Weigel Broadcasting Deployed Dot Hill AssuredSAN

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that Weigel Broadcasting Co. Inc., a privately-owned broadcasting company, has deployed it AssuredSAN storage arrays with assistance from Dot Hill professional services, providing the organization a cost-effective, virtualized IT infrastructure to reduce complexity, improve performance and support future growth.

Looking for value and scalability, Weigel found the AssuredSAN 4004 storage solution offered HA and equal storage capacity with better services, for less than half the cost of a competing NetApp solution.

To replace its aging Windows 2003 infrastructure and legacy networked storage supporting its SGL FlashNet content storage management system, Weigel worked with Dot Hill to migrate its data to a clustered and virtualized Windows 2012 Server environment with a SAN for greater availability with less IT complexity. Further complicating the migration, Weigel was leveraging spanned volumes – dynamic volumes consisting of disk space on more than one physical disk across nine separate volumes.

“We have been extremely pleased with the performance of the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4004 storage arrays,” said Kyle Walker, VP, technology, Weigel. “But we’re also appreciative of the exceptional service and support we have gotten from the Dot Hill Professional Services team.“

Dot Hill Professional Services conducted an asynchronous replication of two servers with multiple VMs to two sites, migrating Weigel’s data to the new clustered Windows 2012 Server and Hyper-V virtualized environment without a hitch. A total of one petabyte of data was migrated to the Dot Hill storage solution in four weeks’ time, and some six to eight SANs were pared down to just three. Weigel’s critical video assets and data are now handled by three Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4004 storage systems and six JBODs per site.

The system handles replication of approximately 300GB of content changes on a nightly basis.

“Weigel didn’t expect to be able to migrate spanned volumes,” said Shlomi Ben Abraham, senior director of professional services and business development, Dot Hill. “But we figured out how to do it. Our Professional Services team understands today’s most complex IT environments. This technical experience and know-how translates into smooth and timely client deployments.“

Dot Hill has experience helping clients in the media and entertainment sector. The company’s storage solutions, particularly the AssuredSAN 4004 with its bandwidth of 6,400MB/s reads and 5,30 MB/s writes, meets the rigors of M&E workflows and content demands.

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. It also provides a complete, instantaneously available DR solution.