UPDATED 15:11 EDT / MAY 19 2014

Oracle enters Server SAN market with GreenBytes acquisition

datacenter administratorsHit by the information explosion several years before the traditional enterprise, Internet giants such as Google and Facebook were forced to fundamentally rethink IT infrastructure, pioneering a radically different approach to delivering IT services that push the envelope on economies of scale. Their efforts have resulted in the development of an architecture Wikibon has defined as “Server SAN”, which combines the best attributes of several existing technologies in an entirely new category of storage uniquely capable of keeping pace with the exponential growth in unstructured data.

Whereas the elasticity afforded by pooling compute and storage resources has historically come at the expense of increased management complexity, Server SAN implementations decouple capacity from the underlying hardware to transcend physical constraints and eliminate that trade-off, enabling an unprecedented degree of operational agility.  The benefits are numerous, but the industry is only now beginning to productize the technology in response to rapidly changing customer requirements.

Oracle, which has fallen behind competitors in cloud computing and analytics, is not arriving late to the party this time around. The database giant apparently recognizes  Server SAN as a potential means of catching up with rivals and even possibly regaining  the upper hand on the long run, a stance reflected by its latest acquisition: GreenBytes, a relatively low-profile storage optimization firm that focuses on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) use cases.

Based in Providence, Rhode Island,  the seven-year-old GreenBytes offers a software appliance calls vIO that plugs into vSphere and utilizes patented “zero latency inline deduplication” technology to increase the cost-effectiveness of flash by eliminating redundant information, thus reducing storage requirements. That makes it a perfect fit with large-scale virtual desktop environments, according to the company.

The steep performance requirements of persistent images make VDI a prime use case for solid-state memory, but deployments have traditionally been plagued by cost inefficiencies that often result in projects failing to meet user and business expectations or falling apart entirely. GreenBytes claims that vIO solves both issues at one swell swoop, efficiently delivering enough IOPS to support even the largest implementations. The software is available as a standalone product and in a converged system sold by Dell.

GreenBytes’ other product, ZEVO, is an implementation of the open ZFS file system (which Oracle obtained as part of the 2010 acquisition of Sun) that has been adapted to work under the constraints of the Mac OS X runtime. The company bought the distribution in July 2012 from former Apple engineer Don Brady, who ended up joining its ranks.

Oracle has provided few details about the acquisition except that Greenbytes’ technology will be integrated its ZFS Storage Appliances lineup and the deal is set to close by July. Although no financial terms were disclosed, it’s safe to assume that the transaction is valued at the tens of millions of dollars given that the firm had raised more than $42 million in funding to date.

The purchase comes less than two weeks after EMC’s acquisition of DSSD, a stealthy flash startup founded in 2010 by ZFS creators Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore. The storage stalwart has kept a tight lid on the buy so far, but Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante uncovered that SAP was apparently an early investor in the company.

photo credit: IntelFreePress via photopin cc

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