Channel Partners Signed for New Dot Hill Systems

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that several channel partners
have signed on to support the company’s two new storage offerings – the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series and the AssuredSAN 4000 Series.

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series is a ‘seriously smart’ midrange
storage solution that takes tiered storage and therefore data access, to a new
level, beyond ‘automated tiering’, and into a new era of autonomic,
real-time data tiering.

The AssuredSAN 4000 Series is a
‘wicked fast’ storage solution designed to deliver
reliability and improved streaming throughput to meet the
demanding performance requirements of customers in the business intelligence, media & entertainment, telco, HPC, big data
and cloud storage markets.

Dot Hill is introducing the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series through trained and authorized Dot Hill Connections channel partners who offer
organizations complete, turnkey solutions. The move is designed to broaden the
reach of Dot Hill and its channel partners into the midrange storage market, while advancing the momentum of the AssuredSAN brand
in vertical markets. Dot Hill will be working with channel
partners to reach SMBs who require solid,
‘wicked fast’ and ‘seriously smart’ storage with
reliability and demonstrated 99.999% availability for applications such as Exchange, VMware server virtualization and virtual desktop
applications.

"Our channel partners
play a vital role in creating integrated hardware and software go-to-market
solutions with Dot Hill AssuredSAN branded storage," said Brad
Painter, VP of channel sales, Dot Hill. "Dot Hill is fully committed to the success of our authorized resellers.
The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is a highly compelling offering that will allow our
channel partners to be successful in the midmarket and increase their
profitability, with a number of opportunities to leverage Dot Hill service and
support while offering their own value-add services."

Dot Hill Connections channel partners are required to complete Dot
Hill sales and technical training on the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series. Reseller
training is available through a number of formats including onsite,
online, and hands-on technical training bootcamps. Dot Hill has developed a
number of sales tools for the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series including
selling guides, various presentations, datasheets, flyers and marketing
toolkits. The Dot Hill Deal Registration program enables resellers to offer a
competitive price, improve their margins and close more business. The company
is also providing resellers with the opportunity to co-sponsor Dot Hill end-user
seminars in eight cities throughout the US.

"Dot Hill is changing the
way companies manage storage, by providing not just automated, but autonomic,
tiered storage solutions that move data in real time," said Charles
Bass, VP of Alliances at Promark Technology, Inc. "Today’s automated tiered storage products are really batch migration
tools, optimized through manual settings based on what data was ‘hot’ the day
before. They are not able to quickly adapt to data access spikes in real time.
The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series, however, is optimized for what is
happening right now, making it suitable for many applications such as ticket
sales, news sites, video hosting sites, Twitter feeds and others that can
experience huge volumes of spur-of-the-moment activity."

"Traditionally, storage
companies have designed their products to address two types of primary
performance demands – high bandwidth/throughput to move large files
effectively, or high IOPs to manage high volume transactions," said
Rick Crane, CEO and president at Pac Data. "The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series and the AssuredSAN 4000 Series
address both of these requirements concurrently."

"We have had the
opportunity to evaluate the Pro 5000 Series in our own labs and have been very
impressed with how Dot Hill really designed for simplicity. By automating many
lower level storage administration tasks, they’ve really lightened the load of
an IT manager," stated Jim Steinlage, president, Choice Solutions LLC.

"The AssuredSAN 4000
Series delivers world-class reliability and provides us and our customers with
a great deal of flexibility in configuring RAID sets," said Neil
Sullivan, director of sales, GW Hannaway and Associates. "With 2.5 times the performance of the
AssuredSAN 3000, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series will be widely embraced by our
Media & Entertainment customers who already appreciate the legacy of
performance delivered by the Dot Hill AssuredSAN brand."

Dot Hill AssuredSAN 5000 Pro Series

Unlike status quo automated tiered storage offerings, which may only
support nightly data movement on-demand or in a user-defined window requiring
manual intervention, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series doesn’t require policies or
manual settings. Data is prioritized and moved 100% autonomically in
real-time, enabling administrators to focus on other important tasks. It supports up to three tiers and delivers faster data
response by continuously and dynamically identifying data ‘hot
spots.’

A hot spot is a segment of data that can experience sudden increases
or decreases in user access; data can be very hot one hour and cold the next
hour, or even the next minute. Common examples of hot spot scenarios include
email, web servers, airline and event ticketing, customer databases, university
class registration, tax preparation, financial and accounting databases.
Featuring a simple interface for
operational efficiency, the 5000 Series autonomically moves information
from enterprise SAS drive tiers to fast-read SSD tiers.

Designed to integrate with virtualization applications such as
VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and Veeam Backup, the
AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series provides OEMs, authorized channel partners and end-user customers
with an alternative that delivers autonomic storage in real-time and
eliminates the need for manual intervention.

It is available in a variety of
tiered storage configurations. A base solution with 48 drives, including a
mixture of 600GB HDD’s and 200GB SSDs, is expected to start at approximately
$63,200, including hardware and software support. It is expected
to ship in October 2012.

Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4000 Series

Sharing the same powerful hardware design as AssuredSAN
Pro 5000 Series midrange system, the AssuredSAN
4000 Series provides streaming performance for post-production video
editing, rendering, streaming and broadcast, complex analytics, HPC, and
telecommunications workloads. It delivers up to 5,200
MB/s sustained sequential read throughput, and up to 3,000 MB/s sustained
sequential write performance. The 4000 Series delivers this performance at
price points that are up to 30% lower than competitive offerings.

For demanding transaction oriented applications, such as cloud
storage and business analytics, it delivers 100,000 IOPS sustained from disk for fast access to database and
structured data content.

An AssuredSAN 4000 Series system with 12 2TB drives is expected to
start at under $30,000 and deliver up to 5.2GB/sec performance. It
is expected to ship by the end of September 2012.