Dot Hill Systems’s new AssuredSAN 4004 storage models, based on the company’s ninth generation RAID architecture, are a great fit for high-end customers with deep pockets.

These products offer greater data security, faster throughput and substantial business benefits for markets that demand extremely high-bandwidth performance, such as cloud service providers, media & entertainment, oil & gas, telecommunications, big data analytics and digital image archiving.

All Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4004 solutions are built on the company’s ninth-generation RAID stack, which delivers up to 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) from disk, sustained sequential read performance of up to 6400 MB/second and writes of up to 5300 MB/second. AssuredSAN 4004 solutions also integrate all the performance tuning and optimizations of the previous-generation AssuredSAN 4000 models, which includes streaming performance optimization to handle randomized, sequential workloads. Dot Hill’s latest firmware utilizes a proprietary Adaptive Read-ahead Algorithm that analyzes workloads and fine tunes options to optimize the performance of specific kinds of demanding workloads, delivering better response times and meeting IT service level agreements.
 
AssuredSAN 4004 arrays support the full complement of Dot Hill’s data management services including the company’s RAIDar management interface, and disaster recovery software comprised of AssuredSnap for point-in-time snapshots, AssuredCopy for creating volume copies and AssuredRemote for array-based remote replication. Support for popular storage software platforms such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and Veeam Backup & Replication is included. Consistent with previous AssuredSAN products, flash based SSD drives are supported across the Dot Hill product line.
 
The Dot Hill platform also includes support for HGST and Seagate Full Disk Encryption (FDE). Self-encrypting drives encrypt every write operation and decrypt every read operation without user intervention. With drive-level protection of data, FDE drives remain fully protected even if they’re stolen, taken out of service, or repurposed. FDE support is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2014.

The Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4004 Series is available in a variety of configurations for SSD, 2.5-inch HDD and 3.5-inch HDD, including highly versatile AssuredSAN 4824 and AssuredSAN 4834 converged interface models. Each AssuredSAN converged interface storage array includes two four-port controllers and can be easily configured in the field with eight 16Gb Fibre Channel ports, eight 10Gb iSCSI ports, or a combination of four 16Gb Fibre Channel and four 10Gb iSCSI ports.  IT managers often use Fibre Channel for the storage network within the data center, and iSCSI for replication and other data management services outside of the data center.
 
These storage arrays are fully backward-compatible with 8Gb/4Gb Fibre Channel and1Gb iSCSI networking solutions such as switches and host bus adapters. AssuredSAN 4524 and AssuredSAN 4534 12Gb SAS models are fully backward-compatible with 6Gb SAS investments. All 4004 models are meta-data compatible with previous generation AssuredSAN arrays, so that customers can accomplish data-in-place migration by simply upgrading to 4004 generation controllers.
 
Products will begin shipping in volume worldwide to authorized Dot Hill channel partners in November. The suggested list price for a 48TB AssuredSAN 4834 16Gb Fibre Channel/10Gb iSCSI model is US$39,869. A similar dual controller configuration with eight ports of 12Gb SAS is $40,265. For more info go to www.dothil.com .