ACADEMIA

GreenBytes announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded the company a patent (U.S. No. 8,156,126) for its method of the allocation of data on physical media by a file system that eliminates duplicate data. The patent recognizes GreenBytes' unique primary deduplication technology that figures significantly in the architecture of the company's highly available (HA) Solidarity and HA-3000 data storage platforms where high-performance deduplication solves complex issues for production virtual infrastructure assignments.

Inline deduplication (deduplication processing at the time of data ingest) requires high I/O (input/output) performance and must support scalable storage architectures as well as a high degree of availability and fault tolerance. Addressing the basic problems of in-memory indexing and searching, which are necessary processing steps for inline deduplication, it was discovered that all historical computer index/search methods degraded quickly in performance as addressable storage grew, even beyond a few terabytes.

"We invented a new, specialized data structure and search algorithm for the particular problem of deduplication, and the result is a deduplication capability that delivers the same high performance with hundreds of terabytes in a datastore as it would with just a few megabytes," said Bob Petrocelli, CEO/CTO, GreenBytes. "We believe that the dcache (deduplication cache) implementation, in the storage kernel, is the seminal concept that enables primary deduplication. The ability to scale the performance of the parallel meta-data search as you increase the size of the storage pool is critical to maintaining low latency."

"The GreenBytes dcache benefits users by providing an extremely fault tolerant and high-performance platform, a necessity for most virtualization storage architectures where routine file system operations in a deduplication environment represent special challenges to most general-purpose storage designs," said George Crump, Chief Steward, Storage Switzerland. "All dedupe is not created equal, and users need to be careful to understand the differences in the offerings. GreenBytes is one of those companies that has spent years maturing key intellectual property to bring a robust inline deduplication capability to the market, and this patent is significant recognition of the company's technology achievement."

The patent for primary deduplication technology was awarded to GreenBytes CEO/CTO, Bob Petrocelli, and principal engineer, Jill Duff, and is available exclusively in the GreenBytes Globally Optimized Operating System (GO OS) found in its Solidarity, HA-3000 and GB-X Series product families.