Evaluator Group Analyzes Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that industry analyst firm Evaluator Group has published three papers that document the effectiveness of implementing its AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series midrange storage solution, citing its business impact as well as its specific value proposition for Exchange and virtual server environments.

"Mid-sized enterprise administrators are becoming IT generalists faced with the challenge of performing multiple job functions. While they have a great deal of knowledge about their environment and application requirements, these administrators do not have sufficient time to monitor and tune individual applications, or the underlying infrastructure," said Russ Fellows, senior partner, Evaluator Group. "Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 has a number of capabilities that are designed to enhance business operations in mid-sized enterprises. The RealPool and RealThin features can help address administration time spent setting up and allocating storage capacity. Reducing administration overhead is also a direct result of Dot Hill’s RealTier, eliminating the need to move data to optimize performance."

Business Value of AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series
In Evaluator Group’s, The Business Impact of New Storage Architecture, fellows said that the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series’ pricing model, which includes RealStor software at a single price point regardless of the capacity or configurations, contributes to a low and declining TCO as the capacity increases. Fellows noted that a system running multiple applications will see performance improvements through the use of real-time tiering, thin provisioning and fast rebuilds. "With the reliability Dot Hill has developed over the course of three decades, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is a strong addition to virtualized application environments," concluded fellows.

Designed for Virtualized Workloads
In the Evaluator Group Technology Insight Paper, Storage for Virtualized Workloads, also authored by fellows, he characterized the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series as part of a new class of storage systems designed specifically to support applications running on virtual servers.

To achieve business efficiency and performance objectives, many of the most critical storage features must be designed into systems, not added as an afterthought to decade-old designs, says Fellows. Pro 5000 systems are designed for virtualization, with striping, pooling and fast healing designed in. The addition of critical VMware API’s for Array Integration (VAAI) and Site Recovery Adapter (SRA) capabilities enable IT generalists to support requisite system performance and reliability.

AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series Optimized
for Exchange Storage
In the Evaluator Group Technology Insight Paper, Exchange Storage – Meeting Requirements with Dot Hill, Randy Kerns, senior strategist, noted that Microsoft has made significant changes with Exchange Server 2010 to reduce I/O overhead.

"Even with the changes to reduce I/O overhead, Exchange is sensitive to disk latencies for mailbox access, which necessitates the selection of storage systems that can minimize response times," Kerns said.

"Dot Hill offers storage systems with the advanced capabilities needed to address evolving Microsoft Exchange environments. By automating tasks for managing storage and adapting to changing workloads, Dot Hill storage can simplify the administrative effort to meet the storage needs for Exchange," said Kerns. "The ability to adapt to changing workloads to meet increasing numbers of email users and the varying needs of server virtualization is one of the most important characteristics of Dot Hill AssuredSAN systems. The automation designed into the AssuredSAN system to measure data usage and move data to the most responsive location in real-time removes the detailed monitoring and management usually required to optimize the storage environment."

"With years of hands-on experience, the analysts at Evaluator Group are extremely knowledgeable about systems architectures, and their in-depth analysis is respected industry-wide by vendors and IT professionals alike," said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. "These three Evaluator Group reports give readers a more detailed analysis of how Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series can make a true impact on virtualized and Exchange environments, and more importantly the bottom line at midmarket organizations. When we designed the seriously smart AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series, we recognized that these organizations can no longer accept outdated, raw performance benchmarks. They need to know how a midrange storage solution is going to tackle their specific applications running dynamic workloads. The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series simplifies the user experience, removes complexity, and delivers minute-by-minute storage tiering to deliver superior performance for virtualized workloads and applications such as Exchange."

AssuredSAN 5000 Pro Series
Smart, Real-time Tiered Storage for the Midrange
The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series with RealStor software takes tiered storage to a new level – beyond competitors’ automated batch migration, and into a new autonomic, real-time data tiering. With RealStor, businesses gain the advantage of high performance SSDs, while storing less frequently accessed data on slower, but less expensive HDDs. Designed for the midrange market, the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series is a performance, highly available, integrated storage solution that delivers faster access to current data with built-in, real-time, autonomic tiered storage and virtualization.

Reliable AssuredSAN 4000 Series
Delivers Performance
Sharing the same architecture as AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series midrange system, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series provides superior streaming performance for bandwidth-intensive applications. The AssuredSAN 4000 Series delivers up to 5200 MB/s of sustained sequential read throughput and up to 3,000MB/s of sustained sequential write performance – making it for customers in the media and entertainment, telecommunications, and HPC markets.