Get Next Level SAN Storage with ARI-100

The excitement surrounding RAID Inc’s ARI-100 series is growing.  Why?  The ARI-100 is an advanced virtualization hybrid storage array, and, although that may be a mouthful, the beauty is in its simplicity. Data is migrated automatically, in real time.

Standard Server-Based Applications Highlight Need for Better Data Storage

The relatively slow I/O to disk storage limits the performance of many of today’s server-based applications.The standard mitigation technique for this issue is to replicate active data from disks to higher-speed memory in a cache in servers and storage area networks (SANs).  Caching content is not the best solution, though, as it mostly accelerates reads, and the size of the cache is normally only a small fraction of the disk capacity available. Therefore, the content must be changed constantly via algorithms.

Storage Tiering Overcomes Traditional Caching Challenges

Storage tiering holds the potential to improve performance for all applications by locating “Hot Data” in the fastest tier consisting of solid state drives, which is the tier of storage available between cache memory and traditional hard disk drives. This technology uses high-speed flash memory and can 1. create a very large cache or 2. a very fast and full tier of disk storage. Both of these provide significant performance games as seen below.

An Even Better Solution: Virtualization with RAID’s ARI-100 Series

RAID’s ARI-100 hybrid storage solution offers a balance of high performance (with the very fast SSDs) and low cost (with the relatively inexpensive HDDs).

RAID’s ARI system virtualizes both the SSDs and HDDs at the sub-LUN level using 4 MB pages distributed across multiple RAID sets. Intelligent algorithms then continuously monitor I/O access patterns and automatically move Hot Data to the SSDs to maximize I/O operations and, therefore, improve performance of the aggregate application workload.

Stay tuned to this site or our Twitter account for more information about the ARI-100 Series or contact us to learn how you can benefit from this technology.