Dot Hill's Latest Patent Maximizes Performance of Real-Time Tiered Storage

AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series Leverages Company's 87th Patent to Meet Growing Demand for Responsive, Self-Managing Storage Solutions

Dot Hill Systems has patented a method for maximizing performance in its real-time tiered storage solution, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series. The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series autonomically manages "hot," and "cold" data in real-time to deliver storage performance when it's needed most.

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series leverages this invention to minimize waiting for data lookups. Storage systems that rely on spinning disks can experience latency when data is concentrated on the same drive. Rather than let requests queue up, RealStor moves the pages automatically, without user intervention, to another drive within the same tier. This lets all tiers maximize their performance. This data migration happens in real-time, without requiring either policy setting or human intervention. Dot Hill's 87th U.S. patent, numbered 8,321,646 describes a lightweight algorithm to keep track of pages in all storage components in a storage tier.

 Dot Hill's RealStor technology also tracks which pages are hot and cold across all storage components in a storage tier. The system has the ability to move the hot and cold pages from one component to another, to balance demand across multiple components. This allows the workload to be evenly distributed across the system and increases overall system performance.

"IT professionals today want highly responsive storage solutions with self-managing features that can handle drastic spikes in data usage," said Ken Day, senior vice president of engineering, Dot Hill. "Securing our 87th patent demonstrates our ongoing commitment to lead storage technology with differentiated product characteristics to capture an increasing share of the midrange storage market."

AssuredSAN 5000 Pro Series: Seriously Smart, Real-Time Tiered Storage for the Midrange

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series with RealStor software takes tiered storage to a new level — beyond competitors' automated batch migration, and into a new era of autonomic, real-time data tiering. With RealStor, businesses gain the advantage of very high performance SSDs, using them to their maximum benefit, while storing less frequently accessed data on slower, but much less expensive, hard disk drives. Designed for the midrange market, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series is a high-performance, highly available, fully integrated storage solution that delivers consistently faster access to current data with built-in, real-time, autonomic tiered storage and virtualization.