LONGMONT, Colo., Aug. 22, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dot Hill Systems Corp. (Nasdaq:HILL), a leading provider of SAN storage solutions, today announced that several key channel partners have signed on to support the company's two new storage offerings – the Dot Hill AssuredSANTM 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 next-generation, "wicked fast" storage solution designed to deliver greater reliability and dramatically improved streaming throughput to meet the demanding performance requirements of customers in the Business Intelligence, Media & Entertainment, Telco, High Performance Computing (HPC), Big Data and cloud storage markets.
Dot Hill is introducing the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series through fully 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 fast-growing midrange storage market, while advancing the momentum of the AssuredSAN brand in key vertical markets. Dot Hill will be working closely with channel partners to reach midsized businesses who require rock-solid, "wicked fast" and "seriously smart" storage with world-class reliability and demonstrated 99.999 percent availability for applications such as Microsoft® 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, vice president 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 convenient 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: quick 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, vice president of Alliances at Promark Technology. "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.
"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 -- Seriously Smart Storage for Midrange Customers
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 percent autonomically in real-time, enabling administrators to focus on other important tasks. The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series 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 disruptively simple interface for significantly improved operational efficiency, the 5000 Series autonomically moves information from enterprise SAS drive tiers to fast-read SSD tiers.
Designed to integrate seamlessly with virtualization applications such as VMware® vSphere®, Citrix® XenServer™, Microsoft® Hyper-V® and Veeam® Backup, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series changes the competitive landscape in the midrange market by providing OEMs, authorized channel partners and end-user customers with a highly compelling alternative that delivers truly autonomic storage in real-time and eliminates the need for manual intervention.
The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series 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. The 5000 Series is expected to ship in October 2012.
Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4000 Series – for M&E, Telco, Business Intelligence, and Other Markets
Sharing the same powerful hardware design as Dot Hill's AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series midrange system also introduced today, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series provides superior streaming performance for post-production video editing, rendering, streaming and broadcast, complex analytics, HPC, and telecommunications workloads. The AssuredSAN 4000 Series delivers up to 5200 MB/s sustained sequential read throughput, and up to 3000 MB/s sustained sequential write performance. The 4000 Series delivers this performance at price points that are up to 30 percent lower than competitive offerings.
For demanding transaction oriented applications, such as cloud storage and business analytics, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series delivers an impressive 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. The 4000 Series is expected to ship by the end of September 2012.
Interested resellers can learn more by contacting Dot Hill at www.dothill.com/contact-us.
About Dot Hill
Leveraging its proprietary Assured family of storage solutions, Dot Hill solves many of today's most challenging storage problems – helping IT to improve performance, increase availability, simplify operations, and reduce costs. Dot Hill's solutions combine breakthrough software with the industry's most flexible and extensive hardware platform and automated management to deliver best-in-class solutions. Headquartered in Longmont, Colo., Dot Hill has offices and/or representatives in China, Germany, India, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Dot Hill, AssuredSAN, AssuredSAN Pro 5000, and AssuredSAN 4000 are the trademarks of Dot Hill Systems Corp. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. For more information, visit us at www.dothill.com.
Statements contained in this press release regarding matters that are not historical facts are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Because such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. Such statements include those regarding: improvement of Dot Hill's financial results due to the launch of new products; the performance or benefits of products in any particular environment; the actual size of the market for products; and the actual date of a product's availability. The risks that contribute to the uncertain nature of the forward-looking statements include, among other things: the limited experience that Dot Hill has with new products; that Dot Hill contracts do not have mandatory minimum purchase requirements; changing customer preferences; unforeseen technological, intellectual property, personnel or engineering issues; and the additional risks set forth in the Forms 10-K and 10-Q most recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Dot Hill. Forward-looking statements speak only of circumstances as of the date they were made and Dot Hill undertakes no obligation to update such statements to reflect circumstances that exist after that date. Promark, Pac Data and GW Hannaway and Associates are entities that are independent of Dot Hill, and Dot Hill takes no responsibility with respect to the accuracy of statements made by those entities.
HILL-G