Infinite Convergence Solutions and Dot Hill Deliver Real-Time Cloud Storage

Dot Hill Systems Corp. has developed a joint solution with Infinite Convergence Solutions, a wireless messaging and mobility solutions provider for carriers and enterprises.

The joint solution, which integrates Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 real-time tiering storage with Infinite Convergence’s Message Storage Application (MSA), allows major mobile operators to develop applications for users who want to access their messages anytime, anywhere, and across all devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.

For more than 20 years, Dot Hill has been developing storage solutions for telecommunications customers such as Infinite Convergence, Motorola, Samsung, Tektronix and others. Dot Hill NEBS Level 3, carrier-grade solutions deliver proven 99.999% availability. The company’s reference platform for mobile messaging provides a way for mobile operators to incorporate Dot Hill storage into carrier-grade mobile messaging and cloud applications. The company has validated the use of the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 as a performance metadata store for these demanding messaging applications, where customers demand instant access to vast amounts of daily text, voice, images, and video messages. The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is able to autonomically identify and stage ‘hot data’ to the SSD tier for greater I/O performance for random data lookups.

Enhancing its messaging portfolio, Infinite Convergence launched the first messaging storage solution of its kind, PMC MSA, in February 2014, using technology previously deployed for a North American tier 1 carrier. With PMC MSA, mobile operators offer subscribers a carrier-grade, unified messaging experience across platforms and devices, including tablets, laptops and mobile phones. PMC MSA’s multi-device synchronization enables subscribers to start a conversation on one device and move to another. To deploy this product, Infinite Convergence needed a storage solution designed for speed, data protection, reliability, availability, scalability and manageability. After evaluating several options, Infinite Convergence chose the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 storage solution.

“Infinite Convergence is focused on serving the telecommunications market with cloud solutions for ‘everywhere’ applications,” said Garrett Wein, VP of WW OEM sales, Dot Hill. “Solutions such as the Infinite MSA really capitalize on the performance advantages of the Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000’s unique real-time tiering architecture. With this latest joint solution, Dot Hill continues to gain traction in the telecommunications market.“

“The Infinite Convergence MSA solution enables carriers to offer an innovative service that allows for differentiation in the mobility market place. It allows increased functionality while encouraging customer loyalty, resulting in an increase in both average revenue per user and average revenue per account,” said John Puma, VP, Infinite Convergence. “The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 provides a number of highly synergistic features including an easy-to-use interface, the ability to mix different HDD drives and SSDs, and real-time autonomic tiering for dynamic workloads.“

Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 – solution for messaging metadata stores
The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 real-time autonomic tiering storage solution provides advantages for telecommunications customers. Using sophisticated algorithms, with RealStor software, it automates the placement of data in each tier to optimize performance. The most frequently accessed blocks of hot data are stored in the highest tier of SSD storage, providing fast read-access. The lower tier uses 10K SAS drives to provide high capacity and value for cold data that is accessed less frequently.

RealStor software identifies hot data blocks and migrates them to the SSD tier in real time. This is for messages and message metadata that are relevant for a short period of time. Sequential workloads remain on the lower SAS tiers for improved performance.

In addition, the system is designed to handle many sequential operations simultaneously.

These features are for concurrently handling the intensive, sequential write operations from multiple nodes running on the open-source Cassandra database, which is used in the telecommunications industry.

AssuredSAN Pro 5000 storage solutions deliver scalability, HA and other features that meet the demands of the telecommunications industry. While Cassandra is designed to allow for node failure or maintenance activities, the inclusion of RAID protection allows for simplified management of the components that are most prone to failure. AssuredSAN JBOD expansion chassis allows solution providers to dynamically add more storage capacity without impacting the operation of the compute nodes. Dot Hill Volume Thin Provisioning eliminates guesswork from determining which node needs the most capacity; each volume takes only what it needs from the array.

Solutions brief outlining attributes of the companies’ joint solution