Dot Hill 30-Year Old

In its 30th year of delivering storage innovations through OEMs and channel partners, Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced it has secured its 100th U.S. patent.

Patent portfolio includes game changers such as EcoStor for battery-less cache backup, SimulCache for fast dual controller write operations, and RealTier software for autonomic real-time tiering.

According to the ipCapital Group, in 2012 Dot Hill ranked first among companies for having the greatest number of U.S. patents per $100 million in storage revenue. In 2013, the company was also ranked first among its peers by MDB Capital Group LLC in terms of Patent Portfolio Tech Score and Companies with Inbound Citations.

Eighty-four of Dot Hill’s one-hundred patents cover the company’s RAID controller and SAN-related technology, including RealTier, its autonomic real-time tiering software. In addition to the 100 patents the company has secured, Dot Hill has 19 additional U.S. patent applications pending approval.

“This 100-patent milestone represents an extensive 30-year legacy of innovation from Dot Hill’s R&D and engineering talent,” said Dana Kammersgard, president and CEO, Dot Hill. “Dot Hill’s patented technologies translate into product differentiation in the form of ground breaking new features, industry leading performance, rock solid reliability and lower TCO.“

Originally co-founded as Artecon by Kammersgard in 1984, Dot Hill has delivered a range of innovations over the last 30 years, including:

• 1997 – First thin provisioning drivers

• 1999 – First 1Gb FC JBOD chassis

• 2002 – First 2U 12 chassis with 3.5-inch drives and integrated controllers

• 2004 – First external storage system to use the SAS disk interface.

• 2006 – First SAS/SATA external storage system device support

• 2010 – First hybrid FC/iSCSI arrays

• 2010 – First 8Gb FC array

• 2012 – First real-time tiering storage solution

• 2013 – First 16Gb FC/10GbE iSCSI converged interface storage solutions

• 2014 – First ultra-density storage system with 48 drives in a 2U form factor

• 2014 – First NEBS Level 3 compliant high-density large form factor 56-drive array

 For a list of Dot Hill milestones the past 30 years, view the Dot Hill innovation infographic.

“You can’t prosper in the storage industry for 30 years by just throwing ‘me-too’ products into the marketplace and hoping customers will adopt them,” said Ken Day, CTO, Dot Hill. “At Dot Hill, customer input is the foundation of our design process. The challenges that they face on a daily basis are top-of-mind when we develop patented technologies for our storage solutions.“

Dot Hill’s 100th US patent, numbered 8,869,131, describes a software management innovation that allows a storage controller to be easily and safely downgraded to a previous version of firmware. This can be useful for testing purposes or if the newer firmware has encountered unexpected issues. The invention includes safeguards that prevent a controller from becoming completely inoperative if a code downgrade is attempted while a feature not in the older version is in use.

Dot Hill’s patent portfolio builds on the IP behind AssuredSAN and AssuredSAN Pro solutions, which deliver solid and fast solutions to customers and OEMs. Continuous innovation benefits the company’s vertical market customers in the media and entertainment, telecommunications, oil and gas, big data and analytics and digital imaging sectors.