Greenbytes today announced its latest storage array, hoping to bring deduplication technology to the masses.
Despite being aimed at the small and medium business (SMB) market, the Solidarity' box has high performance levels.
The storage array is based on solid state technology and contains capacities of between 3.5TB and 13.5TB. The company claims performance of 120,000 4K IOPS and the appliance features dual controllers, able to operate independently, with four 1 GbE and two 10 GbE network ports.
However, it is the inclusion of the deduplication technologies that is getting the industry excited.
Innovations are typically first adopted by larger businesses and slowly trickle down to smaller companies.
Deduplication has been a staple of enterprise storage for some time, with Data Domain - now owned by EMC - leading the way in pioneering the technology. However, the technology has remained external from the SMB market.
"Innovations are typically first adopted by larger businesses and slowly trickle down to smaller companies as they become more affordable and user-friendly," Simon Robinson, research director at The 451 Group, told IT Pro.
"But, [its move to the SMB market] also speaks to the fact that smaller organisations are dealing with the same data growth challenges as larger businesses, and have even fewer skills/resources to deal with it, especially as they are looking to get to grips with server and desktop virtualisation - which can create large amounts of duplicate data."
With GreenBytes especially though, Robinson felt the use of SSD technology also necessitated deduplication technology.
"Storage optimisation and efficiency technologies, such as deduplication, are increasingly necessary components of storage systems that utilise solid state," he said.
"This is still an expensive resource, so squeezing the most value out of it is a paramount concern for cash-strapped IT departments, large and small."
GreenBytes offers inline deduplication which it claims reduces the storage capacity needs by a ration of 12:1 for virtual instances and up to 8:1 for databases. It also provides global deduplication for compressed replicated data.
Michael Robinson, vice president of marketing communications at GreenBytes, told IT Pro it was also about simplicty, helping those SMBs which analyst firm the 451 Group said had "fewer skills/resources" to look after the datacentre.
"For the SMB, Solidarity means the end of complex, HDD-centric, multi-tier storage that can't keep up with I/O and throughput requirements of today's mixed SME storage missions," he said.
"GreenBytes' single tier hyper-performance arrays are priced as solutions for SME storage missions from virtualisation through replicated DR."
The GreenBytes Solidarity storage array will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2012.
