Partnership Between Dot Hill and Xiotech

Dot Hill Systems Corp. has signed a letter of intent to enter into a technology partnership with Xiotech Corp. to enable new virtual storage solutions.

This is Dot Hill’s first major collaboration involving the Intelligent Storage Networking (iSN) software platform acquired in January 2010 along with Cloverleaf Communications Inc. Dot Hill’s iSN software provides advanced heterogeneous storage virtualization and the ability to unify storage technologies.

The iSN platform enables OEM partners to build custom solutions thereby gaining access to and maintaining control of critical information without limits. It is based on a powerful, flexible virtualization engine that scales to over two petabytes (2PB) of actual storage with virtual volumes, tiered storage, thin provisioning, snapshots, replication, and data migration built-in. For companies building private and public cloud storage systems to complement virtual servers, the Dot Hill technology provides a foundation for a new class of midrange and enterprise storage systems.

"End users deploying desktop and server virtualization, or implementing cloud storage solutions are demanding a high-performance, versatile storage platform that eliminates the traditional boundaries of physical storage architectures and first-generation virtual storage systems," stated Alan Atkinson, president and chief executive officer of Xiotech Corporation. "We are looking forward to collaborating with Dot Hill to bring exciting new innovations to market to meet these customer requirements."

The Intelligent Storage Network (iSN) platform can be the basis for cloud storage solutions which require sophisticated management feature sets. Dot Hill’s software provides a solution that enables companies to gain access to and maintain control of critical information without limits and across multiple tiers of storage arrays. This enables users of iSN to harness both structured and unstructured information, so they can make optimal use of resources, whether data, infrastructure, or IT staff.

"Dot Hill iSN technology offers a very strong value proposition – giving users the ability to easily manage and monitor extremely complex heterogeneous storage networks, all but eliminate down time, and reduce the overall cost of storage," said Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Systems Group. "Xiotech has been a leader in highly reliable storage solutions with its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology and the CorteX environment based on standard Internet access and management interfaces. The Dot Hill/Xiotech partnership should result in powerful, innovative solutions that meet many of today’s most critical business needs."

"We acquired Cloverleaf at the beginning of the year intending to move up the storage value stack and increase our gross margins," said Dana Kammersgard, president and chief executive officer of Dot Hill Systems. "Our relationship with Xiotech is initial validation of the software we purchased and we believe will lay the foundation for expanded market presence and a vibrant software business for Dot Hill."