Your company has only recently lunched into Europe, via a link up with Dutch distributor Consolidate-IT. What makes you think you should be on the radar screens of any UK CIOs right now?
I’d say any CIO looking to deploy a data archiving architecture or any kind of significant virtualised machine project would be interested in hearing about us, as we offer a way for him to do both of those at a high-performing level out of one appliance, an appliance that also using standard Intel, not custom-built, exotic, technology.
Sure – but there are an awful lot of green IT companies, or at least companies out there. Why choose you?
We are a storage optimisation company all about very dense storage. Our storage appliances combine highly innovative software technology and advanced power management design with a world-class server platform.
[Interrupts] Whoah. So what’s the name all about? Your name doesn’t suggest anything like that, it suggests surely low carbon footprint more than storage?
We argue that precisely by the way we engineer our appliances we deliver green IT. Green IT isn’t just about lowered power consumption, it’s also about greater efficiency in operations. So we are all about a holistic approach to greener IT through offering systems that are really, really efficient to run, so that you also need less of them, which in turn lowers your footprint as you just need less machines to be running. In fact – an order of magnitude less power than similar equipment generally being sold in the mainstream to mid-range organisations.
I am open to persuasion, of course, but so far it seems a bit of a misuse of the term ‘green,’ to be frank.
Well, here’s a concrete example; if you put a voltmeter at the back of one of our machines, our GB-X Series storage appliances, you’d see the proof of that in the form of the fact that the kilowatts being consumed would be one-tenth of what a different manufacturer would drain.
That could mean anything! You need to be more specific.
OK, I mean that the other guys will need 10 kilowatts of energy and mine will need only 1.2 kW. That’s for a system running 200 Terabytes of load, by the way.
I think we need to take this from the top and worry less about the green tag. Start again with what it is GreenBytes can offer me.
Sure, be glad to. So we are all about efficiency and density of storage, providing ‘inline’ de-duplication at very high rates via our appliances. That’s really useful technology if you are for instance running lots of virtual machine images that need to be available in a very performant way.
Can you make all that a bit more focused? I read words like solid state caching and IOPS [I/O per second] on your website a lot more than I read specific business performance examples.
We are working very closely with a wide range of users but we haven’t gone public yet, I have to admit.
Which is not really good enough for our readers. It could all be hype.
I can tell you about the work we are doing with another company here in New England, Desktone, a company Cisco is invested in incidentally, which as the name implies is a kind of dial-tone for virtual desktops as a service, but in a really massive, enterprise-level scale, up to tens of thousands of desktops. So Desktone has been using our appliances in its quality assurance and stress-testing labs to help prepare rollouts to customers. It’s telling us what other customers are telling us, that this is a way to do things they need to do with one machine instead of ten. We have another great engagement I’d love to be able to tell you about but can’t as yet reveal the customer name…
[Interrupts again] I can’t be dealing with unnamed customers. So the pitch here is all about your innovative technology, yes?
Absolutely. We are different because the current generation of de-duplication technology has been focused primarily on the data backup and archiving market, due to feature and performance limitations. We are different as we are the first to incorporate high-performance inline de-duplication into an enterprise-scale file system. Our file system is as capable of ingesting data backup streams as well as acting as primary storage in a NAS and/or SAN mode and can scale within a single namespace to petabyte-size storage architectures.
