The RealStor software seamlessly enables application demands for high throughput spikes while promising future capacity expansion without additional costly license fees. Osiris Trading is incorporating the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series into its clustered Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 based infrastructure supporting over 40TB of SQL database and web services applications.

Founded in 1999, Osiris Trading is an e-commerce digital marketing provider that offers a variety of digital oriented services. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Osiris Trading has successfully managed to expand its operations growing to over 250 multi-national and multi-cultural staff members with representative offices across the globe.

"We took advantage of Dot Hill's Try-and-Buy program which allowed us to evaluate the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 ahead of deployment into a production environment; no other tiered storage vendor offered this facility," said Ryan Schreiber, head of digital services & technology, Osiris Trading. "We have a wide range of data throughput demands over a 24 hour period and the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 has doubled our storage performance using half of the number of drives compared to our previous storage infrastructure. The fact that we can grow the Dot Hill platform without any capacity based licence fees is an additional bonus as we are currently experiencing an annual data growth rate of approximately 25%."

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series features seriously smart RealStor software that responds to dynamically changing data autonomically without human intervention or policy settings. RealStor software takes tiered storage in a hybrid array to a new level — beyond other tiered storage systems that rely on off-hours batch migration, and into a new era of autonomic, real-time tiering.

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series offers distinct advantages over SSDs used in a read cache configuration. With RealStor autonomic tiering, "hot" data is moved into the SSD tier to enable consistently fast access. This contrasts with most read cache implementations that rely on a simplistic algorithm to optimise read performance and lack intelligence to migrate cold data to more cost effective storage tiers. Dot Hill's RealStor software detects priorities within the data set and delivers faster I/O immediately.

"Many e-Commerce and managed services providers are looking at real-time tiering within a hybrid array to gain the most cost effective and efficient use of flash and SSD technology," said Warren Reid, director of marketing EMEA, Dot Hill. "The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 with RealStor operates in response to the dynamic nature of e-Commerce workloads by moving 'hot' data into high-performance flash storage in real-time while moving less active data onto more cost effective HDDs, helping to ensure that service providers can more easily meet demanding service level agreements."