Dot Hill in Unified Virtual Storage Solutions

Dot Hill Systems Corp. unveiled a portfolio of unified virtual storage solutions designed to address a number of challenges of organizations at all levels – from the data center to the CEO suite – reducing storage costs, optimizing existing storage assets and streamlining management of data growth.

Dot Hill AssuredUVS – AssuredUVS Standard and AssuredUVS Datacenter – bring the benefits of storage virtualization to the SMB and SME markets, by combining the requisite software, servers and storage into an appliance that can consolidate organizations’ multi-vendor storage assets, improve storage efficiencies, simplify management and create more IT and business flexibility.

Built on Dot Hill’s Assured architecture, which combines the company’s new and powerful virtualization and automated management software with its proven AssuredSAN storage platforms, Dot Hill’s AssuredUVS solutions are dedicated appliances that consolidate and virtualize storage across storage protocols, environments, and mixed storage platforms to support multiple server applications. This enables organizations to manage combinations of block storage (Fibre Channel or iSCSI) and file storage (NAS systems with CIFS or NFS) via a common set of data management features such as snapshots, thin provisioning, tiered provisioning, replication, synchronous mirroring, and data migration all from a single user interface. Dot Hill’s AssuredUVS solves today’s key business challenges and transforms the storage environment into a single, unified, strategic corporate asset that improves storage efficiencies even as the requirement for increased data capacity grows.

Dot Hill AssuredUVS complements the server virtualization movement by paving the way for easier data migration and provisioning, creating a flexible, scalable system for managing diverse brands of storage and a platform for leveraging utility and cloud storage resources. The benefits of unified virtual storage can be substantial, including reduced labor and infrastructure costs and increased productivity.

"IT managers are looking for storage solutions that not only deliver immediate value, but also enable flexibility and growth over time, so that storage can adapt to changes in an organization’s applications, user needs, or business demands," stated Mark Peters, senior analyst, at Enterprise Strategy Group. "Storage solutions that are both virtualized and unified are ideal to address the needs for both storage flexibility and data growth. Dot Hill has the right mix of capabilities and offerings and has positioned itself to capitalize on the market opportunity."

The AssuredUVS, previously known as iSN, is based on proven technology acquired from Cloverleaf Communications. AssuredUVS Standard, with 50 terabytes (TB) initial licensed capacity, is designed to virtualize storage for mid-sized businesses, and easily scales to a maximum of 250 TB. The Datacenter edition employs a scale-out model for higher performance and capacities up to 6PB. These appliance products will be available through selected Dot Hill authorized resellers.

"We expect strong interest within our customer base for Dot Hill’s AssuredUVS storage virtualization appliances. These appliances offer both block and file support to unify SAN and NAS deployments. In addition, Dot Hill’s solid heritage as a RAID hardware manufacturer will allow AssuredUVS customers to benefit from tightly coupled networked RAID storage solutions from Dot Hill’s proven AssuredSAN series. Very few storage virtualization vendors can offer this level of integration today," states Paul Hickingbotham, solutions manager at Hammer.

"In a university environment, we needed a cost effective solution that allowed us to continue to use our legacy systems, as well as grow our storage environment," said Andrea Mazzucchi, senior IT leader/senior systems analyst at the Linguistics Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. "The AssuredUVS has allowed us greater flexibility in how we use our storage systems. I’ve virtualized several legacy systems, unified my SAN and NAS environments, and am planning for a disaster recovery site."

"Organizations are rapidly moving beyond the deployment of server virtualization to simplify and consolidate diverse server platforms. Today, they want to make server virtualization a scalable, flexible foundation for the vast majority of their IT workloads," said Richard Villars, vice president of Storage and IT Executive Strategies at IDC. "The biggest barrier to achieving this goal is the failure to also deploy a virtualized storage infrastructure. Solutions like Dot Hill’s new universal storage solution will make it possible for more organizations to actually obtain the hoped for gains in IT efficiency and reliability promised in virtual server build-outs."

"Most IT shops today don’t have just one type of storage from one vendor," said Jim Jonez, director of Marketing at Dot Hill. "Storage assets are typically purchased for specific purposes, but over time this has created silos of storage, some of which are under-utilized, while others have reached capacity. There’s never been a solid mid range solution to overcome this obstacle until now."

More about AssuredUVS Standard
and Datacenter Solutions
Dot Hill AssuredUVS Standard and AssuredUVS Datacenter models allow organizations to create storage volumes, migrate data, and establish snapshot schedules in virtually every operating and hypervisor environment including Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Mac OS, VMware vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V. The AssuredUVS platform supports storage models from a wide variety of vendors including Apple, Data Direct, Dot Hill, EMC, Hitachi/HDS, HP, IBM, LSI/Engenio, NetApp, Nexsan, Oracle, Promise, Xiotech, and Xyratex.

Pricing and Availability
AssuredUVS appliances are expected to be available through Dot Hill authorized resellers starting in December. List prices start at $63,960 for AssuredUVS Standard models with dual controllers for high availability. AssuredUVS can be purchased with a variety of capacity and performance options based on Dot Hill storage arrays. Asynchronous Replication and NAS support will be sold as additions to the base package.