One of the key concerns in a Disaster Recovery deployment today is with respect to the Recovery Point Objective (RPO); and ease of deployment, simplified configuration and management along with minimal investment are the key factors desired by enterprises in disaster recovery scenarios. American Megatrends, a Global company headquartered in Atlanta, US and American Megatrends India based in Chennai, meets this demand of enterprises through StorTrends, a unified storage solution which cuts down on the complexities involved in managing an enterprise storage environment. StorTrends appliances feature wizard driven UI simplifying the configuration of replication pair. StorTrends Snap Assisted Replication (SAR) with built-in WAN acceleration helps organizations to arrive at a pragmatic schedule to ensure data redundancy at secondary location. AMI Built-in WAN acceleration comprising de-duplication, compression and link optimization ensures that minimal amount of data is transferred to DR location thereby reducing the bandwidth cost apart from eliminating the need for any external third party WAN accelerator appliances.

Based on the amount of critical data which needs to be replicated to the DR location, organizations can deploy suitable StorTrends appliance rather than an identical one to the primary location to eventually cut the overall budget. StorTrends also supports multiple replication modes like one to one, two-way, one-to-many and many-to-one scenarios. The WAN Optimization as a built-in tool stands apart in comparison to other vendors wherein external WAN accelerator appliance is required. This WAN Optimization technique can be deployed quickly without any investment on additional components. StorTrends Replication engine leverages the underlying Re-direct on Write technology Snapshots and transfers the incremental data to the disaster recovery (DR) location appliance after performing WAN Optimization techniques. It comprises block level de-duplication, compression, 128-bit encryption and link optimization which greatly reduces the time taken for data transfer without draining the resources and can be deployed quickly in a customer environment.

Data Tiering
The value of the data diminishes over time and it is essential nowadays for the IT administrator to move them on to a high capacity, low cost drives to keep the Total Cost of Ownership in check. At the same time frequently accessed data needs to be kept in the high performance drives to get the required performance demanded by the application users. Therefore effective data migration between the storage tiers is essential for a storage appliance. StorTrends 3500i series appliances support data tiering on flash based SSDs and traditional spinning drives like SAS and NL-SAS drives, by intelligently moving the data between the tiers based on access patterns.

With Automatically Tuned Volumes (ATV), StorTrends tiering also works at the volume level by automatically tuning users' volumes to receive the required amount of performance. Users can choose to have entire volumes residing on specific performance tiers, or choose to have their individual volumes striped among different performance tiers to maximize capacity of high-performance drives. In addition to automation at the tier and volume level, StorTrends brings automation to the disk-based level. On a typical spinning disk drive, outside tracks of the disk platter intrinsically have larger surface area and angular speed than the platter's inner tracks. To take advantage of this variance, StorTrends monitors data at the disk-based level and promotes the disk's most frequently accessed data to the outside (hot) tracks while demoting infrequently accessed data to the inner (cold) tracks. By combining all the above, StorTrends appliances provide best value proposition to organization in managing information technology assets.

Data reduction and WAN acceleration
Remote DR Services operate over WAN with limited bandwidth. The standard TCP/IP protocols perform very poorly due to long latencies and high packet losses. Enterprises often employ dedicated WAN accelerator hardware to optimize the bandwidth usage thereby increasing the cost and the maintenance complexity for the storage admins. AMI StorTrends DR technology comes in-built with StorTrends WDS (Wide Area Data Services) that does data reduction and WAN acceleration to ensure the data backup happens at the configured bandwidths. The other challenge with DR solutions is the amount of data loss (Recovery Point Objective – RPO) and down time (Recovery Time Objective) when disaster strikes. Maintaining RPO and RTO below acceptable levels is a challenge to ensure business continuity. StorTrends Snap Assisted Replication (SAR) ensures RPO to the minimum by ensuring the replication link is utilized optimally.

The patent portfolio of StorTrends comprises of 100+ filed and 50+ awarded as on date on various innovations in the data storage technology. StorTrends has also featured in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for General purpose disk arrays affirming its unique value propositions. With reference to StorTrends, AMI is increasing its focus on flash storage, which offers multi-fold performance improvements over traditional mechanical drives. While doing so, AMI is also addressing some of the key challenges in handling flash storage such as optimizing on costs and extending flash lifetime.