SCIENCE

GreenBytes announced the HA-3000, a high availability (HA) inline deduplicating SAN appliance designed for primary storage applications. The HA-3000 combines the performance of solid state disk (SSD) with the density of enterprise-grade magnetic disk in a unique, fault tolerant, dual controller form factor. Paired with GreenBytes' high-performance deduplication features, the HA-3000 is ideal for primary storage missions including block-based back office databases and virtualized environments. GreenBytes is providing 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 uniquely 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 high-performance, Xeon(TM)-based controllers are fully 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 key 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 with ease, and simultaneously opt to accelerate performance by simply 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 significantly into the utility of the appliance. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments benefit greatly from the data 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 quickly 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 easily 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 significantly 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 wide 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.