Ever gone to the store and wished you could try something before purchasing it? You want to check it out, make sure you like it, and that it serves its purpose. It’s kind of like Sam’s Club or Costco; you go there on a Saturday, try their samples, and buy the ones you like.
That’s what SUSE did with the Dot Hill AssuredSAN™ 3730 fibre channel raid array. They took advantage of an initial “Try and Buy” and added an AssuredSAN™ 3130 JBOD expansion chassis along with 2TB SAS near line drives to it. And guess what? They liked it so much they are looking to implement the AssuredSAN ™ 3000 series platforms throughout their data centers across the world.
Who is SUSE?
SUSE is a leading provider of Enterprise Linux Solutions which is the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Their goal is to help companies increase agility, lower costs, and manage complexity.
With headquarters located in Nürnberg, Germany, SUSE was looking to accommodate over 80 TB of data to host their SUSE Linux Enterprise internal development environment. Some concerns of SUSE were having a system capable of the workload submitted to it, having reliable customer service, and having an easy to use system.
The Trial
STORDIS introduced Dot Hill’s arrays to SUSE. After just a few days of testing, SUSE noticed improvements in their storage performance.
“We saw an immediate performance increase during our evaluation of the Dot Hill 3730 systems, the caching algorithms are very efficient and the battery free cache backup design eliminates the write-through performance issues we were seeing with other systems,” said Rüdiger Oertel, the Software Development and IT Administration Manager for SUSE.
All of the systems in the AssuredSAN™ family have an intuitive web-based interface. With this, there is no host base agent and a wizard to help guide setup. For more experienced users, there is also a command line interface which is also easy to use.
“The Dot Hill CLI is very user friendly and makes it easy to manage the complete system, although we are not spending much time managing the systems. It is more a set and forget,” said Oertel.
SUSE also was impressed with the volumes and number of LUN’s supported by a single system along with the EcoStor™ battery free cache protection which comes standard across the Dot Hill storage range.
The EcoStor™ copies cache data onto a permanent flash card which prevents data loss during a power outage. With a typical cache battery, whatever data is waiting to be transferred to disk during a power failure will be lost. The EcoStor™ protection also has a typical lifespan of ten years compared to an average cache battery which lasts about two.
Dot Hill AssuredSAN™ 3000 Series Features
- 2.5 or 3.5-inch drives
- Mixed-drive configurations of SAS, SATA, and SSDs
- Energy saving drive-spin-down
- EcoStor™ battery free alternative
- RAIDar 2.0 intuitive web-based interface
- AssuredSnap, AssuredCopy, AssuredRemote data protection
- Up to 288 TB with 96 3TB SATA drives
No More Guessing
It’s like a trial except with no error. SUSE tried it and they liked it. Wouldn’t you?
