Storage array manufacturer GreenBytes Tuesday announced Solidarity, an all-solid-state storage array that performs in-line deduplication of primary data and approaches the price of high-performance rotating disk drive arrays. Targeted for the small-to-medium enterprise market, the new array provides high-availability and hardware-accelerated in-line de-duplication and compression using non-volatile DRAM solid state drives (NVRAM SSDs) in combination with multi-level cell (MLC) flash solid state drives.

GreenBytes, as its name implies, makes hybrid systems that combine solid state drives with conventional rotating media to provide performance at lower operating costs. SSDs use a fraction of the power necessary for a rotating disk. The GreenBytes Global Optimized (GO) operating system provides a storage service for managing the functions of the array, which keeps metadata on the fast NVRAM SSDs to allow access to the compressed data on the somewhat slower multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs. The result is an array with up to 13.5 TB of raw capacity that delivers about 60 TB of effective capacity without the performance penalty usually imposed by in-line de-duplication and compression. The operating system also manages the write process to the MLC SSDs, which speeds the process and increases the long-term endurance of the flash SSDs.

The 3U rack-mount array has two controllers built from Xeon processors. Each controller has four 1GB and two 10GB ethernet ports to support iSCSI connectivity and can be configured with up to 48GB of DRAM Cache. Failed controllers can be hot swapped. Dual hot-swappable power supplies also provide high availability. Each array has 16 bays, which support 6Gbs Serial SCSI (SAS), two of which are dedicated to NVRAM SSDs. The rest can be populated with MLC SSDs of capacities ranging from 240GB to 960GB each. An expansion tray doubles capacity and performance for scaling up and additional Solidarity arrays can be added for an unlimited multi-node scale-out application.

[ How to integrate solid-state storage into your enterprise: The New Storage Bottlenecks. ]

GreenBytes' experience is reflected in the functionality of its operating system, which includes a patented block-level de-duplication and compression feature, thin provisioning, and automatic block reclamation in Windows and VMware environments. GreenBytes has been shipping its HA3000 hybrid array since the first of the year and the Solidarity system shares the same 3U footprint and high- availability architecture.

With performance as high as 120,000 in 4K random IOPs, the Solidarity can support the most demanding business-critical applications such as database online transaction processing and virtual desktop infrastructure. When compared to performance arrays that use 15K RPM fibre channel hard disk drives (HDDs), Solidarity competes well with a cost less than $9 per GB on a raw capacity basis, before the effects of RAID, de-duplication, and compression are factored in. Once you factor in deduplication, RAID and compression, the price is much less than an HDD array, especially when reduced power consumption is factored into total cost of ownership. The GreenBytes Solidarity system is expected to be available before the end of March, starting at $59,000 for 3.5TB or $119,000 for 13.4TB.

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