Dot Hill Launches New High Performance RAID Arrays With Enhanced Drive Support

CARLSBAD, Calif., Aug. 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Dot Hill Systems Corp., a world-class provider of entry-level and midrange storage solutions for OEMs and resellers, today announced it is adding a new iSCSI RAID storage offering to its highly successful small-form factor 2.5-inch disk array product line, as well as three new products to its mainstream 2000 series disk arrays. These new arrays all incorporate Dot Hill's next-generation controller family, for higher performance, and include new ease-of-use features such as several new wizard-configuration tools that further simplify storage configuration, as well as optional upgrades to Dot Hill's AssuredCop and AssuredSnap data protection software.

The new solutions include the Dot Hill 2322 iSCSI SAN array, which leverages 2.5-inch disk drives, and the 2532 DAS host-SAS array, plus 2332 iSCSI and 2732 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel SAN arrays, leveraging 3.5-inch disks. The new generation of arrays improves upon previous Dot Hill offerings, by providing greater processing power, greater ease-of-use, significantly higher performance and larger capacities-per-controller domain. The 2732 Fibre Channel 3.5-inch disk based array delivers an impressive 230,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), more than double the 90,000 IOPS of its 2730 predecessor, making it one of the highest performing 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel arrays in the industry. In addition, the new storage systems offer greater expansion with the ability to add 96 drives, 40 more than previous versions, supporting total capacities of up to 192TB using the latest 2TB drives and Dot Hill's family of compatible JBOD expansion arrays.

"These new systems deliver exceptional price/performance with substantially more processing power and greater ease-of-use than our previous generation iSCSI, SAS, and Fibre Channel products, making them ideal platforms for I/O-intensive applications such as transaction processing, business analysis and reporting," said Andy Mills, vice president of marketing, Dot Hill.

Other notable features of the new offerings include Dot Hill's environmentally friendly EcoStor battery-free cache backup, and the streamlined RAIDar 2.0 user interface. RAIDar 2.0 offers provisioning and configuration wizards that provide step-by-step, intuitive screens, enabling users to quickly and easily bring arrays online. A number of unique views provide alerts to important storage events and warnings, and allow users to drill down to ascertain health status, manufacturing detail, or usage of each component - drive, power supply, controller or any field replaceable unit.

These new Dot Hill storage systems support an optional upgrade to Dot Hill's AssuredCopy and AssuredSnap software, which help customers to solve many of today's data management challenges by providing support for business continuance, disaster recovery and regulatory compliance.Dot Hill's volume copy software, AssuredCopy, provides the ability to create full volume copies or backups of disk volumes with the ability to quickly restore whole volumes, folders or individual files. AssuredSnap, Dot Hill's snapshot functionality, provides the ability to create up to 256 point-in-time copies or backups of disk volumes with instant restoration of data to any captured (snapshot) point in time. Since AssuredSnap only copies data that has changed to disk in real time, it can virtually eliminate backup windows unlike traditional backup techniques which require large windows of time to copy data to a backup volume. AssuredCopy and AssuredSnap provide a cost-effective and reliable disk-to-disk data protection and recovery strategy for small to medium businesses and enterprises.

Dot Hill 2000 Series and 5000 Series arrays are based on the highly modular, highly dynamic Dot Hill R/Evolution Architecture, which is designed to rapidly evolve and support offerings from OEMs and resellers, enabling them to quickly achieve a sustainable, competitive advantage in the volume storage market. The R/Evolution Architecture delivers the high levels of performance, storage density, time-to-market leadership and -- most importantly -- configuration flexibility required by volume storage customers. Using modular and bladed components, the R/Evolution Architecture provides OEMs and VARs with a "configure-to-product" model (not just "configure-to-order") that lets them customize volume storage market solutions quickly, easily and precisely. This unique model revolutionizes how OEMs and VARs bring storage products to market by ensuring opportunities for product differentiation.

The new Dot Hill 2322, 2332, 2532, and 2732 Series arrays are available now. Street prices are expected to start at $11,000 USD.