Posted by Michael Robinson on Fri, Mar 05, 2010 @ 11:40 AM
Nothing like a little friendly competition!
GreenBytes is thrilled to participate in the Citrix Ready StorageLink Challenge with the submission of our Oscar-worthy video GreenBytes and Citrix StorageLink Present: When a Boot Storm Strikes.
GreenBytes' next generation storage architecture featuring inline deduplication and integration with Citrix StorageLink enables users to rapidly deploy VDIs with a 90% or more reduction in storage requirements.
Be entertained and educated by watching our video, and please be sure to cast your vote!
Winners announced on April 19. Thanks for your support, and we hope to see you in San Francisco in May at Citrix Synergy.
Cheers!
Posted by Damien Bowersock on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 @ 07:13 AM
As a storage junkie, 2009 was the year of
deduplication. With the
well-publicized bidding war between EMC and NetApp over Data Domain, the big
boys finally validated the value of reducing your storage footprint. 2010 looks to be more of the same. It's not news that the economy is in
the tank and everybody is feeling the strain of budget cutting. Any way that IT organizations can
reduce their spend and shorten ROIs will be beneficial in the near future. Here are a few predictions for the next
12 months:
1. Channel partner programs will be stronger
than ever. With large vendors
continuing to reduce the field sales forces to grow the bottom line, new paths
to market will be important.
Therefore, channel programs will continue to grow and expand the options
available to resellers. Likewise,
vendors will be asking channel partners to carry more of the load in the pre-
and post-sale process.
2. Channel partners will need to be careful
with their customer base. Times
are tough. Big company, little
company - it doesn't matter. Watch
out for vendors taking deals direct to accelerate the sales cycle. When that happens, look for replacement
vendors that can fulfill the same need and guarantee your mutual success.
3. Deduplication will move beyond backup and
archive. Historically, the
only company to successfully leverage deduplication technology outside of the
backup and archive world is NetApp.
ASIS paved the way for new vendors, such as GreenBytes, to provide high
performance dedupe in virtual machine storage. Performance constraints that have typically plagued
deduplication engines are beginning to disappear. It would not be surprising to see a potentially
"game-changing" announcement from more than a single vendor this year.
Let's see how this pans out. It could turn out to be an exciting year in the storage
market.
Next Week...
GreenBytes Goes Global!
Posted by Damien Bowersock on Thu, Dec 17, 2009 @ 07:05 AM
Apparently, judging by the response to my previous post,
everyone is struggling to find ways to reduce the storage explosion in their
data centers. So, let's discuss
one of the major problems in data storage that has a fairly simple solution. A problem I call the "Capacity Creep
Dilemma."
The Capacity Creep Dilemma occurs when the following
scenario plays out in an IT organization:
1.
A developer, tasked with creating a new
application, requests storage for his/her new project. In this example, will use a 100GB
storage requirement.
2.
The storage administrator, receiving this
request, thinks to himself, "I know this person is always wrong so I'll setup
200GB." And, having no available capacity on the SAN, submits an expansion
request to purchase a new tray of disks.
After running his RAID calculator for RAID5 with 146GB drives and a hot
spare, he nets out a request for 4 drives or 600GB.
3.
The storage manager, having dealt with the
storage administrator before, knows that there are probably other requests that
haven't been fulfilled and it's cheaper to buy a full shelf of 15 drives than a
partially populated one. Therefore,
requests from purchasing the acquisition of 15x146GB drives or 2190GB of
storage.
4.
The purchasing, privy to the year-end "deal"
gets a buy-one-get-one offer and submits an order for two shelves, which yields
nearly 4.5TB of storage.
This case may seem extreme, but these scenarios play out
every day. Take a serious look at
you current SAN and calculate the amount of data stored for the primary copy
versus the physical disk it resides on.
Odds are your real utilization rate is around 25-30%. And that would be the best-case
scenario.
So, how do you solve this problem? The reality is, unless you are willing to make fundamental
changes in architecture and habit; you may not. But the good news is technology has changed. Most of these rituals are predicated on
10-12 years of SAN purchasing habits.
But, the technology that we have today is not the same Fibre Channel
based architectures of yesteryear.
It is time to move from physically tying the data to the
drive. By creating an abstraction
layer between the physical device and data set, customers can provision volumes
more quickly and increase utilizations.
One of the big problems in the past was getting the spindle count high
enough to hit performance needs, but not have too much excess capacity lying
around. By utilizing a high-speed
file system such as GBFS you can have the best of both worlds. GreenBytes allows you to have both NAS
and block-level storage presented without physically tying you down to an
individual spindle or spindle set.
Everyone knows the actuator is the slowest moving part - why strap your
performance to it?
And to think, we haven't even touched on improving efficiency
with Thin Provisioning or Deduplication.
Take all the functionality that virtual servers have brought to the
server team and apply it to storage.
With GreenBytes, you can.
Posted by Damien Bowersock on Mon, Nov 30, 2009 @ 02:32 PM
This morning I found myself emerging from a four-day
gluttonous bender that is the Thanksgiving tradition. During the holiday season, many people pause to reflect
back on the previous year and their status in time and space. Today, I too am one of those people;
reflecting on my seemingly ever expanding waistline. Which, I guess as an American, makes me average. Rapid expansion is acceptable this time
of year. (If only I could use the
extra pounds to hibernate.)
For IT shops, it is the end of the year and that means data
production and storage consumption is at an all-time high. Unfortunately, just as me, you can't
blame the extra bits being spun to disk on "preparing for three months of
blissful slumber." Instead, start
coming up with a new plan.
While we are in this time of reflection, take a moment as an
IT organization to evaluate your data retention and, more importantly, deletion
policies. This is generally a time
when IT organizations are limited in active projects, so it is a good time to
do some analysis. Determine if you
can eliminate or cut back on the 27 years of tape technology you have stored in
the vault at the back of the warehouse (you know who you are!) For production data, start determining
how you can reduce the footprint of the storage being consumed by building an
archive. Or, if you have the
impetus, give us a call and find out how you could deduplicate that production
storage. Any way you take it now
is the time to come up with a plan to trim your data's waistline.
So, embark with me on a journey of contraction. Each week I am going to strive to find
one new way to contract my waist.
I'm calling on IT administrators and managers to find one new way each
week to contract your waste. Post
your creative ideas in the comments section, and each week I'll report my
progress and summarize some of the amazing solutions I'm sure you are bound to
concoct.
Seasons Greetings!
Posted by Bob Petrocelli on Thu, Sep 17, 2009 @ 09:15 AM
Bob Petrocelli here, CEO of GreenBytes, and this is my first blog entry on our new website. Expect plenty of information about how our technology works and performs in the coming weeks. I thought I would start off this blog by demonstrating something unique in our storage appliance. One of our objectives was to provide a lot of information directly to users about the performance of the deduplication engine. One way to do this is to ask the system administrator to run MMC (Microsoft Management Console) and look directly at the statistics presented in the storage pool summary.
This provides a great overview of the optimization at the storage pool level. But why should admins have all the fun? We have taken this concept a step further and given our users the power to examine their own files. Try right clicking on a file stored on our appliance from Windows Explorer and select properties. Check out the GreenBytes tab:
Pretty cool! Now, if you want to know how "dedupalicious" your data is, you no longer need to guess!
Stay tuned -- more fun stuff is coming.