The Dot Hill 2013 Analyst Day was very informative about their latest technology and direction. Many people don’t recognize the Dot Hill name because they are an OEM storage provider. For those not familiar with Dot Hill, they have had a long history of low-end high performance storage arrays and a competitive price-performance point that have been used by systems companies like, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems over the past decade.
Recent OEM partner Quantum will be using Dot Hill storage technology to build their storage product roadmaps. Their long time partner, like Stratus, still values their solid relationship with Dot Hill as their needs are continually met.
Dot Hill’s latest product, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 series, has been enriched with software features with their RealStor Software. The supported features have traditionally been designed into higher end more expensive arrays. Dot Hill had made these software features easy to use and more affordable for the lower end storage market. Features like:
•RealTier™ – Creating a tier of SSD and intelligent software, they have developed a sub-LUN tiering solution so that frequently used data can take advantage of the performance and response time that SSDs provide while less frequently used data is still securely stored to disk. If data on a disk becomes frequently used it is automatically moved into the SSD layer and less frequently used data is automatically moved to disk for safekeeping. This is also a cost effective solution.
•RealThin™ – Thin provisioning has always been on the top of the list for storage efficiency. This feature cuts way down on the common issue of over provisioning.
•RealPool™ – Eliminates the need to specify RAID levels and low-level configuration details.
•RealQuick™ – Improved rebuild times with rapid data restoration. As disks get larger in capacity rebuild times can become time consuming.
I also like the simple messaging that Dot Hill created to describe their products today:
•Disruptively Simple – They have kept their management and monitoring tools easy and simple to work with and are an integrated part of their product.
•Seriously Smart – With their RealStor software they have added features like, real time tiering, and thin provisioning for storage efficiency.
•Wicked Fast – From my person experience of measuring the performance of Dot Hill products over the past decade I have seen Dot Hill proven themselves to have high performance storage technology for their market and that still holds true today.
Since Dot Hill products are a part of so many storage vendor’s product lines, you have probably used Dot Hill products directly or indirectly and didn’t even know it, from retail stores to financial institutions. The “Dot Hill inside” model the company has taken on has brought them much success as they grow with new vertical markets, like telecommunications, media & entertainment, big data, data analytics, oil & gas, and digital image capture through their OEM partners.
