Dot Hill Ships First Storage To The Channel
Dot Hill is the first to market with a hybrid array featuring iSCSI and 8-Gbit-per-second Fibre Channel connectivity, 6-Gbps SAS drives, and remote replication capabilities, said Dave Zimmer, vice president of worldwide channels for the Longmont, Colo.-based company.
"It's all bundled to give VARs a complete solution," Zimmer said.
The AssuredSAN 3000 is a 2U rack mount array with either 12 3.5-inch hard drives or 24 2.5-inch hard drives. It is available either as an 8-Gbps Fibre Channel-only array or as a hybrid array with both Fibre Channel and 1-Gbit Ethernet iSCSI connectivity, which makes it easy to do remote replication across a WAN (wide area network) using IP networks, he said.
The AssuredSAN 3000 is the first "Dot Hill"-branded storage array for the indirect sales channel, said Andy Mills, vice president of marketing and business development for the company.
Using iSCSI to tunnel through a WAN to replicate Fibre Channel data is an easy, low-cost way for SMBs to replicate data, Mills said.
"Most of the other vendors out there use one or the other, but not both," he said. "We're one of the first to do it with an entry-level product."
The hybrid array is also important for virtual server environments, Mills said.
"8-Gbps Fibre Channel gives you the bandwidth to keep up as customers load up with more and more virtual machines on their systems," he said. "Virtual machines are now the bottleneck. And with virtualized environments, things can change a lot in a day. We provide the flexibility customers need."
Dot Hill currently has over 80 channel partners worldwide, with over half of them in North America, Zimmer said. The company this quarter plans to launch its first certification training program to let partners handle deployment and troubleshooting, he said.
The company is working with its OEM partners to make sure that channel sales and OEM sales do not conflict with each other, Mills said.
For instance, when a partner registers a deal with Dot Hill, the vendor not only qualifies the sales opportunity, it also has programs in place to make sure it does not interfere with its OEM partners' sales, he said.
"We chose to be very open with our OEM partners," he said. "And, in the U.S., we don't bump into them too often. Our OEMs often sell our storage as a bundle with their servers, switches, and services."