Dot Hill Announces SANnet II SATA Storage Solutions
CARLSBAD, Calif. -- June 7, 2004 -- Dot Hill Systems Corp. (NASDAQ: HILL) has introduced its enterprise-class SANnet(R) II SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) storage solutions. SATA is a new high-speed interface standard for hard drives based on serial signaling technology. This latest addition to the SANnet II family of products can provide businesses with more capacity at a significantly lower cost. Dot Hill plans to begin volume production shipments of SANnet II SATA to all customers in June, including a major OEM customer.
"We are pleased to announce our SATA products because we believe this technology can bring economical disk-based, nearline storage to customers across a broad variety of industries," said Dana Kammersgard, Dot Hill's chief technology officer and co-founder. "SANnet II SATA delivers very cost-effective storage without sacrificing robustness or redundancy. This is a full-featured, fault-tolerant enterprise-class product line. SANnet II SATA will easily integrate into the tiered storage model that businesses are adopting in order to more efficiently manage information based on its value. Compared to some of the recently introduced SATA products, the SANnet II SATA is significantly more scaleable in terms of capacity, host connections and performance. It is also much more rugged as measured by independent NEBS Level 3 and MIL-STD-810F certifications."
SANnet II SATA storage systems offer 12 drive bays providing a capacity of up to 3 terabytes (TB) in just 2U (3.5 inches high) of rack space and can scale up to 16TB of usable RAID 5 storage by adding drives and expansion systems. In addition, the SANnet II SATA supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 3, and 5. Customers have the option of single or dual RAID controllers and AC or DC power. With dual redundant, hot-swappable components including controllers, power supplies, fans, event management units and battery-backed cache memory, the SANnet II SATA provides enterprise-class availability.
Multiple Fibre Channel (FC) host ports enable the direct connection of up to 12 servers (6 redundant) without the use of external switches, providing a lower cost networked storage solution while maintaining high availability.
"This concept of a 'switchless SAN' is something we pioneered back in 1999 with our first generation of SANnet products," explained Omar Barraza, Dot Hill's director of marketing. "It is a much simpler and cheaper approach to installation, configuration and management of networked storage, which are important factors to the SMB and department level customer."
"SATA storage offers enterprises the ability to retrieve valuable data in a more timely manner, which is now required by law for publicly traded companies and within certain industries such as financial services and health care," said Mike Karp, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates. "SATA storage represents an important storage tier, and has an essential role to play at all enterprises looking to increase operational efficiencies by implementing information lifecycle management (ILM)."
As with all its existing SANnet II products, Dot Hill's SANnet II SATA products meet the stringent NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) Level 3 standard used by the telecommunications industry and the MIL-STD-810F standard used by the U.S. Department of Defense. Because it is built on the same modular, open systems architecture as all SANnet II products, the SATA solutions are interoperable with major platforms and operating systems.
The new SANnet II SATA products also use the same storage software suite, SANscape(R) storage management software and SANpath(R) storage networking software, that is used with the other SANnet II systems. This provides a unified management interface for the entire product line including SCSI, FC and SATA, as well as direct attached and storage area network (SAN) configurations.
Dot Hill Systems Corp. is a leader in the innovative design and delivery of storage networking solutions to channel partners worldwide. Its products include the SANnet II family of storage systems, the RIO Xtreme(TM) storage servers, SANscape storage management software, SANpath storage networking software and professional training, support and service. For more information, visit Dot Hill on the Web at http://www.dothill.com.
Dot Hill, the Dot Hill logo, SANnet, SANscape, SANpath, RIVA and RIO Xtreme are trademarks of Dot Hill Systems Corp. All other products and names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Certain statements contained in this press release regarding matters that are not historical fact are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Because such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such statements include the future availability of the SANnet II SATA storage products, the date of its availability and the actual performance of Dot Hill products in particular environments. The risks that contribute to the uncertain nature of the forward-looking statements include: unforeseen technological, intellectual property, supply or engineering issues and changing customer preferences. However, there are many other risks not listed here that may affect the future business of Dot Hill, as well as the forward-looking statements contained herein. To learn about such risks and uncertainties, you should read the risk factors set forth in Dot Hill's public filings with the SEC, including the Forms 10-K and 10-Q most recently filed by Dot Hill. All forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date on which they were made. Dot Hill undertakes no obligation to update such statements to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.