Dot Hill on Monday unveiled a new appliance for virtualizing storage from multiple vendors' arrays based on software the company acquired earlier this year.
Dot Hill, a Longmont, Colo.-based storage vendor which until about a year ago had almost no presence in the channel, next month plans to start shipping to solution providers its AssuredUVS, a new storage appliance which virtualizes SAN and NAS storage under a common interface.
The AssuredUVS combines two standard Dell servers, Dot Hill storage arrays, and the software it received with the acquisition early this year of Cloverleaf Communications, a developer of software that uses virtualization technologies to allow the building of scalable heterogeneous storage infrastructures, said Jim Jonez, senior director of marketing for Dot Hill.
For Dot Hill, which only this year started shipping storage products to the channel after 20-plus years of focusing on OEM sales, the new AssuredUVS appliance marks its transition from focusing exclusively on hardware to focusing more of its value-add on software, Jonez said.
"This brings us a unique mix of capabilities, especially in the virtual storage market, " he said.
The AssuredUVS uses two standard x86-based servers to run the company's software in order to provide high-availability of the appliance, Jonez said. It also includes up to 6 petabytes of storage capacity provided by Dot Hill arrays which fit either 12 large form factor or 24 small form factor hard drives in a 2U rack mount space.
The AssuredUVS can also sit in front of a customer's existing storage arrays, Jonez said. "Customers can put our virtualization engine in the front, add new storage capacity, and then create block-based or file-based volumes across all the storage," he said.
Dot Hill maintains a hardware compatibility list of storage arrays which can be used behind its AssuredUVS appliance, including arrays from Apple, Dot Hill, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, LSI, NetApp, Nexsan, Oracle, Promise, Xiotech, and Xyratex.
