Monthly Archives: February 2012

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Divine Design

100 HTA designers notice quicker ‘open times’, and better application response

HTA is an architectural design firm in the UK that specializes in urban design and residential design services. Looking for more efficiency from its storage and servers, HTA went looking for a consultant to improve workflows. 

HTA uses high end graphic design systems such as Bentley® MicroStation V8i, Autodesk® Revit® Structure Suite and Adobe Creative Suite® and they have over 100 designers creating designs, modeling, and rendering the images. Needless to say, their storage requirements are very demanding. Their issues, not uncommon, included:

• An aging SAN that relied on legacy SCSI drive technology
• Increasing storage performance demands for large CAD files
• Too many physical servers that were underutilized and expensive to maintain

What to Do?

Simple. HTA engaged a competent reseller, Krome Technologies. After evaluating several storage options, the firm selected the Dot Hill AssuredSAN iSCSI network storage because it delivers exceptional price/performance with easy scalability. The initial installation was a single array to manage 17TB of production data.

To improve the server side, a new VMware® based infrastructure was developed which included the consolidation of 12 physical legacy servers down to VMware ESX hosts running on HP DL series servers. Disk-to-disk backup was provided by Veeam software which allows application based snap-shots from the SAN array.

What’s the bottom line?

• Improved productivity through SAN performance with vast improvements in file open times
• Peace of mind with fully certified VMware external RAID storage arrays
• Simple web based storage management without the need for server based agents

You can have results like this too. Contact a Dot Hill reseller or our sales people directly. We’ll show you the way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contributed by: Warren Reid, Field Marketing Manager, Dot Hill Systems

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Thursday, February 2, 2012

AssuredSAN – Now with FREE onsite support!

On February 2nd,  we announced a new service program available to all customers purchasing Dot Hill branded AssuredSAN storage arrays through authorized resellers. In addition to the 3 year warranty for every product, customers who register the product at www.dothill.com/registration will now receive a 1 year onsite service agreement. This applies to all products shipped on or after January 1, 2012.

The onsite service provides coverage 8 hours per day Monday through Friday with next day response time. That’s included with registration. For customers with more demanding service expectations, there are also options to upgrade to a 4-hour response time and to 7×24 coverage. Service coverage is available in North America and Europe all tier 1 cities.

Dot Hill has revamped the service program so that a 3 year onsite service agreement is available at very attractive prices. Customers who purchase up front for 3 years will receive annual service for about 7% of the purchase price. That’s just a great value. At the time that customers register, there is an offer available to upgrade service to a full 3 year period so even if you were not aware of the program at the time the product purchase was made, you can easily add it.

Five 9′s of Availability

One of the reasons that we can offer a free year of service is that Dot Hill products are extremely reliable. AssuredSAN 3000 storage arrays have demonstrated Five 9’s of availability. This is the kind of availability you might expect in an expensive enterprise class storage product costing much more, but we make it available in our core product line for entry and midrange data centers.

Contributed by: Jim Jonez, Senior Director of Marketing, Dot Hill Systems

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