Dot Hill Aims at SMBs with New Branded Storage Appliance

Dot Hill Systems, known mostly as a key hardware OEM partner for companies such as Hewlett-Packard and the former Sun Microsystems, announced March 31 that it is shipping a new branded disk-to-disk data protection appliance targeted at SMBs.

This is a change from the company's previous high-end enterprise OEM strategy in which Dot Hill received little or no recognition for building many of the arrays that HP and Sun sell.

Dot Hill's AssuredSAN 3000 storage appliances are based on the company's 3000 Series storage arrays announced in February.

These high-end machines with the midrange price (they start at about $15,000) are loaded with a plethora of connectivity options: support for 8Gb Fibre Channel SANs, dual interface 8Gb Fibre Channel and 1Gb iSCSI, and the company's optional AssuredRemote data management software. IT managers can plug in just about anything they need with little or no effort.

AssuredSANs are similar in function but also sport a suite of disaster recovery applications, including the company's new AssuredRemote remote replication software. This includes volume copy, snapshot and remote replication as bundled standard features.

Using AssuredRemote's embedded-in-the-array remote replication, storage managers can offload backup operations from critical application servers yet create little to no impact to production servers-even by asynchronously copying and synchronizing data for up to 16 volumes simultaneously over a SAN or WAN, Dot Hill said.

In the high-end AssuredSAN 3900s, this replication can take place through either Fibre Channel ports and/or iSCSI ports because it is fully supported for high-availability failover using dual controllers, Dot Hill said.

"Flagship" configurations include AssuredSAN 3930R Hybrid 8Gb Fibre Channel/iSCSI with 12 3.5-inch disk drives; 3920R Hybrid 8Gb Fibre Channel/iSCSI with 24 2.5-inch disk drives; 3730R 8Gb Fibre Channel with 12 3.5-inch disk drives; and 3720R 8Gb Fibre Channel with 24 2.5-inch disk drives.

Custom configurations, of course, are available.

The Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series is available through Dot Hill's channel partners now. Pricing starts at $20,200 for a dual controller Fibre Channel system fully populated with 500GB SATA drives, the company said.

For more information, go here.