Sharing the same powerful new architecture as Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series midrange system also introduced today (See Dot Hill Presents Intelligent, Autonomic, Real-Time Tiered Storage for Midrange Customers), the AssuredSAN 4000 Series provides superior streaming performance for bandwidth-intensive applications.
The AssuredSAN 4000 Series sets a new Dot Hill performance standard—delivering up to 5200 MB/s of sustained sequential read throughput, a 2.5 times increase over the previous generation AssuredSAN 3000, and up to 3000 MB/s of sustained sequential write performance, making it ideal for customers in the Media & Entertainment (M&E), Telecommunications, and High Performance Computing (HPC) markets. The 4000 Series delivers this performance at price points that are up to 30% lower than competitive offerings—24 terabytes of storage with up to 5200 MB/s sustained sequential read throughput for under $30,000.
For demanding transaction oriented applications, such as cloud storage and business analytics, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series delivers an impressive 100,000 IOPS sustained from disk for fast access to database and structured data content, and up to 650,000 IOPS from cache.
“Video post-production editors today are managing vast amounts of simultaneously streaming rich media content in a variety of high resolution formats—HD, 2K, 4K and 3D. They expect high megabytes-per-second throughput and they simply can’t tolerate dropped frames,” said Dana Kammersgard, president and CEO at Dot Hill. “Similarly, HPC and telecommunications customers need storage to perform with low latency and high bandwidth for demanding data capture and analysis requirements. We designed the AssuredSAN 4000 Series to deliver ‘wicked fast’ performance to meet the stringent requirements of these customers and increase our penetration in these key markets, as well as Big Data and cloud-based storage.”
“Our broadcast and media customers demand reliable uptime, consistent performance characteristics, and flexibility to support a broad range of demanding operational workflows,” said Paul Eisner, vice president, Harris Broadcast Communications. “The AssuredSAN 4000 provides a rock-solid hardware foundation for our own patented software to deliver leading, scalable online storage with Harris’ NEXIO Farad solution.”
With more than 500,000 units shipped, Dot Hill is enhancing its strong global footprint in the lower midrange storage space with the AssuredSAN 4000 Series. According to IDC market sizing data, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series is categorised under Price Band 4, which expands Dot Hill’s potential Total Addressable Market (TAM). Combined with the company’s focus on the midrange market (Price Band 5) with the AssuredSAN Pro 5000 Series, Dot Hill is more than doubling its TAM for 2013 from $4.0 billion (Tier 2 and Tier 3) to nearly $10.6 billion.
The AssuredSAN 4000 Series scales up to 192 drives and allows customers to freely mix drive types, including HDD and SSD, for the most effective allocation of storage resources, based on capacity and performance needs.
Designed to integrate seamlessly with virtualisation applications such as VMware®, Citrix® XenApp™ and Microsoft® Hyper-V®, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series provides OEMs, authorised channel partners and end-user customers with blazing speed. With full support for Windows, OS X and Linux environments, Dot Hill AssuredSAN solutions are ideal to support workflows using Apple Final Cut Pro, Autodesk Flame and Autodesk Flame Premium software, or any application that demands extreme video streaming performance and proven reliability.
As with all Dot Hill AssuredSAN storage systems, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series features energy-saving drive spin-down and patented technologies such as Dot Hill’s SimulCache™ and EcoStor™ to help customers meet a growing set of environmental concerns. Dot Hill’s EcoStor battery-free alternative for cache memory leverages a combination of super capacitors and flash memory that outlasts traditional batteries nearly fivefold. Benefits include lower maintenance and disposal costs and reduced server and application down-time due to scheduled battery replacement and maintenance.
Jason Daly, Dot Hill business development manager at storage distributor Hammer, says: “Hammer's customers have seen significant adoption of the AssuredSAN series as a leading high performance storage solution for the demanding post production video sector. The new AssuredSAN 4000 series raises the bar to deliver even more compelling price-performance from a rock solid product line that can meet the needs of any high performance application.”
Dot Hill’s SimulCache technology leverages redundant RAID controllers, thus eliminating the performance degradation associated with conventional cache mirroring. The implementation of a high-speed dedicated PCI-Express bus streamlines write performance resulting in superior overall system responsiveness, driving faster application throughput. Dual-redundant RAID controllers, dual power supplies and dual fans bring uptime figures to 99.999 percent availability, so customers don’t experience downtime or data loss.
Dot Hill storage solutions feature NEBS Level 3 and MIL STD 810F/G compliance and certifications to meet the most rugged requirements. The company's storage arrays are used extensively for ground stations, deployable command centres, and video archives where scalability, reliability, and redundancy are essential.
As with all Dot Hill AssuredSAN arrays, the AssuredSAN 4000 Series is easy to configure and manage via the RAIDar 2.0 intuitive web based interface which provides storage setup and monitoring without the need for host-based software. AssuredSAN users gain configuration and installation efficiencies via wizards and schedulers for snapshots and replication.