Dot Hill Storage Chosen by Northwest Missouri State University

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that Northwest Missouri State University has selected its AssuredSAN Pro 5000 real-time, autonomic tiered storage to support campus backup systems and to support virtualization and Exchange servers across the university network.

Founded in 1905 and located in Maryville, MO, Northwest Missouri State University has an enrollment of approximately 6,500 students representing 45 states and 30 countries. To address its escalating computing needs, the university sought to expand existing storage infrastructure for improved scalability and efficiency, and to support the school’s virtualization initiatives. Working through reseller Choice Solutions, LLC, the university’s IT team evaluated options and selected AssuredSAN storage for its performance, functionality and price point, as well as its suitability for virtualized environments.

“In addition to outstanding performance, a very intuitive user interface and an extremely small footprint, it was the price point and level of reduced fees offered by the Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 that really sealed the deal for us,” said Timothy Carlyle, director of network computing, Northwest Missouri State University. “We won’t have maintenance fees for three years, and now have ample storage to last through that same time frame and beyond.”

The university’s two AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series arrays, each boasting 32TB of capacity, are located in two different buildings on campus and are 80% virtualized on servers. The arrays run in a VMware environment with Veeam backup and replication, creating seven days of snapshots. Once a week, systems backup to tapes, which are transferred to an offsite location. Three weeks’ worth of data is stored for all Northwest Missouri State campus servers.

The AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series takes tiered storage to a new level – beyond competitors’ batch migration schemes and into a new era of autonomic, real-time data tiering. It manages hot and cold in real-time to deliver storage performance. Powered by Dot Hill RealStor technology ,it responds minute-by-minute to changes in data requirements, moving the most heavily accessed data up to the SSD tier, while detecting less active data and moving it to a lower tier. This data migration happens in real-time, without policy setting and human intervention.

“The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is ideal for educational institutions such as Northwest Missouri State, which are looking for exceptional performance and support for virtualized environments at a price point that is cost effective,” said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing, Dot Hill. “Our AssuredSAN Pro 5000 blends a high-performance SSD tier and high-capacity rotating disk drive tiers with our patented RealStor autonomic, real-time tiering software to provide fast, reliable delivery of data in vSphere environments.”

Dot Hill serves major universities, such as the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State and the University of Sussex and numerous others throughout the UK and the US, through Dot Hill’s network of specialized storage channel resellers. Its channel offers knowledge of storage and virtualized environments as well as an understanding of the education and research sectors.

Installation services and support were provided by Choice Solutions, a growing nationwide systems integrator offering a range of IT solutions, including virtualization, storage, application and desktop delivery, network infrastructure and security. Its team of engineers and sales and support staff helped Northwest Missouri State with technology selection and deployment, by conducting a thorough analysis of the university’s IT goals and strategies.

“Dot Hill’s high performance, reliable storage products with five 9’s of availability are a vital part of our portfolio of solutions for business, education and government customers,” said Jim Steinlage, president and CEO, Choice Solutions. “The Dot Hill AssuredSAN Pro 5000 is a best-in-breed solution that is helping Northwest Missouri State maximize efficiency and capitalize on its virtualization initiatives.“