The combination delivers very good IOPS (in excess of 90K 4k Read IOPs and 15k 4k write IOPs on the mid-range GB-X series) and impressive ingestion rates in excess of 950MB per second with 10GbE. They have also done extra work to improve on OpenSolaris' CIFS support making the system more suitable for a Windows environment. The file system includes all the typical software features you would expect in a storage system like remote replication, snapshots and thin provisioning. Not expected, but welcome, is a Symantec OST plug-in if you are going to be using the unit as a target for Symantec backup applications.
The bundled hardware comes in three configurations: the GB-1000, GB-2000 and the GB-4000. The difference being physical size and supported capacity, which can range from 4TB to 216TB raw (before deduplication) and the I/O capabilities of the systems, which differ by number of network ports and their speed (1GbE or 10GbE). Pricing for the GB-1000 and 1U 4TB system is in the $10,000 price range, yet still includes the complete software compliment mentioned above. This means it is certainly affordable. All the systems use 2.5" hard drives in addition to the SSD tier. The advantage to the 2.5" drives is that they can be packaged more densely into the server, meaning less data center floor space, and they require significantly less power. This combined with the capacity footprint reduction inherent to deduplication leads to a very attractive power efficiency story, hence the "green" in GreenBytes.
The final ingredient is their Microsoft Management (MMC) plug in, that further makes the product interesting for a Windows environment. The MMC console provides the ability to manage and monitor both iSCSI volumes and CIFS/NFS file shares directly from a Windows server. It can also provide analytics of network performance in and out, so you can verify that the inline deduplication is not impacting performance. The MMC interface also facilitates a single-pane-of-glass management for multiple GreenBytes devices. This is especially useful for managing replication nodes.
GreenBytes could potentially be a single tier of storage that provides both backup repositories and--thanks in large part to its SSD integration---primary storage for NAS home directories or storage for server virtualization environments. It is one of the few solutions that we have seen that run the full range and is certainly worth consideration.
