HTA is an architectural design firm in the UK that specializes in urban design and residential design services. Looking for more efficiency from its storage and servers, HTA went looking for a consultant to improve workflows. 

HTA uses high end graphic design systems such as Bentley® MicroStation V8i, Autodesk® Revit® Structure Suite and Adobe Creative Suite® and they have over 100 designers creating designs, modeling, and rendering the images. Needless to say, their storage requirements are very demanding. Their issues, not uncommon, included:

• An aging SAN that relied on legacy SCSI drive technology
• Increasing storage performance demands for large CAD files
• Too many physical servers that were underutilized and expensive to maintain

What to Do?

Simple. HTA engaged a competent reseller, Krome Technologies. After evaluating several storage options, the firm selected the Dot Hill AssuredSAN iSCSI network storage because it delivers exceptional price/performance with easy scalability. The initial installation was a single array to manage 17TB of production data.

To improve the server side, a new VMware® based infrastructure was developed which included the consolidation of 12 physical legacy servers down to VMware ESX hosts running on HP DL series servers. Disk-to-disk backup was provided by Veeam software which allows application based snap-shots from the SAN array.

What’s the bottom line?

• Improved productivity through SAN performance with vast improvements in file open times
• Peace of mind with fully certified VMware external RAID storage arrays
• Simple web based storage management without the need for server based agents

You can have results like this too. Contact a Dot Hill reseller or our sales people directly. We’ll show you the way.

Contributed by: Warren Reid, Field Marketing Manager, Dot Hill Systems

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The onsite service provides coverage 8 hours per day Monday through Friday with next day response time. That’s included with registration. For customers with more demanding service expectations, there are also options to upgrade to a 4-hour response time and to 7×24 coverage. Service coverage is available in North America and Europe all tier 1 cities.

Dot Hill has revamped the service program so that a 3 year onsite service agreement is available at very attractive prices. Customers who purchase up front for 3 years will receive annual service for about 7% of the purchase price. That’s just a great value. At the time that customers register, there is an offer available to upgrade service to a full 3 year period so even if you were not aware of the program at the time the product purchase was made, you can easily add it.

Five 9′s of Availability

One of the reasons that we can offer a free year of service is that Dot Hill products are extremely reliable. AssuredSAN 3000 storage arrays have demonstrated Five 9’s of availability. This is the kind of availability you might expect in an expensive enterprise class storage product costing much more, but we make it available in our core product line for entry and midrange data centers.

Contributed by: Jim Jonez, Senior Director of Marketing, Dot Hill Systems

According to Enterprise Strategy Group research, the top 3 reasons to consider incorporating SSD’s into your storage environment are 1) improved performance 2) higher reliability and 3) reductions in power consumption. This blog will discuss two key instances where the addition of SSD’s to a disk array can improve performance in a VDI environment and while deploying advanced shared file systems.

Addressing the Virtual Desktop Bootstorm with SSD’s
Using SSD’s with HDD’s in virtual desktop environment deployment addresses an annoying and common problem with VDI: the ‘bootstorm.’  The business community all seems, to get going at about the same time by logging onto our desktop and checking email. This can cause frustrating delays just when you are ready to start a productive day. Using SSD’s as a ‘boot’ tier can alleviate the load time for the VDI boot image, allowing for a greater number of supported virtual desktops from a single disk array.

While many variables ultimately impact the number of desktops that can be supported with the storage system, the number and type of each disk drive is certainly worth careful discussion and consideration.  By installing SSD’s and provisioning them for the critical boot activity, performance can be enhanced. 

When working with virtual desktops, the storage plays an important role in overall system performance. If you want to have great, user friendly, virtual desktops, you’ll need storage that enables that to happen. Key areas that directly influence desktop performance include:

• Host interface protocol and the speed of connection to the storage
• Advanced data management such as thin provisioning
• Selection of the RAID level deployed and stripe size
• System cache size and using SSD’s for read cache
• Overall system storage capacity and the number of drive spindles
• Automated tiering usage within the storage system
• De-duplication or compression of data usage

Fortunately, there are integrators out there who have a wealth of experience in this area and who can help in defining the best solutions for each organization.

Better Performance with Advanced Shared File Systems:
Applications such as StorNext by Quantum, are based on writing, updating, and deleting metadata activity in shared environments. The StorNext file system provides the maximum responsiveness to many simultaneous metadata commands. By housing metadata on a high performance SSD within the RAID, there is further improvement to response time in high Random IOPS environments. A mixed array combining SSD’s and HDD’s in a shared file system environment also has performance benefits in both sequential work flow environments and during file cleanup operations that are entirely metadata IO’s.

Utilization of the SSD’s in advanced file systems is specifically introduced to remove any storage performance concerns associated with metadata traffic. There is no doubt that storage array technology with mixed storage media (SSD & HDD) can yield higher performance for certain operations.Shared file systems like StorNext are often used for Rich Media, data acquisition systems and scientific research. Other environments where this solution performs well are High Performance Computing (HPC), oil & gas, energy research, weather prediction, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). 

Recommended Configurations for Sequential and Random Workloads:
The usage of solid-state drives to store and manage metadata vastly improves system performance, fully leveraging the higher processing power of disk array storage solutions. Based on the need for Random or Sequential performance improvements in a dual controller configuration, you should consider either of the following options to configure the disk array to support mixed SSD/HDD. This example in the diagram below includes two SSD’s with the remaining HDD’s utilizing either RAID 5 or RAID 10.

RAID Configurations

Sourcing Your Ideal Configuration
We’ve discussed several effective solutions to manage some common IT challenges. The next step is finding a reliable system that enables the effective integration of these mixed drives. Conveniently, Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN 3000 Series supports mixed drives in a single chassis. Just talk to a Dot Hill sales representative to find out more.

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Historically, rugged storage solutions in the field looked and acted radically different than their networked datacenter storage solution counterparts and both had drastically different operational tasks. But today we are seeing more government mandates to provide simplified sharing of data not just across agencies but across various compute platforms as well. Cloud storage is one way to enable data sharing.

The resulting effect is also a merger of capabilities and storage platforms that can be utilized for both large data center command and control environments as well as those sub C4ISR systems being forward deployed in the theater. Commonality of spares along with data management tools (including replication and data recovery) is becoming as important as the ability to share the actual data in a network centric environment. Having one storage solution that can meet both requirements is certainly going to be more cost effective and have better ROI for government CIO’s.

This is exactly where the combination NEBS and MIL STD in the AssureSAN™ storage solution can shine.

Most of us in the federal space are familiar with the various components of and certification requirements of MIL STD 810F/G testing for our airborne and mobile deployable applications, but how do NEBS standards compare or compliment?

NEBS testing is similar in purpose, in that its intent is to give the customer confidence that the product’s quality and design meets the requirements of harsher environments with a significant benefit in large data center environments. This is seen in TELCO and can apply to our large imagery/surveillance databases as well. There is no direct translation between NEBS and MIL-STD testing, but there are a few key points that are worth understanding about NEBS Certification under harsh conditions that translate well into our MIL STD language:

NEBS Standards require:

Operating during cooling system failure:

-Extended Temperatures:  -5 to 50C

-Relative Humidity:  5% – 90%

-Flame resistant

Operation during earthquake conditions:

-Zone 4: 8.3 on Richter Scale – approximately 5Gs of input energy over a specific frequency and duration profile

Operation while exposed to atmospheric contaminants including:

-Mixed flowing gas

-Hygroscopic dust

Operation under conditions of electro static discharge:

-7 random points subjected to 15,000 volts of ESD

As a manufacturer, we invest in environmental testing so that our customers can more easily determine a product’s ability to perform during a variety of planned and unplanned events when combined in a total package solution. Most importantly, due diligence on the front-end increases the chance of Prime Contractors passing the entire final Racked Solution on the first go around. No one wants a failed certification and retest because that can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and delay in deployment waiting for the next barge testing slot to open up.

For more information and detailed specification of Dot Hill’s MIL STD 810F/G and NEBS level 3 compliant products, please feel free to contacts us at www.dothill.com/company/contact-us

Article contributed by Inese Lanka, Sr. director of Federal Sales, Dot Hill Systems

Inese Lanka, Director of Federal Sales

Plug-and Play Server and Storage System
One of our Dot Hill partners, Jeskell Systems LLC, has done something really remarkable for Federal customers – they have developed a fully integrated server and storage solution which is both mobile and portable. As a Premier IBM Business Solutions partner, they were already selling  the IBM BladeCenter server. They took the next step of combining that with Dot Hill’s highly reliable and hardened AssuredSAN™ 3000 storage system so that they could meet customer needs for a combined rugged server and storage systems . Pretty interesting, right?

This server and storage combination has been designed to meet MIL-STD requirements for air, land, and sea, including size, weight and power requirements. Technology refresh programs can now take advantage of a fully integrated plug-and-play solution, which can help reduce maintenance, reduce upgrade and refresh costs, while still enabling military and aerospace applications to benefit from all of the standard built-in features of a COTS based product offering.

What is Rugged Storage?
Some of the features that allow the AssuredSAN to perform outside the datacenter include a rugged chassis, built-in redundancy, field replaceable parts, and a new filtration bezel which keeps dust and other particles from interfering with the operation. That’s just the high-level – the AssuredSAN design has several other aspects that have made it successful in unmanned and mobile programs.

Live Demos
If you would like to see a demonstration of the solution, visit Jeskell Systems (http://www.jeskell.com/) at one of these upcoming events:

- The Army Intelligence & Security Command (INSCOM) at Ft. Belvoir on November 3rd 
- The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at Bolling AFB on November 7th.

Both these agencies conduct information operations for key military and government decision makers and are continuously looking at advanced technologies to help our warfighters at home and abroad.

Article contributed by:

Inese Lanka, Sr. Director of Federal Sales, Dot Hill Systems

Inese Lanka, Sr. Director of Federal Sales

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