StorTrends, the data storage division of American Megatrends, Inc. (AMI) and an industry leader in all-flash arrays (AFA), hybrid storage, and spinning disk solutions, today announced that it has been granted three U.S. Patents as the company continues to establish a new era of performance storage with proven value. The patents set the highest standard to date for how companies can meet the requirements of the most performance-intensive applications, at the most affordable price-point in the industry.  

AMI was granted U.S. Patent No. 8,954,339 on Data Deduplication for Information Storage Systems, which was filed on April 18, 2012. This awarded patent covers the means to have deduplication run at optimal and efficient space-saving levels. Specifically, it optimizes the amount of system RAM space used in the system to reduce (or dedupe) terabytes worth of data without affecting performance. In terms of customer benefit, this greatly reduces the amount of SSD capacity that a company is required to purchase within the SAN while also delivering the lowest latency in the industry to significantly increase value and response times within an IT environment. 

"Deduplication and compression have become critical features for all-flash storage arrays," said Sukha Ghosh, Vice President of Engineering for the StorTrends Data Storage Division. "Without deduplication and compression, the SSDs are too small from a capacity perspective, and they are still too expensive to scale out for many customers. StorTrends has worked extremely hard to implement the industry's best deduplication and compression engine within StorTrends' All-Flash Array family." 

AMI was granted the second patent - U.S. Patent No. 8,812,811 on Data Migration between Multiple Tiers in a Storage System - which was filed on August 10, 2012. This awarded patent covers the means that StorTrends utilizes to efficiently analyze blocks of data and move the individual blocks among different tiers of storage. Customers lower their costs significantly from StorTrends taking the highly accessed blocks of data in the environment and putting only those blocks into the expensive drive SSD tiers, while the less frequently accessed blocks occupy only the lower, less expensive tier of the storage array. 

"Data tiering has been around for many years and there are several ways to migrate data between different storage tiers. The new patented process is an important advancement for both the StorTrends Hybrid Array and the StorTrends All-Flash Array. This patented process has been designed to intelligently watch and track blocks of data, and it can even predict when data blocks need to be moved into or out of the hot tier based on access patterns," said Justin Bagby, Director of the StorTrends Data Storage Division. "This very unique and efficient algorithm can also be further fine-tuned by the customer for faster promotion and demotion of the blocks of data based on the customer's specific data loads and data type, providing for true quality of service." 

AMI was granted the third patent-Patent No. 8,711,851 on Multi-Protocol Data Transfers - which was filed on July 18, 2008. This patent covers the means that StorTrends uses to maximize the reliability of transmission control protocol and the performance of user datagram protocol to ensure that StorTrends' replication is the fastest in the industry. This decreases replication management and increases the possible recovery point objective (RPO) for a customer by giving more available bandwidth for the blocks that need to go to their disaster recovery (DR) location. StorTrends also incorporates periodicity, which allows the customer to set the priority bandwidth for the replication of the data and avoid bogging down the network during peak business hours. The Wide-Area Data Services (WDS) technology suite includes data deduplication, compression, encryption, and WAN optimization. This technology ensures that the primary site stays in-sync with the secondary site, allowing for increased RPO and recovery time objective. 

"The ability to keep a disaster recovery or backup site in sync with the primary data infrastructure is critical," said Bagby. "We have found that a large majority of IT environments are not in-sync and if a disaster occurs in the primary environment, the chances of the data being in-sync and on the secondary or DR site is low. AMI recognized this as a serious problem, and in response developed its industry-leading WDS replication technology suite that helps shorten the vulnerability window for StorTrends customers." 

To learn more about the StorTrends 3600i all-flash array, please visit: www.stortrends.com/products/stortrends-models/stortrends-3600i