What does it mean to be ENERGY STAR certified? It means to save energy without sacrificing features or functionality. The best part is that when you save energy, it helps prevent climate change. ENERGY STAR’s products are independently certified to save energy without forgoing performance. The ENERGY STAR product certification validates energy efficient products, and we, Dot Hill, wanted our products to be certified, too. We chose to certify our products due to our commitment to environmental protection, responsibility to conservation and customer interest.

Why is energy-efficient storage important? Because every watt-hour of energy saved results in almost two watt-hours of energy savings at the facility level, with lower waste and reduced cooling requirements. In this case, energy savings equals cost savings.

Demartek performed the certification testing on Dot Hill products. But what criteria needed to be met in order to be ENERGY STAR certified?

• Power supplies must be 80Plus Silver or better
• SNIA/Emerald long term testing in carried out at a third party lab
• Must measure stable performance in either IO/sec/Watt or MB/sec/Watt
• ENERGY STAR registration submitted to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for posting on the EPA website

In addition to the ENERGY STAR certification of our products, Dot Hill offers EcoStor, a separate feature that comes standard in all Dot Hill arrays that utilizes super capacitor backup, which requires proper disposal to avoid environmental harm. However, for the ultimate environmental protection, use storage with super capacitors for cache backup that last 10 years instead of batteries, which only last 1-2 years.

The Dot Hill products that are certified are the 3004 and 4004 hybrid arrays in 2U12 and 2U24 chassis.

We are pleased to offer “Environmentally Responsible Data Storage” and strive to continue to improve our data storage products with new features that improve data integrity, save power and reduce waste. 

For more information, visit the ENERGY STAR site here, or click here to see our certified products on the ENERGY STAR site. 

Click here to view Dot Hill’s Environmental Compliance, and click here to view Dot Hill’s EcoStor data sheet. 

Nimble has made a lot of waves recently in the hybrid storage market with a new line of products that supposedly meet a datacenter’s enterprise requirements. However, the DCIG competitive brief compares Nimble’s CS550 to Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN 4004, and shows how Nimble’s solution comes up short.  Dot Hill not only leverages a similar feature set, but goes well beyond Nimble with improved performance, more protocol options and readily available support to truly meet a customer’s requirements.

Why is the 4004 better?

The reason why the AssuredSAN 4004 is superior to the CS550 is because it fits in diverse environments while optimizing performance for business-critical applications. It boasts superior data efficiency, flexible protocol support and enterprise-ready features, and accelerates beyond the CS500’s read caching, utilizes flash for multiple functions and packs 3.5X of raw data into each rack unit. According to the Competitive Advantage report, the AssuredSAN 4004 undergoes the rigorous physical testing required for NEBS Level 3 and MIL-STD 81OG certification. At the same time, the AssuredSAN’s other exceptional characteristics, such as data encryption and available onsite service, reflect Dot Hill’s enterprise-ready standard and quality products.  

What is compelling about AssuredSAN products?

Additionally, Dot Hill’s 4004 hybrid arrays maximize capacity and performance while keeping costs at a minimum. It delivers proven 99.999 percent availability and feature platinum-rated power supplies. All AssuredSAN solutions provide easy serviceability, which then results in lower costs throughout the life of the product. To make the case for AssuredSAN products even better, they are all backed with a 36-month warranty and are available with the latest high-bandwidth interfaces. DCIG’s brief certainly confirms the high standard of Dot Hill’s products!  

“The versatility of the AssuredSAN 4004 allows it to fit in diverse environments while optimizing performance for business critical applications.” – Chuck Cook, DCIG Analyst 

Find out more and read the report to understand how Dot Hill outdistances the competition.

Who should read the Lab Validation Report?

Anyone who wonders …
– If hybrid storage offers improved IO in a data center?
– How storage tiering and read-cache solutions compare?
– If thin provisioning and automated pooling can make storage easier to manage?
– If RealStor™ lives up to its ‘ease of use’ claim?
– How RealStor™ works with business applications like Exchange and SQL?

Ease of use

ESG Lab tested how easy it is to configure an AssuredSAN 4004 with RealStor™ from scratch. ESG Lab was not only impressed with the intuitive simplicity of the wizard, but also noted that the home screen provides an intuitive, top-down overview of the configuration, health, and utilization of the system—from hosts, through host ports and overall capacity, to a great view of back-end storage pool consumption.

Performance in changing workloads

Testing showed significant improvements in response times for workloads mirroring typical business environments, not to mention RealStor™ software quickly adapted to rapidly changing workloads. Testing showed a dramatic improvement in response times for an OLTP workload as ‘hot’ data was moved to the SSD tier. 

ESG stated that they believe customers will welcome Dot Hill’s simply elegant approach to storage management that saves time and money, delivers great performance at a compelling price point and eliminates the hassle of dealing with RAID.

More about the AssuredSAN 4004 Family

The Ultra48 AssuredSAN 4004 is the cornerstone of the AssuredSAN 4000 Series family of hybrid disk array platforms. It is an extremely reliable and serviceable hardware platform that’s based on Dot Hill’s ninth generation field-proven storage hardware architecture. It’s certain that it’s proven and reliable – after all, Dot Hill has shipped more than 650,000 storage systems based on this architecture!

But what makes RealStor™ so great? RealStor™ is Dot Hill’s second generation storage operating system that delivers autonomic real-time tiering. This latest version of the software that’s included with the AssuredSAN 4004 fuels a powerful set of autonomic efficiencies including SSD caching, SSD and HDD tiering in real time, thin provisioning, zero-impact snapshots and quick RAID rebuilds. With all of these features, it’s no question ESG gave their approval. 

The full report is available here. 

Introducing our AssuredSAN 3004 WITH RealStor – a powerful combination that provides breakthrough innovation at a cost effective price.

Is the 3004 with RealStor for you?

• Are you in a remote, branch or small office, such as a dentist office or a legal firm?
• Do you require general purpose server applications, like web, file, database and email?
• Are you in need of backup appliances?
• Do you already possess virtualized environments?
• Can those virtualized environments handle consistently changing data workloads?

If the above questions apply to you, then the 3004 with RealStor could be a great fit. This powerful combination of software with hardware provides breakthrough innovation, enterprise-level features and functionality. But what makes this dynamic duo strong? The answer is faster disk rebuilds, easy to manage pooled storage, cost-optimized provisioning and SSD read cache performance. A bonus: it costs less than 10k.

The 3004 solution itself is built on our proven RAID architecture, and it delivers dramatic performance gains. Our RealStor software boasts many features.

Key features of RealStor:

• RealCache – Allows SSDs to become an extension of the controller cache
• RealPool – Enables a simpler system management
• RealThin – Offers advanced capacity management while reducing costs
• RealSnap – Uses virtual snapshots to streamline images
• RealQuick – Improves system uptime and data protection while reducing the risk of data loss

Together, the 3004 with RealStor meets many requirements and is a proven, reliable solution to meet your data needs. 

To learn more about the 3004 with RealStor and to view the data sheet, click here. 

systems to manage data acquired by the Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) and the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2, NASA’s first dedicated Earth remote sensing satellite to study atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from space. Until now, no organization has been able to acquire this valuable data.

According to Scientific American magazine, 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere every year. This means that 5.5 tons of carbon dioxide can be allotted to each person living on earth. Due to this astonishing fact, scientists estimate that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should be increasing by about one percent per year. However, it is only increasing at half of that rate. As to where the other half of the CO2 is going is a question that is still being answered by Orbiting Carbon Observatory, by combining space-based and ground-based global measurements of atmospheric CO2 with the precision, resolution and coverage needed to characterize sources and sinks on regional scales. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will also be able to quantify CO2 variability over the seasonal cycles year after year.  

For CalTech to effectively store and protect their 66 + million files, they used Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN 4834 Fibre Channel storage system that was directly attached to four file servers running GlusterFS. The 4834 system is part of the AssuredSAN 4004 systems that are engineered to deliver functionality, reliability and performance. They can scale to more than a petabyte of storage with additional expansion arrays. The reason they selected Dot Hill was because of our storage controller performance and extensive capacity capabilities, and with CalTech’s new investment, they can manage 60TB of data and can expand to 150TB – perfect for storing all of the data that they gather from space.

With CalTech’s capability to study CO2 with an accelerated level of precision, their new storage infrastructure will allow them to measure the changes in atmospheric levels of CO2, calculate CO2 emissions, what is absorbing it, and at what rate. Dot Hill systems are being integrated into organizations that make an impact, and in this case, a planetary impact.