NORCROSS, Ga., Jan. 28 — American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) today announced the release of its StorTrends 3500i SSD Array, the first and only storage area network (SAN) to combine solid state drive (SSD) caching and SSD tiering into a single storage appliance. Optimized to support VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix and RHEV enterprises of all sizes, the StorTrends 3500i is available as a hybrid or full flash array and delivers dramatic enterprise performance and reliability at an extremely affordable price point.

“We observed in our hands-on Technology Validation of the StorTrends 3500i array that AMI has crafted SSD into a mature, field-proven, and well-architected storage system. With a comprehensive set of storage features and an intriguingly flexible ability to integrate SSDs with the StorTrends cache and tiering architecture, the 3500i showed us that it is ready to deliver superb performance, extreme versatility, and serious value for mid-range storage customers,” said Taneja Group Sr. Analyst Jeff Boles when asked about the report. “The NetNet is there is no need to look for alternatives to make solid state more affordable and practical for the mainstream — with the AMI StorTrends 3500i, it is clearly here.”

The new StorTrends 3500i SSD Array features an embedded storage architecture, StorTrends iTX, to offer an all-inclusive set of features including SSD Caching, SSD Tiering, Automatically Tiered Volumes (ATV), Automated Data Tiering, and replication with WAN optimization. These features, together with the unique combination of SSD and HDD technology in a slim 3U configuration, deliver up to 56TB of raw storage capacity within the 3U and expansion capacity of up to 256TB. The SAN storage solution features hot-swappable dual controllers with Active/Active or Active/Passive high availability and redundant, hot-swappable power supply units.

To flexibly support SSD growth to match the dynamics of business, the StorTrends 3500i enables both SSD cache and SSD Tier upgrades. The scalable solution enables options to upgrade from 200GB SSD drives to 400GB, 800GB or 2000GB SSD drives without costly forklift upgrades. By running the free StorTrends iDATA tool, customers can easily identify how much flash is required to support their environment. The StorTrends iDATA tool analyzes capacity utilization, IOPS usage, reads vs. writes for volumes, network bandwidth, performance, server statistics and more to classify the amount of “hot data” and “cold data” required.

To help users maximize the value of the SSD technology, the StorTrends 3500i SSD Array combines caching and tiering on the SSD drives to provide the following benefits:

• Enhanced SSD Endurance by leveraging both cache and tier for writes and reads avoiding burning the cells of the SSD drives
• Sustained Latency Reduction from 10ms to sub-3ms for the hybrid configuration to sub-1ms for the all-flash configuration
• Automated Tiering allows for promoting critical data to higher performance SSDs, while demoting data between tiers during off-peak times to maintain SSD space utilization
• Auto Balance Volumes with ATV Technology on the SSD tier as data access trends change between hot and cold to effectively feed applications and databases that need higher performance
• Easy Growth Expansion for the SSD drives allowing for a simple upgrade path for cache and tier capacity growth avoiding forklift upgrades

“When used in a virtual server environment, we have found the StorTrends 3500i SSD Array delivers superior performance, reliability and efficiency, end-to-end,” said Jayesh Dave, CEO, Avision Technologies. “It has helped us achieve new levels of management flexibility with a total ownership cost that is lower than we could have imagined. This efficient solution has also helped us to reduce energy consumption costs and because it integrates seamlessly with VMware Vsphere and Hyper-V we can deliver the flexible virtual server and virtual storage management options our customers both need and want.”

The StorTrends 3500i SSD Array virtualizes SAN management via a web-based console to simplify SAN volume creation, expansion and deletion. Here, customers may manage datastores and VMs with ease and view overview data on the system’s capacity, health and many storage resource management charts.

“Enterprises are demanding higher performance and availability to serve resource intensive applications such as virtual desktop infrastructure and heavy-transaction databases, and traditional disk arrays simply cannot meet the demand,” said Justin Bagby, Director of StorTrends Division at American Megatrends. “That is why we have taken our years of RAID expertise and more than 100 technology patents to build the next generation of storage solutions. The StorTrends 3500i SSD Array is the culmination of our innovation strategy which truly harnesses the power and performance of SSD to revolutionize storage performance, agility and savings.”

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Source: AMI