Graphic Systems Group Selecting 196TB Dot Hill AssuredSAN

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that Graphics Systems Group, LLC (GSG), a NYC creative production agency, has selected its AssuredSAN storage arrays to support its day-to-day computing, secure its creative assets, support offsite replication, and ensure critical network uptime.

GSG develops and executes creative marketing materials for big brands. Focus areas include: advertising, retouching and computer generated imagery, retail and outdoor media campaigns, digital media, and consumer packaging.

When GSG learned its existing storage provider was eliminating support for its storage system, forcing a painful and expensive upgrade after only two years, the firm decided it was time to look at other options. Working with NAPC, GSG evaluated storage solutions from EMC, NetApp, and others before selecting Dot Hill AssuredSAN storage arrays-specifically the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4004 and 3000 models.

“It was amazing how quickly our data was migrated from our servers to the new SAN in only a two-week deployment timeframe,” said Gregory Floro, director of IT, GSG. “Unlike our previous storage system, we didn’t experience a negative production impact. Also the ability to quickly add new storage and easily upgrade controllers to leverage new storage interfaces as needed is a huge win for us and greatly increases the lifespan of the hardware. The service and support from Dot Hill and NAPC has been excellent.“

“This is another example of Dot Hill AssuredSAN storage solutions addressing the requirements of high bandwidth applications across the workflow spectrum-from content creation and editing to secure storage and replication-more effectively than the competition. Predictable high performance and assured BC translate directly into higher productivity and cost savings in creative agencies today,” said Joe Swanson, VP marketing and business development, Dot Hill. “In addition, the AssuredSAN 4004’s multiple connection speed options, modular components and swappable controllers will ensure continued productivity gains in the future at GSG. Upgrades will be easy and inexpensive as their storage capacity and performance needs grow.“

The Dot Hill Professional Services team, in conjunction with NAPC implemented an efficient two-week deployment process, which incorporated a complete migration of all data to the new array. With the new 196TB solution up and running, GSG began to reap myriad benefits, including a doubling of the performance of its previous system and improved responsiveness, as well as newfound simplicity and ease-of-use.

Dot Hill has experience helping clients in the media and entertainment sector, and its storage solutions, particularly the AssuredSAN 4004, with its bandwidth of 6,400MB/s reads and 5,300MB/s writes,  meet the rigors of creative workflows where multiple servers are utilized by creative artists on a SAN to repeatedly access, edit and store potentially millions of assets. The AssuredSAN 4000 Series utilizes Dot Hill’s proprietary, multi-stream processing algorithms to deliver optimized, random sequential I/O, resulting in predictable performance to and from numerous streams of access points for these demanding, media applications.

The network interface capability of the AssuredSAN 4004 allows GSG to leverage both FC and iSCSI protocols in a single system, and the bandwidth provides performance support for GSG’s Windows, Linux and Apple OSX computing environments, as well as its Xinet Digital Asset Management system.

The AssuredSAN 4004 also provides a DR solution that proved much more efficient and reliable than GSG’s tape-based, legacy solution. The DR solution, which includes AssuredSnap, AssuredCopy and AssuredRemote data protection and replication software, provides GSG reliable and efficient BC, in concert with another AssuredSAN 3000 array for inbound replication at the company’s Virginia site. Use of snapshotting in both locations reduced the need for GSG’s previous tape library and the associated manual user intervention and risk of using tape as a recovery medium.