ESG Lab Report Validates Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000

Dot Hill Systems Corporation announced Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has recently issued a Lab Validation Report
(registration needed) validating the wicked fast performance, rock solid reliability, and disruptively simple management interface of the new AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series and AssuredSAN 4000 Series storage arrays available to customers.

The ESG Lab Validation Report documents the results of expert, independent testing of the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series and AssuredSAN 4000 storage solutions.

Key findings:

AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series RealStor Software
As Autonomic as Breathing
The report validates that AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series’ RealStor software with real-time tiering reduces the cost and complexity of deploying and managing storage in midmarket organizations.

"Our testing of Dot Hill’s RealStor software showed significant improvements in response time for workloads mirroring typical business environments, such as email, database queries, and online ordering. RealStor software quickly adapted to rapidly changing workloads," said Brian Garret VP, ESG Lab. "We believe customers will welcome the AssuredSAN Pro 5000’s simply elegant approach to storage management that saves time and money, delivers impressive performance, and eliminates the hassle of dealing with RAID."

Like the autonomic nature of breathing, IT managers don’t have to think about benefits of the RealStor software, concluded ESG Lab; capacity, performance and efficiency are automatically optimized in real-time. ESG Lab noted that after the system automatically configures storage into one or more pools, RealStor kicks in and works without user intervention to deliver smart capabilities including: automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and quick RAID rebuild.

Simple Management Interface
Configured in Five Minutes
The report validates that Dot Hill’s simple management interface, found in both the AssuredSAN 4000 Series and the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series, can be used to reduce the time, effort, and potential for error inherent in managing complex storage environments. A wizard-driven configuration of a system from scratch was completed in only five minutes. Complex device creation and mapping was simplified with table-driven wizards. ESG Lab noted that it was "pleasantly surprised" with the integrated performance monitoring and trending capabilities supported by the management interface at no additional cost.

Testing Confirms ‘Wicked Fast’ Performance
Performance testing of AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series quantified the benefits of tiering in real time. ESG Lab tested an industry-standard workload that simulates the activity of a typical OLTP database application in a pool with sixty 600GB RAID-10 HDDs and eight 400GB RAID-1 SSDs. It showed that real-time tiering kicked in and started migrating frequently accessed data to solid-state within minutes and aggregate performance increased approximately 2.5 times over the course of the next 14 hours.

Performance testing of the AssuredSAN 4000 Series measured the raw performance of the underlying hardware, emulating a typical Exchange 2010 user in a VMware ESX 5.1 virtual server environment with a mailbox size of 200MB and target I/O rate of 0.13 IOPS per mailbox. ESG Lab reported that a peak of 52,000 mailboxes was supported as the number of VMs running in parallel scaled from one to four. In each case, testing recorded average database response time under the Microsoft recommended limit of 20 milliseconds.

"Many storage vendors make grandiose claims about their products’ performance, but few put their products under the microscope to undergo third-party performance evaluation," said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. "This ESG Lab Validation Report offers independent validation of the performance and simplicity of Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 and AssuredSAN 4000 storage systems and the associated real-world benefits for midmarket organizations. These new products deliver demonstrated HA with best-in-class price/performance. And the Pro 5000 delivers the world’s most responsive storage with real-time tiering and a simplified interface for improved operational efficiency.

"As IT managers face the challenges of cost, complexity and performance, we believe our expanded AssuredSAN portfolio is extremely well-equipped to meet the needs of a broad range of customers from entry-level to the midrange, delivering up to 99.999% data availability across the board."

AssuredSAN 5000 Pro Series:
Smart, Real-time Tiered Storage for the Midrange
The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series with RealStor software takes tiered storage to a new level – beyond competitors’ automated batch migration, and into an era of autonomic, real-time data tiering. With RealStor, businesses gain the advantage of high performance SSDs, using them to their benefit, while storing less frequently accessed data on slower, but much less expensive, HDDs. Designed for the midrange market, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series is a performance, available, integrated storage solution that delivers faster access to current data with built-in, real-time, autonomic tiered storage and virtualization.

Highly Reliable AssuredSAN 4000 Series
Delivers Wicked Fast Performance
Sharing the same architecture as AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series midrange system, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series provides superior streaming performance for bandwidth-intensive applications. It sets a new Dot Hill performance standard – delivering up to 5,200MB/s of sustained sequential read throughput and up to 3,000 MB/s of sustained sequential write performance – making it for customers in the media & entertainment, telecommunications, and HPC markets.