Dot Hill 3000 Series Continues to Gain Momentum as Storage Solution of Choice to Meet the Needs of Visual Effects, Grading, and Finishing Customers in Commercials, Television and Film

Dot Hill Systems Corp., a leading provider of Unified Virtual Storage and SAN storage solutions, announced it has entered into a supply agreement with Autodesk, Inc., a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software.
Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk continues to develop a broad portfolio of software for global markets. The company’s customers in the media and entertainment industries – including the last 16 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects – use Autodesk software to design, visualize and simulate their ideas. Solutions include Autodesk Flame and Autodesk Flame Premium software for 3D visual effects, relighting, grading and finishing for film and television.

Under the terms of the agreement, Autodesk will integrate Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN 3000 Series 8Gb Fibre Channel storage offering as part of Autodesk’s turnkey solution for 3D visual effects and finishing. Dot Hill storage can be configured as either direct attach storage and as a Storage Area Network (SAN) as needed.

Featuring a compact 2U24 footprint, 8Gb Fibre Channel connectivity and “five nines” (99.999%) of availability, Dot Hill 3000 storage systems deliver high performance for sequential workloads required in deadline-driven, mission critical effects and finishing work.

Dot Hill offers a storage solution specifically designed to support clients using Quantum StorNext file systems. The Dot Hill solution offers customers a powerful combination of Dot Hill AssuredSAN storage controllers, solid state (SSD) and conventional hard disk drives, creating a high-performance storage tier based on SSD drives for fast I/O and throughput needed for the StorNext metadata volume, along with a second tier based on rotating drives for high capacity data storage.

“Autodesk’s selection of Dot Hill storage to support high performance storage requirements is further validation of Dot Hill’s momentum in the media and entertainment space with our AssuredSAN 3000 Series,” said Garrett Wein, vice president, world-wide OEM sales, Dot Hill Systems Corp. The Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series continues to be the first choice of clients in search of a superior solution for visual effects, grading and finishing in both 2D monoscopic and 3D stereoscopic projects.”

The Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series

Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series arrays offer support for 8Gb Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs), 10Gb iSCSI, as well as other “state of the art” interface options. In addition, Dot Hill continues to add midrange capability and value to its 3000 Series with options such as AssuredRemote data management software for remote replication. Advanced data management such as AssuredCopy, Dot Hill’s volume copy technology, enabling the creation of independent data volume copies for additional data protection, and Dot Hill’s AssuredSnap snapshot capability for improved data availability and business continuity, allow companies to reduce the burden of meeting modern data retention policies. The AssuredSAN 3000 systems can scale to a total of 288 terabytes of storage with inexpensive JBOD expansion units.

The AssuredSAN 3000 Series features a number of eco-friendly enhancements such as drive spin-down capability and 595-watt 80 PLUS-rated (greater than 80 percent energy efficiency) power supplies for reduced operating costs. Additionally, the AssuredSAN 3000 Series also features Dot Hill’s patented EcoStor “green” battery-free alternative for cache memory, which leverages a combination of super capacitors and flash memory that outlasts traditional batteries nearly fivefold. Business benefits include lower maintenance and disposal costs and reduced server and application down time due to scheduled battery replacement and maintenance.