Smith Affiliated Capital Selects Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that registered investment advisory firm, Smith Affiliated Capital (SAC), has selected its AssuredSAN Pro 5000 real-time, autonomic tiered storage.

For 32 years SAC has been helping clients reach their financial goals by building quality investment portfolios that embody transparency, liquidity, stability, and no leverage. As one of the financial industry’s trusted and valued providers of investment services with over $3 billion under management, SAC has been recognized for its independence, integrity, expertise, and innovation. From portfolio management to client service, SAC is dedicated to the financial well-being of its clients regardless of their size or expectations.

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is a next-generation storage component of SAC’s re-architecting the way they support new and emerging requirements for accommodating amounts of storage and new methods of data management.

Chief among these requirements are:

• Attracting and retaining clients by supporting new über virtual engagement models;
• Supporting the new realities of the virtual office and accommodating staff accustomed to the BYOD way of working and convenience of working anywhere, anytime; and,
• Strengthening compliance and data security requirements as data preservation is critical to the investment management services business.

Providing autonomic, real-time tiering for SAC, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is a hybrid array that manages dynamic hot and cold data to deliver storage performance when it’s needed most. Powered by Dot Hill RealStor software, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 responds minute-by-minute to changes in data requirements, moving the most heavily accessed data up to the SSD tier, while detecting less active data and moving it to a lower tier. This data migration happens in real-time, without complex policy settings or human intervention.

“Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN Pro 5000’s intelligent software does a phenomenal job with all the heavy lifting, managing our data in real time,” said John K. Smith, COO, SAC. “This has had a tremendous impact on storage performance, and the speed of the network has greatly improved. A solution that figures out how my organization works and uses that information to provide the quickest access to my data, how I need it and when I need it – now that’s brilliant. This is absolutely the best product we’ve purchased in the last 25 years.“

“SAC Portfolio Managers validate research findings by collecting information from multiple data sources, breaking down complex criteria for analysis, collecting baseline data that can be measured against any new portfolio when complete and then prototyping those options for testing the new portfolio,” continued Smith. “With the addition of the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 and our investing strategies we have enabled SAC to have all the information they need quickly and easily. In turn making faster market/time-critical portfolio decisions, executing on those decisions and then communicating those decisions to our clients, is a tremendous advantage in a time-sensitive financial services industry, where time is money. As industry leaders we are viewed as innovators in financial services and we feel that the addition of the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 will keep us on the cutting edge for years to come.“

Smith says the replication capabilities were also a key factor in his decision to standardize on Dot Hill storage, noting that very few vendors offer this at a price that is approachable for the SMB market. As well, he notes the benefits from ‘machine to machine’ storage synergies; the VM Sources DR facility, which SAC leverages for replication of data from New York, also has AssuredSAN Pro 5000’s in its data center in Arizona.

Finally, Smith says service and support are also critical to a credible and complete storage solution, and the combination of Dot Hill and VM Sources has made SAC feel confident in its data center architecture strategy.

“Service-oriented businesses such as Smith Affiliated Capital must make decisions and respond to clients and employees quickly to stay ahead in today’s highly connected world,” said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. “Our autonomic, real-time tiering and replication provides cutting-edge data management capabilities to enable businesses such as SAC to leverage the data center to power competitive advantage.“