As an answer to the escalating economic and environmental costs of maintaining storage at computing and data centers, GreenBytes Inc. has developed innovative deduplication inline storage appliances that run on one-third the power capacity – about 7 watts per terrabyte – and operate as a single-instance storage appliance that permits real-time, on-the-fly deduplication of file blocks as they are stored.
The Ashaway-based company, which was created in 2007, is the second venture for entrepreneurial brothers Richard and Robert Petrocelli, who previously launched Heartlab Inc., and then sold it in 2005 to Agfa-Gevaert NV for $132.5 million. The company made software for storing cardiology images.
To help launch the new firm, GreenBytes raised $8 million in capital in May 2009, with Battery Ventures as a partner.
On Sept. 14, GreenBytes officially launched its new line of ultra high-performance, energy-efficient deduplication storage appliances, GB-2000 and GB-4000, which combine patent-pending technologies with advanced, open architecture.
According to GreenBytes, these new appliances achieve performance ratios of about three times that of competing deduplication appliances.
“GreenBytes undertook an intensive R&D effort to deliver a high-performance storage appliance that is also easy-to-use and cost effective, so that any company from a Fortune 500 to a SMB could enjoy the benefits of data deduplication technology,” said Bob Petrocelli, chief executive and technology officer of the company.
Petrocelli, who received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2001, attended Brown University for his Ph.D. studies and holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in physics from the University of Rhode Island.
To ensure that customers would be able to use the products for years to come, Petrocelli said, “we created the GB-X Series to be easily and efficiently scalable in order to grow with their data storage needs.”
His brother, attorney Richard Petrocelli, the president and chief operating officer of GreenBytes, described the origins of the company. With the previous venture, Heartlab, he explained, “we had managed the problem of data storage for medical imagery. We decided [after Heartlab] that we should look at the broader problem of data storage. GreenBytes really started from scratch,” he continued, “with the focus of developing the next generation of data storage optimization.”
What GreenBytes’ innovation has accomplished, he said, “is to take deduplication out of the back room market and into the primary, real-time market, creating tremendous cost and energy savings for the customer.”
There is huge market potential for innovative and energy-efficient software technology, according to Michael Robinson, director of marketing and communications at GreenBytes. These markets include: education, financial services/banking, government, health care, legal/discovery, entertainment and storage service/cloud computing providers.
The new GB-X offers tremendous energy efficiencies, according to Robinson. “GreenBytes’ intelligent management capabilities automatically put a subset of drives into a lower power state and keep only a subset of drives active,” he said. A fully populated 216 TB GB-X Series GB-4000 appliance, he continued, “has a power consumption rate of … less than a third of the power capacity when compared to one of the industry’s current storage servers.”
The importance of energy efficiency is underscored by the Uptime Institute estimate that while it once took 30 to 50 years for electricity costs to match the cost of the server itself, the electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost in less than four years.
“Most storage systems are composed of anywhere from dozens to hundreds of disks that are always on, regardless of need to retrieve data,” Robinson wrote in GreenBytes’ application. “That’s the equivalent of perpetually idling an SUV in the garage on the off chance the owner might want to take a drive.”
Ease-of-use is another selling point for GreenBytes’ storage appliances, which can be completely administered from the Microsoft Management Console.
For Richard Petrocelli, the Greenbyte’s innovative storage venture fits into his company’s broader vision of building a sustainable high-tech infrastructure in Rhode Island, with good-paying jobs and regional economic growth.
“Part of our hope when we started Heartlab was to help build a high-tech community in Rhode Island,” he said. •
