Patented RealStream Software Technology by Dot Hill

Dot Hill Systems Corp. unveiled its patented RealStream software which triples data ingest throughput ⁽¹⁾ while handling more than 5,000 parallel data streams for heavy-duty Internet traffic workloads.

Layered on top of  next-generation RealStor OS, RealStream is available in AssuredSAN 6004. RealStream software benefits ‘always-on’ bandwidth-intensive applications across a variety of streaming market segments by managing many simultaneous ingest streams with autonomic, real-time and predictive load balancing. Applications that generate this type of workload will become more common therefore increasing demand for storage arrays that can provide predictive intelligence to prevent crippling data stream traffic jams.

Industry experts project up to 25 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020. IoT is expected to generate massive amounts of data from a variety of sensors embedded in ‘things’ such as appliances and smart devices connected to the Internet. The aggregation and analysis of this data will create new applications and storage requirements to process large numbers of data streams in parallel.

“The emergence of these new data traffic workloads created by the IoT phenomena is driving challenges and opportunities in key storage vertical markets, such as telecom infrastructure, network management, video surveillance, service providers, and HPC environments,” said Brian Garrett, VP, ESG Lab, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Ingesting massive numbers of streams created by these applications is a difficult problem for most storage system vendors to address. ESG Lab has confirmed that the RealStream software that’s embedded exclusively in Dot Hill arrays delivers a fast and remarkably cost-effective 3X performance boost for the ‘randomised sequential’ behavior of real-time write-ingest applications.”

“These parallel workload streams are very dynamic in nature-with variations in speed, arrival time, duration, and rate of change,” said Ken Day, CTO, Dot Hill. “RealStream software utilises new innovative predictive load balancing algorithms to ensure accelerated performance of our customers’ data streams in high-ingest environments. AssuredSAN arrays with RealStream technology can manage more than 5000 parallel data streams, yet guarantee consistent QoS, and our design objective for RealStream is to eventually support hundreds of thousands of streams.“

In developing RealStream technology, Dot Hill partnered with vertical market customers in the areas of streaming network traffic analysis and big data analytics to identify key attributes of their new workload challenges and developed unique algorithms for workloads with thousands of data streams. This innovation is patented by Dot Hill.

“Innovation is the lifeblood of leaders in the IT industry and it’s why Dot Hill has been a perennial supplier of advanced storage solutions for prominent OEM partners for the past 30 years. With the proliferation of the Internet of Things, storage arrays need to be optimised to handle the unique characteristics of complex streaming workloads,” said Bill Wuertz, SVP, products and solutions, Dot Hill. “Taking advantage of our early lead in this area, Dot Hill is announcing our RealStream software combined with the new AssuredSAN 6004 storage array. We will continue to innovate to meet the ever-increasing requirements that represent the future of Internet-generated storage workloads.”

⁽¹⁾ Ingest performance is based on data write operations for parallel streams of IP traffic measured in a network management application.