiple storage technologies will result in significantly better products and reduced costs.
In recent years, the storage industry has recommended a tiered use of storage products. By implementing progressively higher performance (and more expensive) hard drives, a user could match application performance requirements to appropriate storage capabilities. In order to get high performance, users have been forced to utilize expensive and high power disk technologies with expensive interfaces such as Fibre Channel. Lower performing disk technologies, such as SATA drives, have been relegated for use with second tier storage applications.
GreenBytes' unique Hybrid Storage Architecture (HSA) is changing this simple tiered disk approach. HSA incorporates a combination of high-performance (high-cost, low-power) solid state disk (SSD) drives, lower performance (lower cost, lower power) SATA hard drives, high-performance inline data deduplication, MAID energy management and 10 GbE connectivity. The resulting product is a high-performance, high-capacity system that is extremely power efficient and low cost.
GreenBytes' Hybrid Storage Architecture implements inline data deduplication that is performance optimized through the use of SSD for cache and logging functions. Read and write operations from the storage system are largely through SSD, minimizing the IO requirements to hard disk. This allows use of lower performance SATA disk drives while giving the system the performance of faster drives. GreenBytes goes one step further to reduce energy use by implementing lower power 2.5" SATA drives and implementing MAID energy management functionality.
The GreenBytes GB-X Series of products is leading the industry by providing a unique hybrid storage technology solution to address the needs of both primary storage and backup applications. Just as in the automotive industry, it will take time for the leaders to change the overall market, but change will come!
